Behind the Inspection Rating: School rebuilds its confidence

Last summer things looked bleak for Thornbury Primary School. The Bradford primary had been placed in special measures the previous October, when Ofsted found it was failing to provide “an acceptable standard of education”, and further visits by inspectors warned of little progress since then.

Tim Richards was a school improvement officer at Bradford City Council at the time. “My workload was challenging schools, of which Thornbury was one,” he recalls. “It became apparent quite quickly that it was struggling, the leadership team was finding it difficult to make the progress that needed to be made. The morale of the school was so low. Something pretty radical had to happen.”

That radical action saw Richards appointed executive head teacher, charged with steering Thornbury out of troubled waters. A lot has changed since then. Richards is now the full-time head and the school has moved out of special measures after a “satisfactory” Ofsted report that praised the improvements made.

Starting point
For Richards, the starting point was to talk to everyone involved with the school. “You have to find out where each individual member of staff is in their journey and find out what parents and children really think,” he says. “How much do they believe that things are wrong and that there is a capacity for things to be right?”

This, he says, is more than a listening exercise but a means of identifying ways to rebuild confidence in the school. “It’s very, very important to know what you can do quickly,” he says. “In a school like ours it is quite common for teachers to feel that they haven’t got an opportunity to talk so they just close their classroom door and try and get on with the job.”

But simply listening isn’t enough. Communicating a clear vision of where the school is heading, and constantly reinforcing that vision, is a must, he says. “It all boils down to what is happening in the classroom,” he explains.