Behind the Inspection Rating: Games drive school to go for gold

When Julie Keylock took over as head teacher of Samuel Rhodes in September 2010, one of her first moves was to set out a new vision for the special school. Her plan, dubbed Going for Gold, had a simple aim: to turn the good-rated school into an outstanding one. “I realised that we would have our next Ofsted inspection in the year of the Olympics,” she says. “I thought it would be very easy for the children and their parents to understand that having a good Ofsted rating is like getting a silver medal and that we wanted the gold. It was a very understandable goal for them.”

While the Olympics theme helped focus the school, the real purpose of Going for Gold was to drive change in three areas. The first was to improve communication between staff, the second to boost parental involvement, and the third to introduce a behavioural management system. “They were achievable things that I thought could be done,” she says. “The staff were amazing and just went with it.”

Highly effective approach
The results speak for themselves. In its latest Ofsted inspection, Samuel Rhodes secured that outstanding rating and inspectors talked positively about the improvements it had made since 2009, including its “highly effective” behaviour management approach. “I’m a very systems-driven person,” says Keylock. “Small schools allow lots of creativity and flexibility, but I believe you can only do that if you have really solid systems that underpin that. Our children need structure and need things to be very simply laid out.”

The school’s system sees children awarded points for every lesson based on measures such as appropriate uniform, educational progress and attendance. Each Thursday these points are totted up,