Headteacher backs All Saints school to bounce back from Inadequate Ofsted rating

The interim executive headteacher of All Saints CofE Junior School has said the school ‘will come out of its Inadequate’ Ofsted rating ahead of a planned inspection this month.

Navroop Mehat told councillors at Thursday’s school improvement forum that the school possessed ‘really strong leaders’ ahead of this month’s inspection.

The visit by Ofsted comes six months on from a visit by education officials which found the school to be ‘Inadequate’.

At Thursday’s meeting, Ms Mehat presented a report detailing improvements made by the junior school since the April report.

SATs results in reading, maths and science were inline or above the national average. Although writing was 16 per cent below the national average of 69 per cent, Ms Mehat explained that this was because ‘there was not enough pieces of writing to assess and give a grade too.

“It’s not like there were loads of children who couldn’t write, there just wasn’t enough quality pieces of writing,” said Ms Mehat.

“That will not be the case this year – they’ve got lovely writing that they can share, so that number will be completely different.”

The number of children requiring phonics education was a ‘red flag’ following the Ofsted report.

Phonics involves matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters and is usually completed in infants school.

However, this figure has reduced substantially in Years 4-6 since April, with 18 pupils receiving phonics education in the current academic year compared to 191 in 2021-22. All bar two of the 18 are new to the school.

“All of those children received phonics [education] every single day - it was one of the things that we monitored,” said Ms Mehat.

“First thing in the morning, as soon as they walked through the door, phonics were on the screen, they were saying the sounds and then they were straight into a phonics session.”

“All of these children [in Years 4-6] bar two are new to the school, so there is not a strong phonics need in All Saints anymore.

On progress across the school in general, she added: “The senior team have worked really, really hard to be more rigorous – this was something they didn’t feel comfortable doing, they were not used to that level of challenge, and they’re doing it because they genuinely want the children to excel.

“If you walked into that school, you would not see an inadequate school,” Ms Mehat concluded.