20th January 2023
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
HAPPY FRIDAY Happy Friday everyone. It gives me great pleasure to share our Ofsted report with you https://bit.ly/ HonywoodOfstedReport. You will be aware that we had an inspection in December which, at the time, I had indicated had gone well. This is our first inspection under the new Ofsted framework and my first one since joining Honywood almost five years ago and embarking on our improvement journey. Whilst we have never done things to satisfy Ofsted or jumped onto the latest Ofsted bandwagon, it is nice to have up to date confirmation at a national level that we are providing a great education for the children within our community. I know that you can never please everyone all of the time, so hopefully these comments will reassure everyone, most importantly our learners and their families, that we are doing the right things for the right reasons. Ofsted visits are very different to how they used to be and from my perspective, a lot better. They tend to keep the Headteacher at arm’s length; I do not get involved in many of the activities so that the evidence they collect is impartial. The process begins by me and my Leadership Team telling them all about our community and what I think they will see in school. They then watch lots of lessons and talk to lots of children and staff to see if what was said was right. Parents will have provided feedback via Parentview and learners through another survey. I like this format as it is more genuine and transparent. Inspections of old provided opportunities to play the game and dazzle inspectors with a plethora of colourful charts and data to prove a point or engineer a judgement. I had no worries about the new process or my involvement in it as I had the utmost trust in our learners, our teachers, our parents and our community. My trust was well placed as the feedback I received was excellent.
We are, of course, very pleased with our judgement of a Good overall and in all categories. We entered the process wanting to achieve a solid ‘good’. We knew we had not finished our journey and there was still work to do. However, at the end of the first day, after the lead inspector said to me ‘you have nothing to worry about’, he then said that ‘for more than one area we could be looking at the Outstanding category’. Mr Munro and I both spent the evening exchanging emails discussing where we thought he was referring to based on the activities he had completed. We came to the conclusion that, based on the feedback we had received from the team, they were suggesting that behaviour, personal development and leadership could all potentially achieve the Outstanding grade. What the report does not tell you is how close we came to an ‘outstanding’ grading. For me, I was rooting for personal development as that area really captures what we are all about at Honywood and what the school means to me personally. During day two, the lead inspector sat down with me to take me through the Parentview and learner feedback and at one point I had a tear in my eye - as did the inspector. He was going through the comments left and percentages of responses from parents and learners. He ensured that the activities the inspection team completed explored the issues raised by parents so he could satisfy himself that these areas were as they should be. Safeguarding in particular was scrutinised to a high level, as is always a priority in any inspection, and the feedback was that we have an excellent approach to monitoring, recording and dealing with safeguarding matters. As he flew through the statistics I was frantically scribbling them down. He then paused at one particular question that learners had responded to…. He said he had never seen this before in his many years of inspecting schools. It was the response to the question ‘my school encourages me to respect learners from other backgrounds and to treat everyone