Inspectors find a need to improve quality of education

Leadership and management were also rated as requiring improvement, although director of education Nick Hynes said this rating should not be seen in a negative light and indicated a school was on the right track.

Pupils’ behaviour, attitude, personal development and welfare were found to be good.

Ofsted has four ratings – inadequate, requires improvement, good and excellent.

The report said the school was happy and welcoming and, despite its planned closure, staff ensured that the environment was calm and stable for pupils.

Bullying was rare and pupils were confident that staff would resolve any incidents swiftly and effectively.

Most pupils enjoyed school and were positive about their futures.

‘However, the quality of education pupils receive is not consistently of a high quality,’ said Ofsted.

‘This means that some pupils are not as well prepared for their next steps in education or employment as they could be.’

The inspectors said the curriculum lacked ambition in some subjects and did not routinely build on what pupils already knew, but also that improvements were being made to the quality of education by the school’s senior leaders.

Local schools are required to follow the Bailiwick curriculum established by Education, Sport & Culture, which also appoints the school inspectors.

Ofsted found some ‘weak practice’ at La Mare which was not identified and improved.

‘Although teachers check what pupils remember, they do not always challenge pupils to extend their ideas further,’ it said.

Pupils from all year groups were encouraged to take on responsibilities, such as being part of the junior leadership team or becoming prefects, and they had a strong voice and felt that their ideas were listened to by the school.

Ofsted said there needed to be consistently higher expectations of what pupils could achieve and some pupils did not take pride in the quality of their work.

The school’s reading curriculum was found to be at an early stage of development and, therefore, the culture of reading, both within the curriculum and for pleasure, was not well established.

‘Leaders must ensure that they raise the profile of reading swiftly so that pupils develop their cultural understanding further and broaden their choice of vocabulary,’ said the report.

Mr Hynes said that schools rated as good or excellent needed to demonstrate that they were achieving consistently across the board.

‘The gradings are broad. By definition, if a school does not reach the threshold for a good rating, then it requires improvement,’ he said.

‘Requires improvement also means that the school is on the right track, otherwise it would be [rated] inadequate.’

Mr Hynes noted that the report highlighted many positives and showed that the work of the principal, Verona Tomlin, and her staff ‘matches our collective ambitions for continual improvement in the delivery of education’.

ESC president Deputy Andrea Dudley-Owen said the school now had a clear direction of travel.

‘This inspection report highlights the many successes of the school, which are a credit to Verona, her team, students and the wider school community.’

Nothing in report came as a surprise – principal

LA MARE de Carteret High School principal Verona Tomlin said she and her staff were not surprised by the comments made in the Ofsted report.

‘The feedback was fair and we knew where we were as a school,’ she said.

‘The staff are very centred on things we’re doing and changes we’re making with the child at the centre.’

Mrs Tomlin would have been disappointed if the inspectors had found something of which she was not already aware.

She said a lot of time had been spent working on the curriculum to make sure it suited every child.

Reading was one area singled out for concern by the inspectors, but she said they had visited the school not long after curriculum changes had been made and, therefore, they saw them in their infancy.

She also pointed out that literacy had suffered across all schools as a result of the pandemic and that responding to this was everybody’s responsibility, not only the English department.

Mrs Tomlin was particularly pleased with inspectors’ comments about the effective guidance given to students with special educational needs or disabilities.

‘If we are catering for Send students, we are catering for the broad range of students.’

She said a more detailed report provided to the school highlighted that it was ‘on the cusp of good’ in the areas where it was rated as requiring improvement

The school is scheduled to close in 2025 as part of changes to secondary education, but this was not having an impact on morale.

The report had said that staff were proud to work at the school and morale among them was high.

‘This is testament to the strong collaborative culture established by the leaders,’ it said.

Mrs Tomlin said the school was involved with the secondary school partnership, which was working collectively on a new curriculum.

‘When we merge with Les Varendes, that’s our opportunity to take some of the best things we are doing into a new school,’ she said.