‘Pupils feel safer thanks to changes’
ST SAMPSON’S High students are feeling safer, principal Vicky Godley has said, after Ofsted confirmed there had been substantial improvement at the school.
The latest interim inspection findings followed a damning Ofsted report in July 2022.
‘The most important part is to show that we’ve made progress over the course of the year,’ said Mrs Godley.
‘No further areas for improvement were identified, so in terms of our planning, they agreed that we were on the right track.’
The school was praised in the report for a considerable improvement in pupils’ behaviour over the last year.
Mrs Godley said that the school had previously had several different systems to deal with poor behaviour.
‘We reflected on the systems and simplified them,’ she said.
‘So they’re really simple for members of staff to employ, but also for the students to understand.
‘We want to ensure that the changes we bring in, we train for it, we measure, to see whether it actually has an impact.
‘Children can feel the change. It’s a safer place for younger children to be around. Children aren’t as boisterous around the school as they were.
‘You need to ensure that children can engage in disruption-free classrooms. Otherwise, no matter what curriculum you try and deliver in terms of resolving impact, it’s going to be partial.’
The school will be due a further full inspection in the next 12 to 18 months, and will receive only two days’ notice of the Ofsted team’s arrival.
‘That will be with the hope that we can remove all of the inadequate judgments and move to good,’ she said.
She said the school was prepared to make the further improvements in the curriculum identified in the latest report.
‘The next step is to develop the subject matter and the knowledge that we want children to gain,’ she said.
‘Curriculum is a strand that we want to strengthen. We’ve bought in new schemes, particularly in our core subjects of maths and science. It’s now to employ it, embed it, and implement it in the classroom.’
She said there was a real impetus at the school to make the changes necessary.
‘It can’t be done by any one person. Culture takes time in terms of changing and we’re on that journey.
‘Reputation is really difficult to change in Guernsey, we need the whole school community and the whole community to get behind us, to continue to move forward.
‘We won’t always get it right. We’re at the start of where we want to be, there’s still a journey to go on, and still improvements to be made. But we’re getting there.’
