Best Practice

The power of the school gate: Are your pupils ready to learn?

Whole-school issues
Facing problems with pupils arriving in class not prepared for learning, and the disruption this causes, school leader Allen Hall drew a red line at the school gate in a bid to change habits and ensure pupils arrived at school ready for the day ahead

During a typical wet November in 2015 Waterhead Academy was visited by Ofsted for our third Section 8. The leadership team had worked tirelessly since going into special measures a year earlier, and we were hopeful that we would receive another positive report and inch closer to the end of the process.

Waterhead Academy was formed from two local schools. Recently, it was featured in The Guardian as a remarkable school that could “teach a divided town to live together”. This was down to resilient and committed staff and a community determined to improve the life chances of their young people.

However, hearing the lead inspector say that we were “not making progress” sucked the oxygen out of the room. The result was an educational backdraft that set off a chain of events as we teetered on the edge of our very own Darvaza crater.

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