Ofsted Letter
Dear Parents and Carers
I am writing to let you know that we had a Monitoring Inspection from Her Majesty’s Inspector, Mrs Dorothy Bathgate on Monday 7th December. The purpose of the visit was to assess the actions and progress the school has made against the targets which were set in our full OFSTED inspection in May 2015. The letter from Mrs Bathgate is attached for you to read. A copy will also be available on our website.
Mrs Bathgate was very impressed with the wealth of evidence which we have for each target to show what we have done and the large amount of progress we have made. In her feedback to Senior Leaders and Governors, Mrs Bathgate commented that normally a school which has been judged as Requires Improvement, could expect to wait up to 7 terms after their inspection before being re-inspected. This could have meant that we would have to wait up to December 2017 before we had a chance to be graded as a good school.
The governors, staff and the HMI feel that we are currently more than capable of providing enough evidence in order to get a good grading now. In recognition of this the HMI has recommended that we are re-inspected much sooner by OFSTED. An early re-inspection gives the school the chance to get back to ‘good’ more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. This has been confirmed by the Regional Director of OFSTED and we are likely to see them in the Summer term.
We are really pleased to get this very positive feedback on the work all staff and governors have put in. Mrs Bathgate spent time with our children also and was full of praise for their excellent behaviour and also the way in which they work in lessons. We see this as a clear vindication of the fact that our recent OFSTED judgement was very harsh on the school.
I hope you will agree this is fantastic news for everyone involved with Albany Junior School. I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone I work with here for the amazing job they continue to do. Before the previous OFSTED, we had all worked hard to improve on the whole school results from May 2014. We focused on every child in every year group and ensured they had what they needed to progress well. Children across the school made excellent progress in 2014-15 due to the continuing great work of everybody at our school. This excellent progress is also continuing this term.
We are very happy with the outcome of this inspection and look forward to the opportunity to show that we are a consistently good school. If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact me by phone or email on head@albany-jun.notts.sch.uk.
We really appreciate your feedback and continued support.
Yours faithfully
Mr. C. Robertson