Richard de Clare Community School

“Dream big, work hard, believe & achieve”

Richard de Clare Community School is much larger than the average-sized primary school set in extensive grounds in a market town. The vast majority of pupils are White British. The proportion of disabled pupils and those who have special educational needs is slightly above average. I was appointed as Headteacher in 2012 and a few months later the school was judged to be Requiring Improvement by Ofsted.

There were few surprises in the report and it provided us with the impetus we needed to drive school improvement for our community. We had to quickly establish a number of essential systems to monitor the progress of pupils and to hold teachers to account for their performance. Following this point there was a high turnover of teaching staff. We began to gather a substantial amount of data and analyse this to judge the school’s effectiveness, pupils’ achievement and to identify where further improvement was needed. Joint assessment with teachers from other schools ensured that teachers’ judgements about pupils’ attainment and progress were consistent.