Inspectors take opposing view, Schools take the Blame for Poverty

In 1994 when I was Head Of Music at Foxwood School, the inspector (who stayed all week with me) and who was a music specialist, watched me teach the music listening course that myself and colleague, Mr Phillips had devised between us, and told me that we should publish it. The school passed its inspection but was closed 2 years later.


Foxwood tutor group early eighties


In in 2003, a couple of weeks into being Acting Head of Music at City of Leeds School, the Ofsted inspector told me that you should "never, my dear, talk over music". Well, in the initial stages of the course, sometimes you have to, and the fact that three students merited their own separate TA should have indicated something to this woman about how well we were controlling behaviour! And I published my book on teaching music* a couple of years later.

Ten years later - after two proposed mergers, one with Carr Manor, and one with St Michael's, after a proposal to make it a 14-19 vocational centre, after two attempts to academise, after federating it with Primrose,  then defederating it, but leaving the sixth form with Primrose, after proposing an outright closure and sending students all round the city, after chucking out the acting head, and then half the governing body (including myself) and imposing an IEB, the school finally succumbed to academisation this year.

 

City of Leeds previous logo

However, during this time, no inspections were actually failed! My own two younger children got 8 or 9 A-Cs each as a hard core of amazing staff kept the place ticking over. And they will keep on doing it, while academy bosses stuff the kids into purple-edged blazers paid for by the public money that once paid for Special Needs and Music services etc, etc, etc .

I make two points here:
1. faced with an identical listening course, two inspectors took a completely opposite view, and
2. the very existence of published inspections means that children from deprived areas will always have their schools scrutinised and attacked for all the wrong reasons . Until we attack poverty, and not the schools that try their best to support poor children, they will continue to suffer, as will, quite unbelievably, the staff who choose to work, and used to find their job satisfaction and their calling working in areas of deprivation.


* Including SEN in the Curriculum: Music, published David Fulton's, shortlisted for TES award

City of Leeds School

This blog has been set up to provide accurate information about the campaign to keep City of Leeds School open, successful, still at the heart of its community and including as it does, children bussing themselves over from all over Leeds and flying in from all over Africa and Europe.

My background is that I worked for 16 happy years at Foxwood School, Leeds [led by Bob Spooner:heateacher of genuine vision and genius], and only left because they closed that amazing place. The despair that I shared with other staff, and with parents and children from Secroft and Gipton was almost unimaginable.

Next I sent my youngest children to Royal Park School [led by Rita Samuel, renowned throughout Leeds for innovation and high standards], and even became a governor and after-school teacher there. I only stopped working there when it was closed. Years of despair followed, bumping into ex-pupils all round Headingley, Burley and Kirkstall, who couldn't understand why they had been separated from their friends and favourite teachers, and why they had to go so far to school now.

My personal interest is that these same two children of mine went on to City of Leeds, and left, both with 8 or 9 A-C GCSEs, including several As and Bs. Living in the area, I had heard the rumours about the school, but a when I started to do the odd music lesson there, I realised it was Foxwood all over again: great school, terrible reputation.