Chase High School – Achieving our first ‘Good’ Ofsted rating
Executive headteacher, Jamie Foster, reflects on how Chase High School shed its lowly local reputation and entered a new era of renewal…
- by Jamie Foster
Before 2017, Chase High School in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, had never received an Ofsted rating higher than Requires Improvement or Satisfactory under any of its previous incarnations.
At the time of my arrival, the school’s GCSE grades were 7% gaining 5 A*s to Cs. Ofsted had rated it Inadequate. When the school was academised and brought within the Discovery Educational Trust in 2015, I was appointed as deputy headteacher. I had the responsibility of overseeing behaviour, which had been a significant challenge.
Rookie errors
My first priority was to stabilise the corridors and classrooms. We did this by raising expectations, preventing combative situations from occurring in key spaces and getting to a point where we effectively owned those spaces again – the corridors, canteen and other shared areas.
This process of ‘restabilising’ the school didn’t happen overnight. For the first 18 months or so, my focus was on making sure the school was safe, that staff could operate in the manner they needed to and ultimately laying the groundwork for further improvements to come.
I know the stories of ‘super heads’ going in and revamping everything at a school within 18 months. But that wasn’t the story at Chase High School. We realised early on that this process had to be a long-term journey if it was to be sustainable.
The teaching staff had been at the school for some time. To work there, you evidently had to care for the kids. So we knew we had the right people already in place.
As a new deputy head, however, I still made mistakes. There was an overload of initiatives, attempts at changing the culture without enough consultation, all those rookie errors – but I stayed at the school.
When you’re working at a school in challenging circumstances, staff want to see that you’re there for the right reasons and that you actually care. That’s rather than this being just another stop on your personal career journey.
We were operating in an area of very high deprivation. Around 50% of pupils were on Pupil Premium at the time, as well as very high SEND numbers. They could see I was in the trenches with them, which built up some goodwill. And they eventually forgave the mistakes I’d made.
Aspirations, character and excellence
This meant that when I was later appointed head of the school in 2020, there was already a level of trust. It had became clear that we would need to push our improvement efforts on in a new direction, or else risk not progressing any further, so when introducing a new set of initiatives to get where we needed to be, I consulted more extensively. I was able to engage better with staff, having built up positive relationships with them over time.
One change we made was to our motto, which until then had been ‘Aspirations, care and excellence’. The school was indeed very caring. It was a value firmly embedded in all staff. However, we’d perhaps allowed that caring, pastoral side of the school to take precedence over our teaching and learning.
We’d found ourselves at a point where it became necessary to revise this, so I opted to change the motto to ‘Aspirations, character and excellence’. This formed part of a new vision and a set of values centred on raising the bar, raising expectations in the classroom and restoring pride in the school badge.
Quicker turnarounds
For a long while, Chase High School was a first choice for very few families. When I first arrived, we had year groups that weren’t full and a sizeable casual admission.
To shift that reputation, we made sure our SLT was highly visible. There wasn’t anything revolutionary involved. It was just about being present at the front gate, meeting and greeting parents during drop-off, and making efforts to accommodate any parents wanting to meet with us.
We sought to enable quicker turnaround times on emails and other communications, and ensured families wouldn’t just receive calls regarding incidents of poor behaviour, but also have their children’s achievements clearly communicated to them.
Once parents saw that we wanted to help, that ‘us and them’ attitude started to disappear. Many parents we ended up engaging with successfully previously had few, if any positive experiences of school themselves. But by seeing the school’s staff more often as part of their community, with children of our own (some attending Chase), they came to recognise that they were welcome at the school and able to engage with us.
Revising expectations
Many have talked about how tough the pandemic must have been as a new school headteacher – but one advantage of that period is that we were able to ‘reset’ people’s ideas of the kind of school we were.
As we entered lockdown, we began looking at how to organise virtual learning and everything that came with that. Like most other schools, these were unknowns to us – but having started to drive new expectations around our teaching and learning provision, we aspired as a team to become the best virtual school in the South East of England.
We looked at what the local grammar school nearby was doing. Following this we distributed around 500 laptops to get things up and running early on, and began offering live lessons as soon as possible. We sent out surveys to parents, and we acted on their feedback as soon as we could.
At the same time, we were continuing to engage with our local community, travelling to the top of high-rise flats with food parcels.
All this activity helped to successfully revise local expectations of what Chase High School was all about. The pandemic, in its way, helped to further highlight the work we were doing amid very challenging conditions.
When we eventually returned to the standard school day, it felt like a new start. There was a sense among the staff of, ‘This is what we do – and we’re good, aren’t we?’ Having shown that we could do a decent job, we had even become a first choice option for some local parents.
And in 2022, the school finally attained that Good rating for the first time in its history.
Pockets of excellence
As part of our improvement journey, we wanted highlight pockets of excellence among our students and ensure the school was recognised for that excellence locally.
Under our Elite Sports Academy programme, pupils with outstanding talent or potential in sport are placed on a different tutor programme that gives them access to different trips and cultural experiences throughout the year that we pay for. It’s akin to a traditional ‘more able’ pathway, except oriented specifically around the field of sports.
We also have an Elite Performing Arts Academy that operates in a similar way, with different strands for drama and music, which feeds into fantastic shows staged at the school.
