Stockland Green School

Stockland Green School Slade Road, Erdington, Birmingham, B23 7JH

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Overall effectiveness

Previous inspection: Not previously inspected This inspection: Inadequate 4 Achievement of pupils Inadequate 4 Quality of teaching Inadequate 4 Behaviour and safety of pupils Inadequate 4 Leadership and management Inadequate 4

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Summary of key findings for parents and pupils

This is a school that requires special measures.  Since the academy opened, students’ achievement has declined, their attendance has fallen and the number of students excluded from school has risen.  Few students make good progress and they make below-average progress in English.  The achievement, attendance and behaviour of students supported by additional government funding lag behind that of their classmates. The spending of this funding is not making enough of a positive difference.  Inadequate teaching has led to students not making enough progress. Too often teachers do not take into account what students already know and can do when planning lessons.  Teaching is not tackling the significant weaknesses in students’ basic literacy skills.  The poor behaviour of students has not been managed well enough. This has led to unacceptably high numbers of students being excluded or repeatedly excluded from school.

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Summary of key findings for parents and pupils

 Too many students have low attendance records and this reduces the opportunities they have to learn. The number of students who are absent frequently from school has been more than double the national average.  Leaders at all levels, including governors and the academy trust, have until very recently failed to stop the decline in students’ achievement, behaviour and attendance. They have not improved the quality of teaching.  The academy’s self-evaluation is weak. Its development plan does not tackle the key areas needed to improve the school.

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The school has the following strengths

 Students say they feel safe and well cared for in school.  Leaders work well with a range of agencies to support students who need the most help.  The school’s specialist resource base is making a positive difference to the education of the students it supports.

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Information about this inspection

 Inspectors observed teaching in 33 lessons, some jointly with a member of the senior leadership team. They also observed an assembly and students’ behaviour and conduct during breaks and lunchtimes.  The inspection team met with senior and subject leaders, groups of students, the Chair and Vice Chair of the Governing Body, the executive headteacher and another colleague from the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership.  Inspectors considered the views of the 28 parents and carers who responded to Parent View (Ofsted’s online questionnaire), the school’s own analysis of parents’ views and the 43 responses to Ofsted’s staff questionnaire.  The inspection team analysed information about examination results, students’ progress, their attendance and behaviour. Inspectors reviewed a range of documents, including the school’s self-evaluation, development plans and its records relating to the monitoring of teaching and the

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Inspection team

James McNeillie, Lead inspector Her Majesty’s Inspector Susan Tabberer Additional Inspector Robert Steed Additional Inspector Alan Jones Additional Inspector

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Full report

In accordance with the Education Act 2005, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector is of the opinion that this school requires special measures because it is failing to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education and the persons responsible for leading, managing or governing the school are not demonstrating the capacity to secure the necessary improvement in the school.

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Information about this school

 Stockland Green School is smaller than the average-sized secondary school.  The school is part of the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership, which is a hard federation of schools and a multi-academy trust. The Trust board has appointed the local governing body and delegated full day-to-day powers to these governors.  The school converted to academy school status in May 2012. The predecessor school, with the same name, was judged to be good when inspected by Ofsted in November 2010.  Approximately half of the students are from White British backgrounds. The largest remaining groups are from Asian or Asian British (approximately 20%), Black or Black British (approximately 10%) and Mixed (approximately 10%) heritages.  The proportion of disabled pupils and those who have special educational needs supported through school action is above average. The proportion supported at school action plus or with a

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Information about this school

statement of special educational needs is much higher than average.  More than half of the students at this school are supported by the pupil premium, which is additional funding provided to schools for students in local authority care and those known to be eligible for free school meals.  The school has a specially resourced provision for 14 students in Years 7 to 9 with Autistic Spectrum Disorder.  At the time of the inspection, there were no students attending alternative provision and all students are educated on the school site.  The school meets the government’s most recently published floor standard, which sets the minimum expectations for students’ attainment and progress.

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What does the school need to do to improve further?

 Improve teaching so that all students make good progress, particularly in English, and the proportion of students who attain grades A* to C in all of the subjects they study to at least the national average by making sure that:  teachers plan lessons that meet the needs of students of all abilities in the class, including the most-able students  all teachers, including of English, use every opportunity to support students to develop basic literacy skills and have high expectations of the presentation of students’ written work  written feedback to students makes clear the next steps for improvement in the subject as well as in the accurate use of spelling, punctuation and grammar.

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What does the school need to do to improve further?

 Raise the attendance of all groups of students to at least the overall national average by making sure that:  students, parents and the local community become more aware of the direct link between good levels of attendance and achieving well, and the importance of not taking holidays during school term times  all teachers take responsibility for promoting good attendance and supporting students to catch up on any learning that they miss when they are absent from school.

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What does the school need to do to improve further?

 Reduce exclusion rates of all groups of students to at least the overall national average by:  implementing consistently effective systems to manage and improve the behaviour of those students who do not conform to the school’s expectations.

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What does the school need to do to improve further?

 Improve students’ behaviour in lessons and around the school site by:  making sure that teaching engages and motivates all students so that disruption to learning is minimised and positive attitudes to learning are promoted  eliminating boisterous behaviour around the school site by helping students to understand the need to be aware of the impact of their behaviour on other students.

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What does the school need to do to improve further?

 Strengthen the leadership of the school by making sure that:  the actions of the leaders of the academy trust and senior and subject leaders are focused on improving the quality of teaching, students’ achievement, behaviour and attendance  the school development planning is based on accurate evaluations of the school’s effectiveness, reflects the priorities of the school’s work and includes measurable criteria by which success can be judged  the judgements made on the quality of teaching routinely take into account the impact of teaching on students’ progress  leaders of subjects, other areas of the school’s work and individual teachers are held to account and take responsibility for the areas for which they are responsible  leaders, including governors, ensure that the spending of the pupil premium funding has a direct impact on the achievement, behaviour and attendance of the students for whom it is

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What does the school need to do to improve further?

An external review of governance, to include a specific focus on the school’s use of the pupil premium, should be undertaken in order to assess how this aspect of leadership and governance may be improved.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 Students, including the most-able students, are not making quick enough progress, particularly in English, from their below-average starting points on entry to the school.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 Students’ attainment at the end of Year 11 is below average in a number of subjects. In 2013, 48% of students gained five or more GCSE passes at grade C or above, including English and mathematics. This figure is well below average. Only 39% of students supported through pupil premium funding achieved this measure, compared to 60% of pupils not eligible for support from the additional funding.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 The achievement of students from different ethnic backgrounds varies widely. For example, students from White British and Black Caribbean backgrounds made weak progress in English in 2013 but students of Pakistani heritage did much better than the rest of their classmates overall.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 Students’ progress in mathematics requires improvement. Their progress is not accelerating and not enough students made more than nationally expected progress in this subject in 2013. Students’ progress in science has been good, although weak teaching was observed in this subject during the inspection.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 School leaders have chosen not to enter students early for GCSE examinations from now on. Last year, the policy of early entry had neither a discernible positive nor negative impact on the achievement of students, including the most-able students.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 The school’s records, and observations during the inspection, indicate some improvements in students’ achievement but this is not consistent across all subjects, for all groups of students and in all year groups.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 Students supported by the pupil premium funding achieve less well than their classmates. In English, these students achieved approximately one grade below other students in English and approximately three quarters of a grade below other students in mathematics. They have made much slower progress than their peers in English. However, in 2013 there was a small gap in their progress in mathematics and this was considerably smaller than the previous year.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 The achievement of disabled students and those who have special educational needs requires improvement overall. Students supported by the school’s specialist provision receive well- targeted guidance that meets their needs. However, as is the case for all students, teaching is not helping these students, or other disabled students and those who have special educational needs, to make good progress.

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The achievement of pupils is inadequate

 The school’s approaches to supporting students with the lowest levels of literacy and numeracy skills on entry to the school, partly funded by additional government money, is helping some, but not all of them to catch up.

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The quality of teaching is inadequate

 Teaching has not resulted in students, and groups of students, making good enough progress, particularly in English. At least good teaching is required to support students in this school, the majority of who start with well below average levels of skills.  In lessons, students in a range of subjects have to complete the same work, at the same time, irrespective of their ability or needs. This is stopping students, particularly the most-able students, from learning more quickly. This also results in weaker attitudes to learning for those who have difficulty concentrating.

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The quality of teaching is inadequate

 Teaching, including the marking of written work, is not focusing enough on developing students’ literacy skills in all subjects. Even some of the most-able students do not use accurate basic skills such as spelling and punctuation in their written work, and this is not being dealt with by all teachers.

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The quality of teaching is inadequate

 Poorly presented work is not being challenged by every teacher. This has a direct impact on students’ learning, for example when a student is unable to identify place value in mathematics because written work is untidy.

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The quality of teaching is inadequate

 Teachers do not use additional adults in lessons consistently well to help students. Help in lessons is better for students who are supported by the school’s specialist provision.

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The quality of teaching is inadequate

 There is good teaching in this school, and some that is outstanding. Too many teachers do not understand, and some need more opportunities to see, what good teaching looks like.

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The quality of teaching is inadequate

 The best teaching inspires students, engages and excites them and helps to develop their spiritual, social, moral and cultural understanding. In these lessons, teachers are enthusiastic, use their good subject knowledge well to ask questions that challenge students to think more carefully and give students clear explanations of how to learn better.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Strategies to manage students’ behaviour have not been effective and this has led to students being twice as likely to be excluded from this school than is the case nationally. Students supported through pupil premium funding, disabled students and those who have special educational needs are excluded more frequently than their peers.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 The school’s records show that the main reasons for exclusions in the past have been because of aggressive behaviour towards a fellow student or an adult, including while out of school, and for persistent disruptive behaviour in lessons.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Students confirm that behaviour in lessons is not always good and can depend on which teacher is in charge. They say that some of their classmates ‘mess around’, shout out or are disrespectful to the teacher or each other. Inspectors observed these weaker attitudes to learning in lessons, particularly when teaching failed to engage students or meet their needs.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Inspectors also observed weaker attitudes to learning when students were, for too long, sitting passively or unengaged in their learning, even though these students did not misbehave.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Inspectors also observed good behaviour in lessons which almost always linked directly with good teaching. These positive features included students responding well to teachers’ expectations of how to behave, listening carefully and sensitively to each other when answering in class or reading aloud, and quickly settling to independent or group work.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 At social times, some behaviour is too boisterous. This includes, for example, students kicking a ball around in an area where groups of students are standing talking to each other, as well as pushing, shoving and play fighting at the entrance to the school building. Movement around the corridors and on the stairs is often congested, although there is a high level of staff supervision.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Students’ attendance at school is well below average and many more students are frequently absent from school than is the case nationally. In particular, those students supported from pupil premium funding are absent from school much more often than their classmates.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Approaches to help students who are supported by the school’s specialist provision are making a good difference to their conduct around school and their attitudes to learning.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Improvements are beginning to be seen in both students’ behaviour and attendance. Compared to the same period last year, the number of students frequently absent from school has reduced and the number of students who have been excluded because of persistently disruptive behaviour has been reduced by a fifth. However, these figures are still a cause for concern, and improvements have not had time to be sustained.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Students say that they feel safe in school and many explained that they feel safer in school than they do after school and at the weekends. This is despite the historically high levels of poor behaviour that resulted in exclusion from school.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Students feel safe because of the high levels of staff supervision and access to the places they can go to at breaktimes, such as ‘The Grove’. They indicated that teachers and other adults in the school care about them and take action to help them when they are in difficulty. The relatively small number of parents who responded to Ofsted’s online questionnaire reflected the views of students in this respect.

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The behaviour and safety of pupils are inadequate

 Students of different ages have a good understanding of types of bullying, including racist and homophobic bullying. They say that bullying does occur, particularly name-calling, but students are comfortable that teachers deal with it quickly and effectively. Students are aware of dangers they face outside of school and how to keep themselves safe, for example when using online chat rooms.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 Leaders have failed to make sure that teaching is good, and that all students achieve well in all subjects, have at least average levels of attendance and have good behaviour. Leaders have not had an accurate view of how well students in this school achieve compared to schools nationally.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 Improvement planning is not linked closely enough to the school’s weaknesses. Plans do not have clear, measurable criteria by which leaders, including governors, can monitor the school’s progress against the planned actions.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 Leaders have not made sure that the spending of the pupil premium funding has made a significant difference to the achievement, attendance or behaviour of those students it is intended to support.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 Until very recently, judgements made about the quality of teaching have not taken into account the impact of teaching on pupils’ progress. This has led to an over-generous assessment of teaching quality. Inspectors agreed with senior leaders’ judgements of the quality of teaching during joint lesson observations.  Leaders of subjects and other aspects of the school’s work have not had a consistently good impact on the school’s effectiveness. Increased levels of accountability have been introduced relatively recently and these leaders, and teachers, are responding well to this.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 Improvements this term introduced by the new associate headteachers include a more systematic approach to the tracking of students’ progress, increased levels of accountability, and what students and staff describe as a more positive atmosphere in school. However, these are ‘green shoots’ and too recent to demonstrate that there is a track record of improvement.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 There has been an increased expectation that all teachers are responsible for promoting good attendance and supporting students who have missed lessons. The improving rates of attendance are early signs that this is having an impact. Senior leaders are also raising the awareness of parents and the local community, through the Family Support Worker, of the important link between regular attendance throughout the school year and good achievement.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 The curriculum is adequate and is reviewed regularly, including to better match the needs of the increasing numbers of more-able students who are now joining the school. One example of this is a writer’s workshop for more-able students in Years 7 and 8 which was taking place during the inspection. Provision for students with special educational needs is positive, and particularly for those students who are supported by the school’s specialist resource provision.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 There are good opportunities for some students to experience work-related learning as part of their studies in Years 10 and 11. However, there is not enough focus on ensuring that students’ literacy skills are developed well.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 Safeguarding arrangements meet national requirements. Leaders work well with a range of agencies to support students most at risk and this is an important contributing factor to students feeling safe.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 The academy trust leaders have not secured the school’s improvement since conversion to academy status. A range of leadership support has been provided in the past, but the impact of this work has not led to students experiencing an acceptable standard of education.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 Since the appointment of the two associate headteachers, the executive headteacher has provided good support to help them to develop their vision for the school. However, leaders of the academy trust have not provided robust enough challenge in the school improvement planning process.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 Inspectors strongly recommend that the school should not seek to appoint newly qualified teachers.

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The leadership and management are inadequate

 The governance of the school:  Governors have not ensured that students’ achievement, behaviour and attendance are good enough, or that the spending of the pupil premium funding has made a difference to the students for whom it is intended to support. They do know about the poor achievement of students in a number of areas and how this compares with all students nationally, but have not understood what this means for the overall effectiveness of the school’s work. Governors have a good oversight of how the performance of teachers and leaders is managed, have only awarded pay increases if teaching is of sufficiently good quality, and have taken decisive action when relatively recent concerns emerged. Governors took quick action to ensure that the two associate headteachers would be ready to take over the leadership of the school after the resignation of the previous headteacher.

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Grade Judgement Description

Grade 1 Outstanding An outstanding school is highly effective in delivering outcomes that provide exceptionally well for all its pupils’ needs. This ensures that pupils are very well equipped for the next stage of their education, training or employment. Grade 2 Good A good school is effective in delivering outcomes that provide well for all its pupils’ needs. Pupils are well prepared for the next stage of their education, training or employment. Grade 3 Requires improvement A school that requires improvement is not yet a good school, but it is not inadequate. This school will receive a full inspection within 24 months from the date of this inspection. Grade 4 Inadequate A school that has serious weaknesses is inadequate overall and requires significant improvement but leadership and management are judged to be Grade 3 or better. This school will receive regular monitoring by Ofsted inspectors. A school that requires special measures is one where the school is

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Grade Judgement Description

failing to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education and the school’s leaders, managers or governors have not demonstrated that they have the capacity to secure the necessary improvement in the school. This school will receive regular monitoring by Ofsted inspectors.

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School details

Unique reference number 138137 Local authority Birmingham Inspection number 427287

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School details

This inspection of the school was carried out under section 5 of the Education Act 2005.

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School details

Type of school Secondary School category Academy converter Age range of pupils 11–16 Gender of pupils Mixed Number of pupils on the school roll 725 Appropriate authority The governing body Chair Sarah Dawson Headteacher Marie George and Tracey Peters Date of previous school inspection Not previously inspected Telephone number 0121 566 4300 Fax number 0121 566 4301 Email address enquiry@stockgrn.bham.sch.uk guidance ‘raising concerns and making complaints about Ofsted', which is available from Ofsted’s website: www.ofsted.gov.uk . If you would like Ofsted to send you a copy of the guidance, please telephone 0300 123 4234 , or email enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk .

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School details

You can use Parent View to give Ofsted your opinion on your child’s school. Ofsted will use the information parents and carers provide when deciding which schools to inspect and when and as part of the inspection.

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School details

You can also use Parent View to find out what other parents and carers think about schools in England. You can visit www.parentview.ofsted.gov.uk, or look for the link on the main Ofsted website: www.ofsted.gov.uk

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School details

achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages. It regulates and inspects childcare and children's social care, and inspects the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (Cafcass), schools, colleges, initial teacher training, work- based learning and skills training, adult and community learning, and education and training in prisons and other secure establishments. It assesses council children’s services, and inspects services for looked after children, safeguarding and child protection. Further copies of this report are obtainable from the school. Under the Education Act 2005, the school must provide a copy of this report free of charge to certain categories of people. A charge not exceeding the full cost of reproduction may be made for any other copies supplied. If you would like a copy of this document in a different format, such as large print or Braille, please

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School details

telephone 0300 123 4234, or email enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk . You may copy all or parts of this document for non-commercial educational purposes, as long as you give details of the source and date of publication and do not alter the information in any way. To receive regular email alerts about new publications, including survey reports and school inspection reports, please visit our website and go to ‘Subscribe’.

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School details

T: 0300 123 4234 Textphone: 0161 618 8524 E: enquiries@ofsted.gov.uk W: www.ofsted.gov.uk

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