ABSTRACT
We have seen how some schools have not only recovered from a poor reputation and performance, but have gone on to develop a culture of continuous improvement. In this chapter, we will look in more detail at how some schools specifically lifted themselves from Ofsted's list of failing schools. We will hear from people like Dexter Hutt who, when he became head teacher of Ninestiles School in Birmingham, faced an uphill task. Just six per cent of students gained five good GCSEs. The recently designated technology college had a poor record in the local area: it was ‘perceived as a tough school, unloved and unwanted by thoughtful parents’. Five years later, not only did almost three quarters of the students reach the GCSE standard, but Ninestiles had successfully turned around another Birmingham school and had started to help a second school to improve. Dexter Hutt was knighted in the 2004 New Year's Honours List. A year after Sir Dexter started his drive for improvement in Birmingham, Hugh Howe took the reins at Fir Vale School in Sheffield in September 1999. Fir Vale had an unimpressive record as Earl Marshal School. The school was one of 18 to be controversially ‘named and shamed’ by the new Labour government in 1997. Fir Vale was not the sort of school which might expect a visit from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Yet just before the school was ready to celebrate over a third of its pupils gaining five good GCSEs in 2003, Mr Howe proudly welcomed these royal visitors, and showed them around his new school. They saw a school outwardly transformed with new buildings and equipment, but more importantly they experienced a school reborn as somewhere that pupils, many of them from Sheffield's poorest areas, can hope to achieve their full potential. It is also one that parents actively choose and openly support.
