Secret Teacher: I feared special measures – but it's made us stronger

Special measures. Inadequate. Words used to describe schools that are the bottom of the pile. The words you never want to hear as a teacher.

Prior to autumn 2016, I had only ever worked in schools rated good by Ofsted, and was fearful of the term special measures. For years, my school has been getting itself “Ofsted ready”. We were always listening out for tips about what Ofsted inspectors want to see from those we felt were in the know.

Ofsted came. There didn’t seem to be much that they did like. The inspection was changed from a one-day to a two-day inspection. At the end of day two, school leaders were told that the school was being downgraded from good to requires improvement. Then a phone call came from Ofsted to inform our headteacher that the judgment had been further downgraded. We were devastated. Disbelief, anger, confusion, embarrassment and a myriad of other emotions followed. What would the parents say? How could it have gone so wrong? What we had believed to be true, what we had been told by school improvement partners, by “mocksted” teams, by local authority advisers on learning walks, was completely wrong. They all said we were good; Ofsted begged to differ, quite drastically.

In the aftermath, there was some inevitable fall out. Our headteacher walked out of the door in a state of shock after the phone call, and didn’t return. The rest of us remained. We have rallied and supported each other. We all muck in to get things done, we try to look after each other. Our parents have been overwhelmingly supportive – we didn’t lose a single child as a result of the judgement. In fact, we gained a few.

Being a special measures school is a journey we didn’t expect or want to go on, yet it’s making us stronger and better in our practice. The first step on the road to recovery was to get matched with an outstanding school, and an executive headteacher was appointed. Our support team are positive and constructive in their advice. No blame has been apportioned to those of us who have stayed, but equally there is the understanding that things need to change.

The education and adoption bill of June 2015 requires any school in special measures to convert to an academy. This was a route that staff and governors had unanimously rejected when presented with it as a choice two years previously – this time, there wasn’t an option. Of course we had reservations; academies get a lot of bad press with reports of high staff turnovers, poor working conditions and no real evidence that they are any better than local authority-controlled schools.

We became part of a small multi-academy trust. The colour of my payslip has changed, and we appear to have a bit more money to spend on improving resources. But the conditions of service for staff remained the same, and our governing body has retained the governors who wanted to stay.

In online chatrooms, opinions of both teachers and parents are pretty varied on the subject of schools in special measures. The prevailing message of many threads is depressing. However, among the negative comments there are those who mention the camaraderie and great continuing professional development opportunities. Both are true in my experience.

At the beginning of the process, some people even told us that we were lucky we went into special measures. I scoffed at time, but I’m beginning to understand why. Some days it’s hard – change is never easy, especially when it’s enforced – but we have come to accept that we’re now in a better place than before.

We are under more pressure, but we are being supported and helped. And after four years of getting ready for the call, of clock watching every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, of making sure we were “Ofsted ready”, it’s a bit of a relief. The worst has happened, and it’s really not that bad.

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