Lord Grey School

Dear Parents and Carers,

I feel very honoured and privileged to be the new Headteacher of Lord Grey School, as I know that it is a very caring, inclusive and supportive school, which has high expectations for students. It is an exciting, vibrant and compassionate school and there is a genuine concern to treat everyone as an individual. I believe in high standards of academic achievement, alongside a firmly held belief that school should be fun and exciting, and I know that the staff share this vision for the school.

Lord Grey School has entered a new phase in its development – one which is focused on rapidly raising academic achievement and continuing to make LGS a first choice local school. We are a popular and over-subscribed school, and our aim is that all stakeholders hold the school in high esteem. Our Ofsted inspection in 2007, confirmed that we are a ‘satisfactory’ school with some ‘good’ elements and it recognised that we are on a journey of school improvement. Personal development and well-being of students were deemed to be ‘good’ by Ofsted and we are now building on this to ensure that all areas of school life are good or outstanding.

We are committed, as a staff, to creating a calm, supportive, caring and respectful ethos which will enable all students to make the most of the opportunities presented here. This ethos will underpin our learning and enable students to make excellent progress and achieve high levels of attainment. We hope that we can work in partnership with all stakeholders to move the school forward. In particular we hope that the students develop a sense of ‘ownership’ and get involved in planning the future of their school.

Ofsted have said that we must build strong and consistent leadership; they commented that behaviour has very much improved and that student participation is on the way up; they have challenged us to improve the independent learning skills of students, particularly in readiness for Sixth Form life; they have asked that we improve the quality of teaching and the consistency and accuracy with which staff assess student work. We intend to rise to all of these challenges in the next few years – we are determined to be graded ‘good’ after our next Ofsted inspection. Together, we can do this.

Our intention is to develop the whole person. Working in partnership with parents we are laying the foundations which will produce well-educated, honest, positive and hardworking citizens of the future, who have the ability to form, develop and sustain caring relationships and who are fully aware of the part that they, as individuals, can play in making society better. We want to promote the concept of ‘rights and responsibilities’ based on mutual respect and under-pinned by a rigorous but clear whole school behaviour code based around ‘core values’.