Melksham Oak celebrates ‘good’ Ofsted rating

MELKSHAM Oak has achieved a ‘good’ Ofsted rating, moving the school out of a ‘requires improvement’ category, to being effective in all areas.

The school was last inspected in 2017 and has seen significant improvement since then. Principal of Melksham Oak Community School, Alan Henderson said that the ‘good’ rating is positive news for the school and for the town.

He said, “I think it’s a great thing for the town, for the only secondary school in Melksham to be a good school, and people in the community can feel proud to send their children here. “I joined in 2019, along with some other members of the leadership team. Between then and the inspection, there has been huge changes.

“One of the key changes that has taken place is that we are far more ambitious for what we want our students to achieve now. I was conscious when I came in 2019, I felt students weren’t ambitious enough, we wanted them to aspire to life beyond Melksham and Wiltshire.”

The Covid-19 pandemic happened shortly after Alan joined as headteacher.

Praising the hard-work of his team during the pandemic who continued to deliver lessons to the students Alan said, “We’ve worked hard over the last three years and during the time of Covid, which staff deserve a huge amount of credit for.

“During that period, teachers were asked to adapt to that time and asked to remodel, reshape and rewrite the way they were working with the school. It was a huge body of work.”

Speaking about the impact of the Covid pandemic and the disruption this caused to the school and its pupils’ learning Alan Henderson said, “What Covid meant was that actually the curriculum development didn’t happen at a pace that I would like, because of the interruptions. When we came out of Covid, the pace had to quicken up, things had to happen quicker than they would have had to. We knew that we were expecting Ofsted back. We had been expecting them for the last 12 months, which has been difficult.”

The school’s leadership team is now looking at which areas to focus on next. Alan Henderson said, “As far as community engagement goes, we are looking to increase it, without question. For a while now, we have rightly focused our energy on the school. This year, we are looking much more beyond the school and classroom and working more with our local community – whether that’s through a range of different outlets and our sixth form local community engagement work, or our student council working with the town council.

“It was clear what needed to improve and it was clear to me that moving a school from ‘requires improvement’ to ‘good’ doesn’t happen overnight. It is not about quick fixes, or short-term fixes. What we have done over the last few years is making sure we are getting our fundamentals right.

“We have a fantastic curriculum in place. Our teaching is strong, our behaviour and policies are consistent, so that we can then look to build our additional offers, like extra-curricular activities and work with the local community.

“We have worked very hard over a long period of time, now it’s about ensuring those changes are sustained and built on and improved in the future.”