THE head teacher of a Blackburn school has criticised the timing of it’s most recent Ofsted inspection.

Sue Mellor, who is in charge of Meadowhead Infant School, said that just a few weeks between inspections was not enough time to make reasonable progress.

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The Shorrock Lane school was judged to be ‘requires improvement’ when it was visited on January 27, with the report being published on February 18. Inspectors attended the school again on March 23.

Inspector Philippa Darley said that the senior leaders and governors were not taking effective action to tackle the areas requiring improvement identified at the last section five inspection In a letter to the head teacher she said: “You have written a comprehensive improvement plan focusing on areas for improvement from the last inspection.

“In this, you included targets for pupils’ progress in each year group.

“These are appropriate and provide leaders with a helpful goal against which you can check if your actions are effective.

“However, the system in place for checking on improvements has not been carefully thought through.

“It is not yet regular or focussed enough. Teachers do not receive enough feedback on the quality of their teaching and, consequently, your support for their improvement is not specific or rapid enough.

“Senior leaders are involved in checking the quality of teaching and learning in their subjects.

“Nevertheless, these checks do not look specifically at the areas for improvement from the last inspections.

“As a result, they are unable to show that these areas are steadily starting to improve across the school.

Mrs Mellor said: “We were not given enough time between inspections to make progress. The whole staff are committed to making improvement at the school.

“The inspectors can come back four to 12 weeks after the previous visit and they came back after we had only four weeks and one day back at school after the report was published because of the half term .”