Alton School improves

I was delighted to read the Ofsted report on Roehampton's Alton School, which noted the satisfactory improvement teachers, parents and pupils are making.

In last year's SAT scores the Alton, at the end of Danebury Avenue, made massive improvements, and the importance of the Ofsted report is that it shows that these strides forward were not a one-off fluke; the product of an unusually strong year, but because the school is building on strong foundations.

The key sentence in the Ofsted letter for me is "Given pupils? well below average starting points in Nursery, there is evidence of stronger achievement levels as a consequence of more consistently good teaching."

The importance of measuring not simply how pupils do when they come out of a school, but where they were when they went in - what is officially called "value added" is really important, because while schools that serve a challenging area like the Alton Estate will probably never get perfect academic results, they often stretch pupils far further than schools that select on academic ability do.

No pupil left behind has been a key belief for Labour in Government - which is why school standards have been transformed for the better in the past decade. And it's why schools like the Alton are getting better and better.

Here is the Ofsted letter about Alton School.