Key Stage 2 results for all primary schools in England were published today, with some improvement for Kent schools, although they are still below the national average. This year there are nine Kent schools in the bottom 200 in the country, which is better than 2010 when 10% of all the bottom 200 schools were in Kent. However, the results must still be a matter for serious concern as the proportion of children across Kent achieving Level 4 in both maths and English at Key Stage 2 continues to be consistently below the national average,.........

New Road Primary School and Nursery Unit in Chatham, has been placed in Special Measures by OFSTED, the eighth Medway primary school classified as failing out of 36  inspected since I started monitoring outcomes in May 2010. This makes a shocking 22% of all Medway primary schools that have been found inadequate at some stage during the past 18 months.  This compares with 6% nationally......

OFSTED has chosen to redesign its website, so all the links to individual OFSTED Reports in this website are now obsolete! I shall be working to replace the links over the next few months,  but in the meantime, you will find the links take you to OFSTED general, from where you can make your own connection.

Medway Primary Schools appear to be failing OFSTED's at an even faster rate than in Kent, as St James CofE Voluntary Aided Primary School on the Isle of Grain is placed in Special Measures. Once again the school has no permanent headteacher, and the Governing Body has proved inadequate to support the school in a difficult time: "The governing body has had too little involvement in monitoring the school's work and has not provided enough challenge". As always it begs the question as to what the Local Authority was doing to support a school without a permanent headteacher.  That makes five failures since May 2010, two further schools have come out of Special Measures in that time, and just 15 have had a Satisfactory or Good rating, with none being Outstanding. I last wrote about the problems in Medway as recently as November, but it is apparent that Medway Council still has a great deal to do to provide the children of the area with a satisfactory education.