Friday 26 May 2017 The Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) has issued an unequivocally positive report following a recent inspection of The Grammar School at Leeds (GSAL). The two-day inspection at the end of April was a regulatory compliance inspection, which has a clearly prescribed brief to ensure that the school meets certain statutory requirements, in contrast to the ISI’s more wide-ranging education quality inspections. The inspectors therefore focussed on ensuring that GSAL meets over 200 regulations across eight specified standards: Quality of education provided; Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils; Welfare, health and safety of pupils; Suitability of staff, supply staff, and proprietors; Premises of and accommodation at schools; Provision of information; Manner in which complaints are handled; Quality of leadership in and management of schools. In their report, the inspectors confirm that GSAL meets all eight of these standards, which are scheduled in the Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014 and the statutory framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage. With the inspectors making no recommendations for further action this is the best possible outcome from a compliance inspection. In GSAL’s last full inspection, in 2011, the school was ranked as ‘excellent.’ Sue Woodroofe, GSAL principal, said: “We are delighted to have met every standard, all of which were rigorously tested across the whole school at one day’s notice. As a regulatory compliance inspection, the report itself is a pass/fail exercise, which cannot ever do justice to the scale of the success for a school of GSAL’s size and complexity. “However, during the course of the inspection visit, GSAL was regularly commented upon as outstanding, with strong principles and values, warm relationships amongst pupils and staff, super facilities and excellent academic outcomes – and all of this backed up by parent and pupil responses to the ISI survey.” The ISI is the body approved by the Department for Education (DfE) for inspecting independent schools. Although independent of the DfE, the inspectorate is monitored on behalf of the DfE and reports annually to it. Read the ISI report in full General News Academic Whole School
