4:13pm Thursday 18th March 2010
By Hannah Crown
THE headteacher of a school which faced closure because of poor standards two years ago has described how the school has started to improve.
Turin Grove school one of three Enfield secondary schools to be placed on a Government list of failing schools in 2008, when it was told to either improve, become an academy, or close.
The school was today described as "improving" by London Mayor Boris Johnson, who plans to relaunch it as a mayoral academy with extra cash from the autumn.
Janet Lewis, who took over the headteacher's post at Turin Grove school in November 2008, said the school had previously been "understaffed".
Appointed on a three year contract by Edison, a US founded education services provider, she described some of the problems she faced on joining the school.
She said: “Attendance was in the 80s and now we have 93 per cent, just through being on the phone to parents, and a new texting service, asking the parents where the children are.”
The school “needed to make improvements in maths” because “the teaching wasn’t as good as we wanted”, and had appointed a new subject head, Iesha Small in September 2008.
She added: "Science wasn't doing terribly well. We had been without a head of science for some time and managed to get an experienced head in."
She said: “Our maths results were 10 per cent below our English results in 2009, when we had 27 per cent of children get 5 A*s to C in english and maths.
She added that overal in 2009, "64 per cent of pupils got 5 A*s to C [across all subjects]."
She said she expected maths results to match those of the school's specialist subject, English, next summer, while science pupils were also seeing improvements.
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