Headteacher blog 6th September 2024

It’s great to be back at school: everyone refreshed and ready for another fantastic year at Farfield! We have lots of new children and some new staff starting with us and we have had an excellent first week. This is an exciting time of year and I am always conscious that children only get their schooling once and it needs to be the best it can be. Our end-of-year parent survey in July proved that over 98% of our families rated their child’s experience at Farfield as good (15%) or excellent (83%) but there is always room for improvement.

Over the holidays we had lots of work in and around the junior building: a huge number of new windows (including the main hall pictured below) and lots of dirty work replacing pointing. We are grateful for significant financial support from Leeds City Council for this investment. It is hard keeping the whole school up to scratch with no formula funding to take account of the split site, age of the buildings or size of the grounds.

Earlier this week the new government announced the immediate end to single word/phrase Ofsted judgements. We will be moving towards a report card type Ofsted report in future. This is to be welcomed but I am concerned that inspections will continue to be rushed and under-resourced and that huge conclusions – good or bad – may still be drawn from very flimsy evidence. I would still never want to be an Ofsted inspector under these arrangements.