Super school takes step forward after addressing Estyn concerns

Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporter

A super school has emerged from an Estyn follow-up category, councillors have been told.

At a meeting of Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council’s Children, Young People and Families Scrutiny Committee on Tuesday, November 3, councillors received a report on the council’s improving schools programme, covering March to September.

This included an update on Abertillery 3-16 Learning Community (ALC), which had been put into the “significant improvement” Estyn follow-up category by the education standards watchdog, following an inspection in March last year.

They were told of the need to address several recommendations, including: “Improve the quality of teaching, develop pupils’ literacy and numeracy skills, ensure that leaders identify clear and specific actions when planning to improve teaching and ensure that the school meets the statutory requirement for pupils to study Welsh up to the age of 16.”

Following a monitoring visit in July, Estyn “judged” that the school had made “sufficient progress” in addressing the recommendations to be moved out of the category of needing significant improvement.

Just days earlier, Blaenau Gwent councillors had narrowly voted to close ALC’s Roseheyworth primary school campus next year in a bid to address financial issues caused by falling pupil numbers at the school.

Significant pressure

Head of school improvement Eurig Towns said: “There was significant pressure on ALC during that time to deal with the Roseheyworth situation and address all of the issues with Estyn coming back to look at the school.”

Cllr Julie Holt (Independent, Abertillery and Six Bells) said: “It’s nice to see that we’re going in the right direction. The school is on the way up and we have something to build on.”

Committee chairman Cllr Wayne Hodgins (Independent, Brynmawr) asked whether there would be any further Estyn monitoring visits to ALC, especially due to the imminent closure of Roseheyworth at the end of August next year.

Chief education officer Joanne Sims said: “They are no longer in any form of follow-up, so the recommendations have been addressed.

“The proposal (to close) Roseheyworth campus is based on how many pupils the school can accommodate.

“Estyn were aware of the plans, they fed into the consultation as well, but that would not have formed part of this work as they were focused on the recommendations.”

Education department

She added that the school had told the education department that it felt “better able to consolidate” teaching and learning across two primary campuses rather than three, and it means that there are fewer mixed-year groups at the school.

Ms Sims said: “Their expectation is that this will be better for teaching and learning.”

Mr Towns said: “The report from Estyn gives us strong confidence that the school is identifying the right things to improve on and has the right processes in place.”

He believed the school would continue to improve and that pupils would now have the “same experiences and approaches across all of the school” campuses.

The committee went on to vote to accept the report.

Dubbed a “super school”, ALC was created in September 2016.

The school came into being following a merger of Roseheyworth Road, Six Bells Road and Tillery Street primary schools, and Abertillery Secondary School.