WORKING TOGETHER TO PROMOTE AND CELEBRATE ACHIEVEMENT
Plashet School is a highly successful, oversubscribed 11–16 comprehensive girl’s school situated in the heart of East Ham within the London Borough of Newham. Newham has no dominant ethnic group, having one of the highest ethnic minority populations of all areas in the country. It is also the second most deprived area in England. You will know Newham well as it was the host borough for the 2012 Olympic Games and contains the Olympic Park. It is ironic, therefore, that the one thing Plashet lacks is 21st century sports facilities. We were scheduled for a BSF programme that planned to incorporate our 1930s’ building with 21st century learning-space design. This commitment was cancelled in 2010. While we pursue ways to enhance our physical environment, our core purpose of ensuring that the young women we serve are happy and successful whilst at our school, and in their lives beyond Plashet, continues.
Our girls are predominantly of Asian origin, and many of them live in the local area. However, some commute from further afield because of a cultural, religious or educational desire for single-sex education. Ninety per cent of them are bi-lingual speakers, with 90 per cent of these being reasonably fluent in English.
Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali are the most common languages, with many more also spoken within the school. Our mission statement, ‘working together to promote and celebrate achievement’, underpins all we do. Overcoming learning inequalities and improving learning outcomes for all within our school community is what makes us tick. Our 1,344 young women are highly motivated, keen to learn and achieve their potential.
Plashet achieved Leading Edge Status in September 2004, and we have since then shared our practice with other schools nationally in the areas of leadership and management; meeting the needs of our more, highly and exceptionally able students; as well as school ethos that promotes high achievement. When inspected by Ofsted in 2005 and again in 2008, we were deemed ‘Outstanding’ and included in Ofsted’s 2009 ‘Twelve Outstanding Secondary Schools — Excelling Against the Odds’ report. In 2008, our inspector commented, “Plashet is a happy and harmonious place” and “Students’ achievement is outstanding because GCSE results are very high compared with the national average.” This is still the case with our summer 2012 GCSE results of 74 per cent A*–C, including English and maths being our best ever.
Outstanding achievement at Plashet is in our DNA. The examination results achieved by our girls as well as the progress they make have, for the last six years, placed us in the top 5 per cent of schools nationally. Whilst exam results are not representative of the whole experience a young person has in their education, we acknowledge they provide a passport for life and can open doors to a wide range of experiences, especially in times of economic difficulty.
This does not happen accidentally. We have a dedicated team of teachers and support staff who demonstrate unerring commitment each and every day. We are a school where students have a passion to learn. Alongside these crucial elements, we have a strategic set of interventions we employ to target learning at the individual level. These include our mid-phase admission work that formed a case study for the London Leadership Strategy 2012 publication ‘Growing Greatness’ as well as our current R&D work surrounding the impact of our KS4 Study Club programme. We collaborate with three local schools on a pilot Saturday school ‘Emerging Scholars Intervention Programme’, through which we target more able girls from disadvantaged backgrounds in order to raise aspirations, achievement, capability and resilience. When our young women leave us they are confident, proud of their gender, cultural and religious backgrounds and ready to seek the opportunities life beyond Plashet offers them.
