An introduction to our school

Our school is an 11-16 mixed, community, comprehensive school of around 950 students.  We are lucky to be based in a relatively new building, with great facilities, on a beautiful site at the edge of the Peak District market town of Chapel-en-le-Frith.  The Peak District National Park is quite literally on the school’s doorstep and provides endless opportunities for walkers, cyclists, mountain bikers, climbers, cavers and other outdoor enthusiasts. 

The nearest big towns to the school are Buxton and Stockport but good transport links mean that the school’s staff travel from a wide area with many commuting from Manchester, Sheffield, Chesterfield and the towns of East Cheshire.  A sizable contingent of staff live in the villages of the Peak District.  For anyone considering relocating it is a wonderful area in which to live, with a good mix of housing, decent schools, easy commutes and a good quality of life. 

Chapel-en-le-Frith is a rural Peak District market town.  The biggest employers in the area are however industrial, mainly manufacturing and quarrying.  The school takes students from a wide rural area beyond the town with some students travelling for up to an hour by bus to reach school.  There is considerable socio-economic variation across the school’s catchment.

We believe that our school is unusual in several ways; perhaps the most obvious of these is structural.  The current school was formed by merging, in a new building, the local area special school with the existing high school.  The special school became the current 50 place enhanced resourced SEND provision, always referred to simply as ‘Learning Support’ in school.  To meet the moderate to severe special educational needs of its cohort, Learning Support operates as a ‘school within a school’ with a full independent curriculum with significant dedicated SEND trained staffing, including 7 teachers of SEND.  Students based in Learning Support study an independent curriculum appropriate to their needs.  The curriculum is highly adapted to the social and academic needs of the individual, with a strong focus on independent living, interpersonal and employability skills.  The aim is always that a student’s school life should be as ‘normal’ as possible. Almost all students based in Learning Support attend mainstream tutor groups and assemblies. 

All students can integrate at breaks and lunchtimes and share social and eating facilities.  Many students attend at least one mainstream subject and some will progress to take several mainstream subjects including GCSEs.  These arrangements make for a wonderfully inclusive school with young people who are very accepting of difference.

Our inclusive approach spreads more widely too and we often buck local and national trends by being positive about accepting students with difficult and complex backgrounds.  We have, for example, an unusually high number of looked after children in school, and we often take students who have been permanently excluded from other schools. 

Raising aspirations is of critical importance to us, as many students in this isolated rural area are not naturally exposed to the wider opportunities that an urban area might offer.  Significant resources are devoted to bridging this gap, we have good links with further education providers and, despite being an 11 to 16 school engage with a number of universities including Oxford and Cambridge.  As a result of this work, and despite being in an area with few local post 16 provisions, the school maintains superb progression rates to successful post-16 education.  Students in a typical year may transition to over 20 different post-16 institutions.

We think that we are different in other ways too. Our governors value the arts and creative subjects, and we retain high uptake in these areas. We aren’t a top-down organisation; we are a team, and we work together to do the best we can for the young people in our care. Perhaps most importantly, we recognise that happy, committed staff make for a successful school. We work really hard to look after and develop our staff.

Visitors to our school notice these differences. People frequently comment on the sense of community, the calm atmosphere, and the fact that our staff smile, joke and enjoy what they do.  At the start of one of our Ofsted inspections the lead inspector commented, after meeting the staff in briefing, that he had never met such a welcoming, smiley and relaxed staff team at the start of an inspection.  Perhaps it is not a coincidence that we are always fully staffed and are often ‘cold called’ by people wanting to work here.

We are in the minority of secondary schools that remain local authority run.  This is by choice after careful research and consideration and is regularly reviewed by governors.  We are not however an isolated school, we benefit from support from Derbyshire County Council, we’re a member of the Peak Edge Group of schools (PEGS) a local grouping of rural primary and secondary schools, and we have good links with local employers, universities and teaching schools. 

Like most schools, we have our strengths and weaknesses. We are proud of the work we have done recently on curriculum development, on teaching and learning and on behaviour.  We believe in research-based practice and many staff are now engaged with research and further professional qualifications.  Our exam results are consistently strong with subjects attaining above national averages.  Our challenges remain those of many rural schools; further improving our results requires that we better engage disadvantaged students, the increasingly complex SEN needs that face us require constant adaptations to practice in Learning Support, and while we’ve always set balanced budgets, and are proud that we’ve never had to make staff redundant, finances remain tight.  Running one of Derbyshire’s largest SEND provisions means that we’re at the sharp end of the current national issues around SEND education. 

This is a brilliant place to work.  The school is in a good position with a strong Ofsted inspection in October 2024, above average progress 8, oversubscribed for the last 13 years, and consistently above average progression figures.