ISI Report for St. Augustine's published

The ISI report for St. Augustine's school has now been published on the school website. I see that Mrs Gumley Mason is following the time-honoured tactic of burying bad news in the most inaccessible place she feels she can get away with. It requires that you follow three hyperlinks in succession to get to where the report actually is, and the text announcing the content of the link is really rather small.

Can you easily read this?

7.5pt Georgia is not the most readable typeface in the world, especially with underlining and inadequate paragraph spacing. The link is also not in the location you would expect it to be. Under the title "Inspection Report" in the News menu on the home page you don't find the ISI report at all. The report you find there is Deacon Anthony Clark's gushathon. The only link to the ISI report is in that list of miscellaneous news.

I expect the report also to be published on the ISI website early next week. This delay is routine, the ISI gives a school 2 weeks to distribute the report to parents before it is made available to the general public from its own website.

It's also slightly curious that the report is described as the "latest" ISI report. The school has only recently joined the Independent Schools Council, and so this is the first ISI inspection of the school. Previous inspections were conducted by OFSTED.

Finally, here is a bit from section 5.2 of the report, concerning safe recruitment practices.

Several individuals had started work before their CRB certificates had been received, although these were eventually obtained as required. These individuals were not recorded as having a previous CRB check or List 99 clearance and supervision, and a few other checks were not complete. In a very small number of cases the recorded delay in checking was lengthy.

Unfortunately, the ISI doesn't indicate what it means by "lengthy", whether they mean days, weeks, months or years. This is one of the major shortcomings of the way the ISI writes its reports. They could perfectly well have included something like "The longest delay between stating work and completion of CRB and List 99 checks was x months". But they haven't. You as parents are left blundering around in a fog wondering how long they mean by "lengthy."

Even before CRB checks cam into force 10 years or so ago, the Department for Education maintained what is known as "List 99", a list of people barred from working with children. When a notification is sent by the school to the DfE (or since 2009 to the Independent Safeguarding Authority), if appropriate the person's name is added to List 99. The Times has a good description of how List 99 works, and how and why people are added to it. From my knowledge of ISI reports and those of friends, I think the ISI wouldn't have said "lengthy" unless the delay was at least six months in one or more cases. But I emphasise that is an educated guess, nothing more.

As you can see from the Times article, List 99 has has been in existence for over 80 years, and even before CRB checks came in, it has been necessary for schools to carry out List 99 checks on new staff. So the school doesn't have the excuse of not knowing that the requirements existed. They have been in place for almost as long as the school has existed in Ealing.