A mobile phone ban, extra curricular clubs and video games are helping a trouble-hit secondary school in Barry to turn things around.
Pencoedtre High School was put into special measures following an Estyn inspection in 2022.
The following year, reports were emerging of teachers locking the doors of their classrooms to keep them and pupils safe due to behavioural issues.
There is still a problem with attendance at the school, but executive headteacher Innes Robinson insisted that “bit by bit, we are getting the school right”.
Mr Robinson, who arrived at the school last year, told a Vale Council scrutiny committee on Monday: “It was not in a good place and I think the most important thing to say [is that] what wasn’t in a good place was staff morale."
“I think it is the lowest I have seen staff morale in any school because they had been in special measures for a year and they didn’t see the way out of it.”
Mr Robinson said a number of measures were adopted to improve the confidence of members of staff and create a different kind of learning environment that would make children want to go to school.
Staff at Pencoedtre High went on strike over the behaviour at the school, with union representatives saying some members of staff felt “at the end of their tether” over issues like verbal and physical abuse.
A number of tougher approaches were proposed, including the introduction of CCTV and creating a secure unit for challenging pupils.
Another union representative said at a council scrutiny meeting in January 2024 that the school needed “boots on the ground to make sure all of the learners are where they should be”.
Mr Robinson said: “For me when I read all of that, all I think to myself is ‘prison’…these are absolutely delightful children."
“There is no need for any of these sorts of things and once you have got to this point where you are seeing pupils as always doing the wrong thing, that is when the culture is completely wrong.”
As well as attendance, other issues at the school according to Mr Robinson included too many pupils in corridors and social media, with the headteacher saying in relation to this: “I can’t tell you how bad an impact it was having at Pencoedtre.”
The mobile phone ban at the school sees pupils having to put their phones away into a locker for the day.
Other changes include the introduction of lunchtime clubs – among them a football video game club which the headteacher himself has got involved with – and a sports area.
“If you get kids doing clubs at break time, they enjoy being at school,” said Mr Robinson. “If they enjoy being at school, they don’t misbehave.”
Another issue was literacy rates. At Pencoedtre, Mr Robinson said children are coming into the school three years behind the average reading and writing age. He added that the school is using tools like literacy intervention programmes to try and improve this.
Learning and culture scrutiny committee members heard at Monday’s meeting that attendance at Pencoedtre has gone up from 75% to 79%.
However, a number of scrutiny committee members raised concerns about this and Mr Robinson noted that this was still “criminally low”.
Speaking after the meeting, the chairman of the learning and culture scrutiny committee, Cllr Rhys Thomas, said: “It’s a travesty that one-fifth of children aren’t attending school at Pencoedtre, and their life chances will be seriously diminished because of this non-attendance."
“I do welcome the limited improvement in numbers since the pandemic, but the fact of the matter is that attendance is still below pre-pandemic levels."
“The Labour Welsh Government and their colleagues on the Vale Council should make tackling the attendance crisis an absolute priority.”
Mr Robinson also commented on the attendance of year 7 pupils, which he said is 90% at the moment.
At the scrutiny committee meeting he added: “Making attendance move by one percent is an incredible feat."
“It’s not where I want it to be, but the mistake people make and they made before I got there was they spent a lot of time looking at data…and talking about data of children when actually there is a lot to be said [for] if kids are happier they will come to school.”
Following the meeting, a spokesperson on behalf of Pencoedtre High School and Vale of Glamorgan Council told Bro Radio News: "Attendance levels at Pencoedtre have improved significantly over the last year thanks to the hard work of staff to address this issue."
"A commitment to adopting best practice in learning and teaching has helped boost engagement, which in turn leads to children spending more time in the classroom. We are confident that ongoing efforts in this area will see attendance figures continue to rise."
"It is also misleading to say that 20 per cent of pupils have no engagement with school. These figures represent overall attendance figures. It is not the same pupils that are absent all of the time."
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