2018 has been a highly successful year for Westbourne School. Having achieved the accolade of being graded “excellent’ across all five inspection categories by Estyn in May 2018, the school has both maintained its No.1 position in the Sixth Form League Tables for small schools, as verified by The Daily Telegraph in August and achieved a percentage of Grade 9 GCSE grades five times the national average.
The autumn term has seen further success with Westbourne having the privilege of being invited to the ESTYN Awards Dinner at Cardiff’s Holland House Hotel in October. Not only were school representatives presented with a Certificate of Excellence in each key inspection category, the school was particularly recognized for “Best Practice” in two specific categories of “Leadership” and “EAL (English as an Additional Language) Students”. These two latter areas identified were particularly pleasing, due to the hard work that has been done by every part of the school community over the last few years.
In addition, the school was commended for our outstanding work with students whose first language is not English. These students excelled and surpassed expectations in our nurturing environment of support, expertise and personalised curriculum.
The last twelve months have been the most successful and rewarding of my career, says Dr Griffiths, but I am pragmatic enough to appreciate that a standard has been set that is now the minimum, rather than aspirational, level of achievement required from this excellent school.