A SCHOOL placed in special measures last year after receiving a critical inspection report has been moving in the right direction, Ofsted has said.

Worlingworth Primary School was inspected last June and the report was published at the start of the current academic year, rating the school as “inadequate” and recommending it be placed in special measures.

After the school had seen five heads come and go in just five school years, Stradbroke High School’s Andrew Bloom was appointed executive headteacher last September.

Mr Bloom was appointed after being asked to take on the responsibility by education chiefs at Suffolk County Council.

A new head of school, Victoria Gascoyne-Cecil, has also been added to the team at Worlingworth and

A Section 8 Ofsted monitoring visit was carried out late last month and the inspector’s report has now been released.

Her Majesty’s Inspector Ian Seath said: “Leadership and management have improved markedly since the last inspection. The executive headteacher and head of school are giving the school a clear direction for improvement. The school has an accurate view of its own strengths and weaknesses.

“Improvement planning is strong and expectations are high. Self-evaluations are accurate, detailed, and have clear timescales and deadlines. Persons responsible for meeting targets are identified. Progress towards them is monitored by the management team, but until now has not been effectively monitored by governors. They recognise that they have been too dependent on information and analyses provided by senior staff.”

He concluded: “The school is making reasonable progress towards the removal of special measures.”

Mr Bloom said he was pleased with the response from Ofsted, which can only say that a school is either making “reasonable” progress or none at all in an S8 report.

He said: “There will be one more monitoring visit in the summer. We don’t want the school to be bounced out of special measures straight away - we want to be able to show we can sustain the improvements. We’d like to be out by the end of 2013.”

He said there had been a change in the school culture reflected in the new members of staff at Worlingworth and that parents and the wider community had been extremely supportive of the changes being made.