Copthorne Prep School was inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) in February 2018. This was a regulatory compliance inspection, which is designed to establish whether the school meets each of the 493 regulations in the ISI handbook. It does not investigate the quality of education offered by the school, unlike the 2015 ISI inspection report available on our website, which judged us to be excellent in 12/13 categories and good in the other.
Schools are advised to use regulatory compliance inspections as similar to a vehicle MOT and to use them as an opportunity to tighten up any areas that are found to require improvement. The report itself lists only whether each regulation has been “met” or “not met”.
I am delighted to be able to report that the results of the parents’ questionnaire were universally favourable, so thank you for your positive comments about the school. The school met all the regulations with the exception of two specific requirements relating to the Single Central Register (SCR) of staff appointments. As soon as these were brought to our attention, we rectified the errors immediately. The report however retains the “not met” record in those areas. Discrepancies on the SCR always have a knock-on effect in other areas, but I can reassure you all that our safeguarding procedures were verbally praised by the inspectors as being particularly thorough, and our SCR is now fully compliant.
The school was re-inspected on 6 July 2018 by way of a no-notice inspection and as predicted above, was deemed to be fully compliant in all areas.
Nathan Close
Headmaster
