Netherhall School's education quality 'requires improvement'
A school has been told the quality of its education "requires improvement".Inspectors from the watchdog Ofsted found that pupils' personal development, behaviour and attitude at Netherhall School in Maryport were "good", but that the quality of education, sixth form provision, and leadership needed to be improved. The report also said that pupils were benefiting from a revised curriculum which "raised expectations for pupils' achievement", but that there were weaknesses in how well some subjects were delivered, including in sixth form.The school has been approached for comment.
Ofsted's previous full inspection in 2018 had judged the school to be "good" across all criteria. The school, which has 870 children on its roll, was found to have undergone "many changes" in leadership and staffing since the previous report.
'No effective challenge'
Inspectors said pupils enjoyed attending Netherhall and that sixth form students served as "excellent role models" for younger children.The report also highlighted the "extensive range" the school offered including sport events, overseas trips and charity fundraisers.However, inspectors said the school had not ensured pupils' understanding was checked "well enough"."This means that sometimes staff do not know when pupils have gaps in their knowledge or whether they remember their learning over time," they said."This hampers them from building on what they know and can do already."Inspectors said the school was taking steps to improve "many aspects of itsprovision" leading to improved attendance rates.They also praised children's behaviour and said staff were "proud" of their work.Governors were said to not always challenge the school "effectively"."This means that governors do not have a precise understanding of the school's strengths and areas for development," the report added.
Follow BBC Cumbria on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
12 minutes ago
- Times
The cost of chillin' — is air conditioning worth it?
Restless nights of tossing and turning in bed have become a common theme for people across the UK in recent weeks due to the heatwave, leading many households to consider getting air conditioning. The UK has typically been averse to getting air con in the home, often baffling tourists — particularly Americans — during these increasingly hot summer months. Yet while government regulations have ordered housebuilders to ensure all new homes mitigate overheating, most residential properties in the UK are still designed with the key purpose of keeping the heat in. Oliver Novakovic, the head of technical and innovation at Barratt Redrow, the UK's largest housebuilder, says air-conditioning units are not on the company's agenda. 'Air conditioning is not something that comes up when we do our customer research, people are more concerned about how to keep heating costs down in winter.' Yet attitudes seem to be changing. The proportion of UK homes overheating in the summer has jumped from 20 per cent in 2011 to 82 per cent in 2022, according to a paper published this month in the journal Energy Research & Social Science. The researchers found that this had also led to the use of air conditioners in UK homes rising from 3 per cent to 20 per cent over the same period. So what are the pros and cons of getting air con at home — and how do you go about it? We break down the key questions. A portable air conditioner is a stand-alone unit about the size of a kitchen bin that can be plugged into a socket and moved to any room. This makes them especially good for those in rented accommodation. They also do not require professional installation and units start at about £150. Natalie Hitchins, the head of technology content at the consumer rights group Which?, says: 'For renters or those who want a quick, icy blast, freestanding portable air conditioners are the best bet. Fitted air conditioning is significantly more expensive than a portable unit, and installation can be complex and disruptive.' A portable unit works the same way as a fitted air conditioner — pulling in warm air from a room and expelling cool air — but it has an exhaust hose attached to it to get rid of the heat, rather than having a section that sits outside the house. This means a portable air conditioner always needs to be near an open window or door where the hose can expel hot air. This can cause issues for people at night if they want to draw the blinds or close a door. • Read more expert advice on property, interiors and home improvement Portable air conditioners are technically cheaper to run, with the comparison site Uswitch finding that a portable unit would cost an average of £17.22 to run for nine hours a day for seven days, compared with £46.49 for a built-in unit. But they are not as efficient as fitted air conditioners, with the single hose design usually still drawing some warm air into the room, meaning they take more power and are likely to be left running for longer to cool a room. They are also louder. Joe Stein, the director of AllStar Electrical & Air Conditioning, a London-based firm, says: 'The problem with portable units is they tend to be very loud, generating the same sort of noise you used to hear from the old fitted units, and they also suck up a lot of electricity.' Stein says his calculations for running air conditioning for nine hours a day would put a portable unit at £21.92 a week and a fitted unit at £10.96 a week. A fitted unit tends to be more energy-efficient, quieter and sleeker looking. The cheapest and simplest option is to have the air-conditioning box mounted to a high or low position on a wall inside your house. Units can also be installed in the ceiling or even in cupboards, known as concealed units. Air conditioning can also be installed in the loft of a home, with ducts distributing the cool air to different rooms, although this is often tricky to retrofit and is better to get done when first doing a loft installation. A fitted unit requires space for one section — the external condenser — to be outside the house, and will need to be installed by a registered gas engineer. The inside and outside sections are connected by insulated pipes that are typically about 3-5m in length but can reach as far as 30m, or 100m on bigger commercial systems. The most simple and cheapest fitted unit will just have one indoor and one outdoor section, serving one room and is called a single-split unit. A more complex system is multi-split units, in which there are a maximum of five indoor units connected to one external condenser, catering to different rooms in the house. Stein says a multi-split unit is useful if you live in a block of flats with just a balcony to store the outdoor unit, but the cost of installation is more expensive, and will also usually require redecorating if the pipes need to run through the ceiling to get from a bedroom to the balcony. Almost any type of property can have fitted air conditioning, but some types of homes will require more work, according to Stein. Terraced houses are more difficult than detached houses because the outer part of the unit can only be fixed at the front or back of the house, rather than the sides, so the pipes have to run a longer distance if they are on a multi-split system. Stein adds: 'The most difficult property tends to be flats because you have to get the machines up to the balcony, cut the ceilings and plasterboard to run the pipes through it, and then redecorate the area.' The installation cost can be significant. Stein says: 'It all depends on the type of installation, but the cost of a fitted unit will start at around £1,500-£1,600 for the smallest type of unit in a small bedroom.' This means that installing a fitted unit into five bedrooms would cost a minimum of about £7,500. The installation of a single-split unit takes about half a day. Most engineers will visit the property beforehand, although some do video calls, and companies such as Boxt, a website that organises installations, enables customers to provide the necessary information online. Whether it is a fitted or portable unit, air conditioners are likely to improve your ability to sleep during particularly hot nights and your mood during the day if working from home. Adam Knight, the lead engineer at Boxt, says: 'Air conditioning gives you consistent, controllable comfort, better sleep and improved air quality. It's also quieter and more energy-efficient than people realise, especially when compared with most portable fans or electric heaters.' He adds that modern fitted air-conditioning systems also can be flipped to heat rooms during the winter, offering longer-term value overall. They also usually hit the required temperature quicker than radiators that rely on boilers. Those suffering from bad hayfever also benefit, with air conditioning filtering allergens such as pollen and dust. This all comes at a price, though. The running costs will depend on the unit's power and size, as well as the temperature of the room it is cooling, but Natalie Mathie, an energy expert at Uswitch, says: 'It's easy to build up a hefty bill, especially during a heatwave.' Portable air-conditioning units use about 1 kilowatt of power an hour, according to Uswitch, costing about 27p an hour to run, while a built-in unit uses 2.7 kilowatts a hour, costing about 73p an hour. In contrast, an electric pedestal fan running for nine hours a day for seven days would only cost £1.03. There is also the environmental impact. Novakovic says: 'The issue with air conditioning is it introduces a lot of carbon. You don't really want to bring air conditioning into homes because of the amount of carbon it would create.' ● Are heat pumps financially worth it? Between now and 2050, cooling technologies including air-conditioning units are predicted to become the biggest contributor to growing energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency. In the UK, hydrofluorocarbons — the most commonly used refrigerants in the units — are being phased out due to being potent greenhouse gases, but more eco-friendly alternatives, such as hydrofluoroolefins, can still create ecological damage when they break down in the atmosphere. Heat pumps Phil Strickland, the technical director at 21 Degrees, which provides energy-efficient installations for the home, says: 'Nearly all heat pumps can run in reverse mode and do cooling, reducing the temperature in all your rooms by three to four degrees.' However, this only works if the heat pump is powering emitters such as underfloor heating or fan coil units, but not for radiators. New-build homes Government regulations introduced in 2022 ordered all housebuilders to ensure that the temperature in their properties' bedrooms overnight does not exceed 26C for a prolonged period. Novakovic says: 'It's been a positive in that the sector is considering overheating in more detail than it did previously.' He says housebuilders are more focused on bringing better ventilation through the home, as well as innovations such as shaded glazing, which allows light but not heat in. Strickland adds: 'You can now get glazing where the glass reflects the sun back out again with a special coating, so it lets the light in, but reflects the UV light back out.' ● Welcome to the world of 'personal cooling tech' Fans Electric fans are a much cheaper option to buy and run than air conditioning and can cool you as long as the temperature is less than 35C. However, it does not actively cool the air, just moves it round, with the wind on the skin helping to make sweat evaporate more quickly. Shading and curtains A lot of heat in our homes comes through windows, especially those that are south-facing. Closing curtains once the outside temperature starts to climb helps to prevent some of this heat getting into the room. Outdoor shutters and inward opening windows help to cool the house and are a common sight in Mediterranean countries — and they are simple to install. A DIY version of this is to hang a sheet over the outside of your window. Wet floor A simple trick to bring the heat down in a room is mopping a tiled floor, and leaving the water to evaporate, cooling the tiles. But this will increase humidity in the house.
Daily Mail
34 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
MY LIFE IN A GARDEN by Carl Gorham: Nature? It will ruin your garden
MY LIFE IN A GARDEN by Carl Gorham (Ireton Press £8.99, 272pp) What could be more relaxing and fulfilling than a spot of gardening? Fresh air, plants, birdsong, the hum of a lawnmower . . . no wonder barely an episode of Gardeners' World goes by without Monty Don earnestly assuring us that 'gardening is good for your mental health'. Yet the reality is that gardening can also be intensely frustrating and disappointing. Plants get eaten by slugs, weeds abound, and your carefully nurtured seedlings mysteriously wither and die. So it's refreshing to read a memoir which, while centred around the restoration of a garden, is written by someone who just can't see the point of gardening. 'You make something beautiful in a garden and nature ruins it,' Carl Gorham grouses. Far from being a healing interaction with the natural world, he regards working in the garden as 'a dour, repetitive series of mucky jobs'. He is so uninterested in gardening that when he lived for several years in a flat in south London which had two burned mattresses in the front garden, it didn't occur to him to move them. Yet in 2005 he became the owner of a house in Norfolk which had a three-acre garden with 'hedges, beds, shrubs, plants, a sunken valley, a beech maze, a firepit and nine lawns'. He and his wife Vikki had bought the property on impulse, swept away by images of growing their own vegetables, holding parties in the garden, and sleeping under the stars on summer nights. Owning a place like this was a sign of their confidence in the future: Vikki had endured years of treatment for cancer and was now apparently in remission. Sadly, she died suddenly, two years after they acquired the house. From then on, Gorham faced one challenge after another. Not only was he struggling with his grief and raising his young daughter, he also had to cope with the death of his mother, his own battle with cancer and then a nervous breakdown. Not surprisingly, the garden was neglected and became 'a creeping, gloomy presence reaching out in all directions like an invading army'. Eventually he and his new partner, Emma, decided the house was unaffordable and would have to be let. Gorham was put in charge of restoring the garden, and it's his account of his bungling attempts to knock it into shape that is the heart of this warm, funny and sometimes very moving book. He mines plenty of wry humour from his struggles with the garden, which he views as 'a disobedient child I've been put in charge of and am having no luck in pacifying'. But as he toils over the weed-infested paths and the bramble-choked borders, he comes to realise that, despite his lack of knowledge, the garden has sustained him through 15 years of ups and downs. Gradually, he makes his peace with it. He and the garden are 'like two old lags who've set aside past differences and agreed to work together on a final job'.
The Guardian
38 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Sudoku 6,945 hard
Click here to access the print version. Fill the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9. To see the completed puzzle, buy the next issue of the Guardian (for puzzles published Monday to Thursday). Solutions to Friday and Saturday puzzles are given in either Saturday's or Monday's edition.
