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Overview
Situated in a pleasant setting, overlooking the River Wye and Chepstow Castle, The Dell Primary School opened its doors to its first pupils in January 1989. The school enjoys excellent facilities in a fine building amid extensive landscaped grounds. Designed and built to replace two outlying Victorian village schools and to cater for a large part of Chepstow town, it originally accommodated 240 pupils in eight classrooms. Extra classrooms in 1992 and 1994 have increased capacity to 12 classrooms and an arguable 360 capacity. The school has grown rapidly from 170 pupils in January 1989 to an expected 395 plus pupils for the start of the 1997-98 academic year. The school's catchment area is a relatively prosperous one, containing two nearby villages and a large part of Chepstow itself. Its pupils' parents work locally or commute mainly to Bristol, Newport and Cardiff. Parents take a keen interest in their children's education. The school is a local education authority (LEA) school, formerly under the control of Gwent (LEA) and now the largest primary school in the new Monmouthshire Unitary Authority. It is a primary school catering for the needs of 4-11year-olds, many of whom have enjoyed state or private nursery/playgroup provision prior to admission.
The challenge
One of the school's first challenges was to put in place policies, processes and practices that would meet the aspiration of a parent body who had largely campaigned to keep open their own village schools and who would inevitably make comparisons with their child's former school, its values, its ethos and its academic standard. The pace of change in the education arena at that time and since has been considerable: the introduction and subsequent major revision of the National Curriculum, assessment testing and reporting, the devoting of budgets to individual schools, customer-driven by pupil members on roll, performance league tables, 5-yearly inspections, the integration of special needs pupils into mainstream schools, single governing bodies, appraisal, new technology, etc. The school was thus faced with the same demands as all other schools, together with the unique demands of the maiden voyage of a brand new school and the integration of staff and pupils from several different schools. A priority was to establish and embrace a philosophy, a set of...