Digging underneath the Ofsted-outstanding rating for one of London’s smaller new primary schools

Harris Primary Academy Purley Way, on the left, just before this building opened in 2017

It was a case of “back to the usual” for the Harris Federation on the Ofsted front, as one of its newer primary schools achieved an “outstanding-in-all-categories” verdict which had the inspector marvelling at the quality of its work with pupils.

This followed, of course, the story Education Uncovered broke last month about another of its schools becoming the first Harris institution ever not to achieve a “good” or “outstanding” rating from the inspectorate.

Still, the latest judgement, on Harris Primary Academy Purley Way, in Croydon, south London seemed intriguing in that the single-inspector team offered no thoughts on a few interesting aspects of this three-year-old school.

The first was that this institution, which resembles a free school in having been founded from scratch in 2016 but which is mysteriously actually classed in official records as a “sponsor-led academy”, is one of the smaller primary schools in London, with only 107 children recorded as on its books as of the last census, in January this year.