The Black Country school that climbed out of special measures to record its best-ever GCSEs in under 10 years

Link Academy has, since 2017, bounced back from being rated ‘inadequate’ and put into special measures by Ofsted to achieving its best ever GCSE results this summer, beating the national average for Maths and English.

The Netherton school started life as Hillcrest School and Community College, then joined four other secondary schools in the Dudley Academies Trust in 2017, under the sponsorship of Dudley College.

The current principal Emma Edwards-Morgan has seen the transformation first-hand, having been a pupil at Hillcrest in the 1990s.

She said: “We’ve got Dudley College as a sponsor, which is a really successful college with lots of networks for us to be able to use as a school, and I think what happens within trusts is that you get a lot of support from centralised services.

“That means, from our perspective, some of the infrastructure that have in a school becomes a central infrastructure, meaning it can help us to be more cost effective, with in-house financial functions.

“We can then look at aligning things like our core values and really look at the opportunities we can provide for children in the local area, as well as share best practice and, because the schools in the trust are geographically so close to each other, support in different ways.”

The academy has five core values: dreaming big, rewarding effort, leading together, respecting each other and our world and learning that inspires.

Ms Edwards-Morgan said: “We worked to develop the values representing the five things that we are all about and refer to them in our everyday work with the children and it just allows us to really pin things to those values and those beliefs that we all hold.

“As a former pupil, I think a lot of them resonate in a different way, particularly in the challenging demographic that we’ve got, and I think the belief that our children now have in their own ability and their options when they leave school is a big sea change in our school.

“That’s how we came to dreaming big and we come to that all the time about really encouraging the kids to believe in themselves and go on to things that we know they’re capable of.”

The academy provides a secondary education for pupils from 11 to 16, with GCSEs, T-Levels and exams for other qualifications at the end, but also provides a broad extracurricular offering which Ms Edwards-Morgan said was among the broadest of the schools in Dudley.

This includes a free breakfast club, lunchtime clubs and activities including activities like arts and crafts and chess, plus after school activities such as wall-climbing, rugby, football, acting and dancing.

Other activities include a textiles club and a darts club, which Ms Edwards-Morgan said had been inspired by Luke Littler and had impacted positively on attendance, all of which she said was about incentivising the pupils to know that they are there to learn, but also to take part in activities that interest them.

She said: “When I think back to my own experiences here, I loved art and dance and spent most of my lunch times in the dance hall, so those are some of my happiest memories.

“It is about GCSEs and qualifications, but if you want the kids to achieve really well in their GCSEs, we need them to be in school and we want them to be happy and engaged in school, so I think that when you get that right, the rest does start to follow.

“We’re passionate about that and, on a recent Ofsted visit, our personal development curriculum came out as a strong standard and we’re proud to get that acknowledgement because the staff do work really hard.

“I’ve worked in a lot of secondary schools and you don’t always get staff willing to give up their lunch times every day and their after-school time, but I think we get a real commitment from our staff to offer a really wide range of clubs for our kids and it makes a big difference to them.”

Ms Edwards-Morgan said her own history as a former pupil and member of the community gave her a strong link to Link Academy and said that drove her to keep wanting the pupils to achieve.

She said: “I think that being a member of the community as a child and still having family living around here, I really do care what deal the children get here.

“From my own journey and experience, what the academy means to me is that I just want our children to realise they are as good as anybody else in any other school.

“We’ve had children who have gone to Oxford University off the back of their education here and I think it shows that we cultivate a sense of belief from our children that they are as good as anybody else and achieve as well as anybody else.

“My big passion is that when you get education right, it influences the community in which the school is in and, ultimately, we’re about churning out really good human beings.”