"The school is all in flames..."

Last spring, Penny Jones received a phone call that all heads dread. Here she recounts the crisis and her response, and gives her leadership advice for dealing with such a catastrophe.

It was the Easter holidays, April 2010. I was on holiday in Italy when I was woken up by a phone call. A colleague was on the line: “Penny, I am at the school. It’s on fire. It looks bad. It’s all in flames.”

My first thoughts were that there was little that I could do that would be of any help, and I was confident that my colleagues would handle the work of the emergency services well and the emerging structural assessments.

A main concern was communication with the parents, children and staff. I was adamant that a confident and reassuring tone was required in all our announcements to ensure that the trust we had begun to build within the community was maintained.

Hatcham Temple Grove is a two form entry primary and nursery. The building was a London Victorian triple decker in New Cross. The school became the primary phase of Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College in September 2008 replacing a local authority primary school. We had received £5.5m for a refurbishment through the Building Schools for the Future Programme. The building work had been going on since May 2009. We were just four months from completion.

The immediate task of liaising with the emergency teams and local authority – the freeholders of the building – was carried out by the federation. The fire – the cause is still unknown, but arson has been ruled out – raged for 24 hours and was fought by 50 firefighters. The federation press officer co-ordinated responses to enquiries by the press. There was local and national coverage of the fire.

By the end of the first week, it became apparent that we would be unable to salvage anything from the building. The local authority offered us the use of an empty adult education centre a mile from the original building as a temporary home.

When I returned from holiday, I drove straight to the original site. The building was the landmark for the area and now stood stripped of any of the decorations and coverings that had kept it as a secure presence through many generations.

My thoughts revolved around making sure that we could start learning teaching could recommence as soon as possible. The Key Stage 2 SATs were only two weeks away.

The benefits of the federation and all through structure in dealing with events such as this are many; especially significant was the networking of the server. Though there was nothing salvageable in our building, all our pupil data, assessment records and personal documents were fully accessible and safe.

The facilities team organised a thorough, deep clean of the new premises. Fire routes were devised. Classrooms were allocated and labelled. Playgrounds were resurfaced where necessary, the hoarding was painted, weeds cut down and even our school signs relocated. The building was completely empty and so furniture was needed for every room. A secondhand furniture repository was sourced and the facilities manager spent a hectic day wading through all manner of second hand equipment. Five van loads were identified and sent our way. A removals firm was employed to unload all the equipment and put it in place.

The ICT team fitted a whole ICT suite. Each classroom was set up with a teacher’s and class computer, Interactive whiteboard and telephone. Photocopiers were sourced for the office.

The existing kitchen was refitted to ensure that we could provide each of our 400 pupils with a hot lunch.

Our deputy and assistant heads, my personal assistant, two admin assistants and I worked on the class resources and organisational factors. Ensconced at a bank of computers in the senior school’s staff workroom, we spent days ordering from catalogues. We rearranged the post and redelivery of SATs papers, cancelled our planned INSETs and the swimming lessons coach. It was a round the clock, head-spinning whirl.

All of these activities need money. Due to the nature of the building programme and our lease of the building from the local authority there were five insurance companies who would need to negotiate to decide upon liability. This was clearly going to take a significant time. The Department for Education, Young People’s Learning Agency (YPLA) and our sponsors, the Haberdashers, all donated or lent us funds.

An important part of my activity was to liaise with all the groups that had been keen to offer their support and assistance. Our school draws children from a wide range of backgrounds, thirty languages are spoken and 60 per cent of the families are in the lowest income bracket.

I contacted the PTA who had already sprung into action and helped to co-ordinate their fund raising activities. I liaised with many of our other supporters and together, by the end of the academic year, we had raised over £27,000 in gifts and donations.

We were all keen to ensure that the staff, children and parents felt secure in the solution that we had devised. Many staff and parents had attended the school themselves and teachers had lost many personal articles. Assessment material and records had been lost. Particularly difficult was the loss of all the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile assessment records. The process of introducing the school community to our new base had to be handled sensitively.

The week before the start of the new term, we sent a letter to all staff and parents explaining that we would be relocating the school for at least the remainder of the academic year.

On the first day of term, each member of staff was given a prepared pack of basic brand new equipment to enable them to begin to settle in. The first two days of the term were given to staff to set up their classrooms as best they could.

We held a welcome meeting for all parents and pupils in Year 6. We had decided that Year 6 should return two days earlier than the rest of the school. This would give them extra time to settle before their SATs and would enable us to trial all the organizational matters and movements with a small group. From this day we also held one-on-one tours of the building for our special educational needs children who we felt were particularly at risk of feeling unsettled by the move.

At the end of that first week, our Year 6 pupils acted as tour guides for groups of parents and pupils who came to our whole school welcome meeting. Overwhelmingly the parents were appreciative of our efforts and eager to support us. All children returned to school the following Monday only three days later than their planned first day.  

We spent six months in our first temporary building. We continued to build our stock of resources although some came quicker than others. I remember the reception class teacher asking me what I would suggest for a topic involving six pots of paint, one jigsaw and an empty sand tray. But there were particular highs. One parent donated £1,000, a child bought a paint brush with her pocket money and the stationers Ryman sent us an emergency school in a box.

We continued to support the children and staff in recovering from the trauma of the fire. We offered the services of the educational psychologist to all. Our local vicar, who is also a school governor, took a number of assemblies and all children, staff and parents were invited to contribute to creating a display of memories of our old building.

We had a visit from the loss adjuster. Every staff member was interviewed to detail and cost every item that had been in their classroom! Personal effects within the classroom were sadly not to be covered by the school insurance and therefore colleagues were advised to claim on their home insurance for any lost possessions. Parents were shocked to find that the many PE kits and children’s personal effects would not be covered by the insurance and therefore had to replace these themselves. Co-ordinating the replacement of inhalers for each asthmatic child became a job in itself.

A few of us were eventually able to return to the building to see if there were any items we could salvage. Our first priority was the safe. Unfortunately since the fire this had been broken into and all the contents stolen including the money for our Year 6 school journey. We did manage to recover some other very precious items though, including our nursery’s goldfish and giant African land snails, which had been kept alive by the security guards.

In October, we packed up our temporary home as the local authority had earmarked it for another school. We now operate in demountable classrooms situated on the car parks of the lower and upper senior school sites. Our nursery classes take place in the hall of our local church, very close to our old building. There is still no estimate of when building will start on our new school.

Penny Jones is headteacher of Hatcham Temple Grove School in New Cross, London. The primary school is part of the Haberdashers’ Aske’s Academy Federation. More information is available at www.hahc.org.uk. This piece is adapted from a paper published by the Haberdashers' Aske's Academy Federation.