BIG changes have been made at Rose Hill Primary since headteacher Sue Mortimer arrived four years ago.

In January 2007, the school was deemed to be failing by Ofsted and put into Special Measures, but under Mrs Mortimer’s leadership, it passed its inspection 16 months later.

Inspectors returned in July to say the school had made “significant improvement” because of the vision, determination and drive of the head, teachers and governors.

Mrs Mortimer said: “It is about having very high expectations of everybody in our school and making the curriculum more interesting and exciting for the children.”

Over half of Rose Hill’s pupils have Special Educational Needs, and for a third, English is a second language.

To boost both results and pupils’ confidence, teachers have worked to change the way the curriculum is organised, grabbing children’s attention to help them learn.

Each term is focused around a different project, which starts with a special event to engage the pupils.

Children might go on a school trip, listen to a talk from a special visitor, or arrive one morning to find their classroom transformed into a rainforest or Second World War air raid shelter. Outdoor lessons offer another way to grab pupils’ imagination.

Whatever the weather, they are taken outside for lessons in Rose Hill’s huge grounds, where an outdoor learning classroom was built in summer 2009.

Mrs Mortimer said the initiative made boring parts of the curriculum more exciting. When children have to learn about writing instructions, they now do so by building a shelter then writing a manual for the year below describing what they did.

And extra focus has been put on helping pupils who find mainstream education difficult to improve their confidence, self-esteem and literacy.

The Nurture Class takes a group of pupils with behavioural and educational problems, and teaches them in a small group overseen by a specialist teacher.

Mrs Mortimer said: “What happens in the nurture class is what we have tried to do in the rest of the school.

“We have tried to help the children become more confident and to increase their self-esteem. We have tried to make sure the curriculum is the right one for our children.”

She added: “Change is always difficult, and although any change can cause a little bit of unease about what it is going to mean, parents are positive about what we have done.”