Crookesbroom Primary Academy: Meet the headteacher behind one of South Yorkshire's top state primary schools

• Crookesbroom Primary Academy was Doncaster and South Yorkshire’s top primary school in our 2024 league table
• Its headteacher says they have high standards, and strive to do the basics well
• But the school also focuses on the ‘whole child’ - dedicating itself to helping them grow into well-rounded people
• Their head also wants to instil his pupils with ambition, and see them to go on to do big things

Primary schools are important, playing a vital part in shaping young people’s lives in their early, most formative years.

This extends far beyond the academic skills one might expect schools to focus on. A great primary school will also make sure they have opportunities outside of the classroom, and will help guide them emotionally and socially as they discover the world and their place in it.

One Yorkshire primary school has shown it is doing an exceptional job across the board. In our rankings of top performing schools of the 2023/24 academic year, Crookesbroom Primary Academy was not only the top-performing state primary in Doncaster, but also took out the top spot in South Yorkshire - as well as fifth place in Yorkshire overall.

The school had 96% of its Year 6 pupils meet the government’s expected standards in reading, writing, and maths - a vital set of key academic skills - and especially impressive when compared to averages of 60% locally and 61% nationally.

We caught up with Crookesbroom’s headteacher Rob Harvey about how the school did it, as well as why it’s such a great place to be a young learner. Here’s what he had to say:

Crookesbroom Primary Academy and its pupils

Crookesbroom is a primary academy serving the Dunscroft community, just to the northeast of Doncaster, in South Yorkshire. At any given time, it will have about 230 pupils on its roll, and it is often such a popular choice for local families that it ends up being oversubscribed.

The school’s headteacher is Rob Harvey, whose teaching career has spanned multiple schools across England and Italy. He believes this has allowed him to not only build a picture of how children learn best, but also bring together the best things from those schools - as well as some of the best characteristics of colleagues, headteachers, and deputies.

Among the student body, there was not a huge amount of diversity. But Mr Harvey saw that as an opportunity. “That's not an issue at all, because what I see is a great chance to educate and to almost bring that in to them.”

That could mean travelling to Doncaster to visit a mosque, championing learning other languages or more about other cultures, or even finding other ways to celebrate our differences. Mr Harvey walks the talk in that respect, sporting a single, sparkly blue fingernail inspired by Australia’s Polished Man initiative; a movement to end violence against women and children.

“The primary school angle I've taken to tone it down slightly is that we respect women and girls… Back in October, we had a whole school initiative with this.” But for Harvey, it has become a year-round addition to his usual attire. “The reason I'm doing it now is because, well, we respect girls all year round, not just in October.

“I'm not saying specifically here, but misogyny is still a problem in many schools and it's sometimes casual comments that make out women are somehow inferior, which is absolute nonsense,” he said. “It's really challenging, I'll be honest, to try to break down some of these stereotypes… I really don't like expressions like man up or grow a pair, these sorts of things are really casually used, but actually they've got a really negative connotation towards women, which we're trying to work on.

“I'm really passionate about making sure that everybody knows that they can achieve,” he added. “If you want something enough and you work hard for it you can get there, it doesn't matter if you’re a boy or girl, doesn't matter your skin colour, or your religion.”

‘Doing the basics well’

One thing Mr Harvey believes makes Crookesbroom a great place to learn is its high standards. These are shared by its governing body, the Delta Academies Trust, meaning at its core, the school had a strong curriculum, excellent teachers, and lots of opportunity for collaboration.

“We always aim for the top. Because I think if you don't aim for the top, you won't get it,” he said. But that didn’t mean they had any “flashy tricks” up their sleeves when it came to teaching. “It's as simple as we do the basics really well all the time.”

The school’s fantastic results last year were a testament to that. “We had 96% of the children meeting the expected standard [in reading, writing, and maths], which is our best ever. It's an incredible result for any school, but certainly I'm so delighted for ours,” he continued.

Included in that were scores of 100% in both reading and maths. “It's lovely to get nice results, but the bottom line is I want children leaving here with the best writing and reading and maths and all around development that they can have. Knowing that we've put all this work in and it's paid off, it's amazing… I've got really high hopes for what they're going to do in the next few years.”

But aside from the academics, Mr Harvey wanted to see his pupils become well-rounded people. “We also see that the children need these experiences as well,” he said. Celebrating and respecting diversity was a key part of that, but so too was enrichment, from school trips and sports, to choir and community outreach, to the school’s Quentin Blake, Axel Scheffler and Julia Donaldson-themed school library.

Even embracing the outdoors had its place, with the headteacher “trying to bring as much nature as I can into school for children”. It was important that they grow to appreciate the need to look after the environment, he added, whether that be by recycling, or planting trees.

Ambition

Mr Harvey said that Crookesbroom’s children were “absolutely incredible”, but like any school, they came from different backgrounds and faced different challenges. “There's children who have had different types of trauma, and it's very challenging.”

That meant the school found itself providing a lot of emotional and social support, he continued, but that wasn’t necessarily the hardest part. “The biggest challenge has been creating that level playing field. I think it's probably fair to say nationally there are real imbalances I think between areas. I mean we all know about north/south and the London-centric sort of nature it sometimes feels the country has.

“One of the challenges we're really working on is ambition,” he added. “I want our children to… go out to Oxford, Cambridge, London, America, wherever - go abroad and have these amazing jobs and go to these amazing universities.”

It was a bit of a balancing act, because he also wanted them to love where they came from, and feel pride for Doncaster. “But actually there's nothing wrong with aiming high and going big and opening your eyes to the world, because there's everything out there and just some of our children maybe don't necessarily have that drive or haven't seen it before,” Mr Harvey said.

“I think it's really hard if you're maybe the first or one of the first in your family or friendship group or something to make that move. But we've got some great inspirational role models that we've seen. So we're just trying to show these children that, yeah, you can do it and we'll support you all the way.”

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Community

Primary schools are often the heart of the community they call home, and Crookesbroom is no exception. Mr Harvey says they receive a lot of support from the local Co-op grocery store, as well as MPs and the local church, bolstered by an exceptional PTA.

The school also had a unique approach to extending its learning to the community. There were shared meals from different cultures that pupils were learning about, which were open to families, or open class events, where parents could learn alongside their children for an afternoon. The PTA group, Friends of Crookesbroom, also ran a popular ‘grandparents bingo’ - a chance to get sometimes overlooked members of the school community more involved.

Community pride is another one of the school’s key priorities, Mr Harvey added, and it wasn’t unusual to see its young pupils getting into the spirit of it. “We are in charge of what is happening within our gates, but not so much out. But I've got some children, it's amazing, their dedication to going, for example, outside the gates with litter pickers - they want to go and clear up in the community.”

Local MP Lee Pitcher also recently visited Crookesbroom to spend time with its young learners, which ended with the school receiving a letter on Government-headed paper - praising not only what it was doing, but the whole school community. Mr Harvey said that was the whole point.

“This isn't about one person or two people or whatever. It's about the staff. It's about the children, and it's about their families,” he said. “We're achieving amazing things and genuinely the kids here get a brilliant deal, and that's the collective [result] of everyone coming together.”

You can learn more about South Yorkshire’s highest-performing primary schools, and how they did in our regional rankings, online here.