‘TO make a real difference doesn’t just happen overnight’ said St Aldhelm’s Academy principal Cheryl Heron a year ago, not long after the Poole school had reopened as an academy.

Despite the uncomfortable feeling that that didn’t offer much encouragement to its then pupils, you could accept the point. As Cheryl Heron said, “embedding new attitudes takes time”.

What no-one anticipated was that a school, which was scored the 11th worst in the county with just 21 per cent of pupils gaining five grade Cs or better a year ago, would then plummet to the very bottom of the pack for the whole of England.

What’s more, its score of just three per cent of pupils attaining a grade of C or better sounds absolutely woeful.

The best you can say for it is that its appalling results divert attention away from Carter Community School in Hamworthy that also finished in the bottom 10 in the country.

‘Could do better?’ That would be the understatement of the year.