A Suggestion for Amanda Spielman our new HMCI: but first, some background.

It was 8.20 on a cold January morning on a post-war housing estate, showing its age, with narrow potholed roads and boarded-up shops. I was waiting along with a gaggle of parents for the primary school gate to open. Some of the parents were what heads in similar circumstances call “Kidults” - young mothers who became pregnant for the first time in their mid-teens. Their conversations suggested that they were finding it hard to be what Bruno Bettelheim once unforgettably called a “Good Enough Parent”.

There was another group of mothers distinctive for their hijabs and burkhas, who kept their own counsel. The two groups didn’t mix, although, as I discovered later, their children do, sometimes with a degree of friction heightened by Brexit, which has scratched open wounds of latent intolerance and racism festering just below the surface for years.

The school is typical of thousands on the outskirts of towns and cities all over England. In these challenging communities, domestic and social violence, drugs and poverty of aspiration can test a youngster’s resilience to breaking point. It would be easy for despairing heads to ask: “What more can you do?” Thirty years ago, some would have done just that. Not so today. Quite the reverse: there are scattered examples of such outer-ring schools beginning to crack the cycle of disadvantage.

So, my suggestion is that Ofsted surveys primary schools like this isolated in the urban outer ring and succeeding against the odds. What we need to know is how and why some can do it. My bet is that among the points of good practice will be at least the following five.

Five points of good practice

First are positive attitudes that brook no denial. It is reflected in staff language and behaviour, which is contagious with children. It is clear they are adept at recognising genuine success defined widely to embrace as many talents as possible. Academic achievement is valued no higher than achievement in sports, music, the arts, and service to others.

Second, they run lunchtime and after-school-clubs aplenty which are complemented by catch-up sessions for the “We can’t do it yet” groups. These reflect a determination to make children push their learning to the limit. Pupils receive coaching to surmount the hurdle and continue on their learning journey.

Third, they are creative in leadership and management; staff development (to which they devote exceptionally high levels of resource); teaching, learning and assessing. They ensure the environment is rich with horizon-lifting exemplars, whether that is in puzzles, riddles, questions, quotations or in the achievements of past pupils.

Fourth, they focus on parental and community involvement; they are hand in glove with housing, health visitors and community groups. Staff visit the local shops, which by awarding points for behaviour are drawn into the school’s campaign for behaviour and attendance.

Fifth they involve pupils in everything the school does and offer them a guaranteed set of experiences. Above all they personalise everything they do - handwritten positive cards posted home, greetings at the gate, acts of unexpected kindness.

But HMCI’s inspectors will be able to identify patterns more clearly.

However they must do it soon. The effect of spending cuts, exacerbated in some cases by the new funding formula, is rapidly diminishing these schools’ chances of succeeding against the odds as they are now.

Sir Tim Brighouse is a former schools commissioner for London