Sharon Hollows
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Dame Sharon Hollows, DBE (b. 1958) is an English schoolteacher and headmistress.
When Hollows took on her first headship at Calverton Primary School in Newham, London in 1994, pupils' performance was very poor. But by the time the 1999 primary school results came out, she had raised the score 11 year olds achieved across the three subjects in the national curriculum tests to 269 - up from just 45 in 1994. It marked out the school as the most improved in the country. In 2001 the performance went up again, to 287 - way above the national average. That is in spite of most of the pupils being from African, Asian or Eastern European families, for whom English is not their first language.
In October 2000 she gave the footnote addresses at the W. Garfield Weston Foundation's Outstanding Principals Awards Program conferences in Vancouver and Calgary.
Her work was formally recognised in 2001 when she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. At the age of 42 she was one of the youngest recipients of this honour.
[edit] Accolades
At the Children Left Behind Conservative Party conference on the state of British schools, Dame Sharon earned the following praise:
Another example of transformational leadership is Sharon Hollows, who took the headship of Calverton Primary School in Newham in 1994. Like Whalley Range, Calverton was in a very poorstate when she took over, yet Ms Hollows succeeded in raising the score that her eleven yearolds achieve in their national curriculum tests from just 45 in 1994 to 287 today. Having raised its performance from well below to well above the national average, Calverton became the most improved school in the country, despite most of its pupils being from families for whom English is not a first language. Ms. Hollows reports that one of the keys to her approach was involving parents more, drawing up ‘home-school contracts’ before they became a national requirement ([1]).
