Carter Community School

The school opened in 1946 as Herbert Carter Secondary School which was named after Alderman Herbert Carter of Carter's tiles which was based in Hamworthy. The school was the first secondary school to be built after the Second World War in Poole on open fields at the southern end of the Hamworthy peninsula. The school has wide corridors and large classrooms which tell of its reserve purpose which was to act as a hospital should war break out again.

The school was awarded Good in an Ofsted report in January 2017.[1]

In April 2013, the school converted to academy status as part of the United Learning group of schools.

Carter Community School is a small secondary school for students aged 11 to 16 with 410 students on roll as of August 2020. Since 2004 standards have risen considerably and GCSE results continue to improve year on year with 48% of students achieving 5A* – C grades (including maths and English) in 2012.[2] Students who attend Carter Community School currently make more progress than in any other secondary school in Poole and Bournemouth; the school is placed in the top 25% of all schools nationally (FFT -D). The school's most recent Ofsted inspection in 2017, judged the school to be ‘Good’ in all areas.[3] The school has had extensions such as the sports hall in 2003 and full size all-weather sports pitch.

Carter SLT May 2014.

The school's leadership team is organised around key missions that are designed to drive school improvement. Each leader takes responsibility for one mission and the line management of one subject area. The missions are as follows:

This structure allows the school leaders to contribute across the whole of the school development plan, but ensures a strong focus is given to each mission. These "golden strands" of leadership run into the subject teams who plan their own improvement around these whole school structures.

In September 2013 Carter received students at the age of 11 for the first time. This change in age of transfer was championed by the local authority to bring Poole schools in line with most of the rest of the country. Carter has devised an innovative project based curriculum that builds other best practice from Key Stage 2 and then combines this with specialised subjects that students are so keen to study at secondary school.

Mr. Davies, Principal of Carter at the time said "we had planned to run our project based curriculum across the whole of the year 7-week, but she we talked with our students they told us that the thing they most looked forward to about secondary school was the change to be taught specialist subjects, in specialised rooms by expert teachers. So we scaled back the project to two days a week and our students have flourished".

• Official website