Today the school which serves a deprived neighbourhood in Newham east London is Britain's

Today the school, which serves a deprived neighbourhood in Newham, east London, is Britain's most improved and the borough's second- highest achiever. WHEN SHARON Hollows walked into Calverton Primary for the first time, the school was one of the worst performing in Britain. Behaviour was bad, staff were leaving and it narrowly escaped being declared failing One class had nine teachers in a year. Assessment and reporting arrangements make it quite clear that all requests for variations must take place before a cut-off point."If schools vary the timetable without authority, this represents a breach of security in the tests, and this is something we take very seriously.".

Instead, we are being represented as the worst school in the country."In reality, the school has an aggregate score of 182, better than many other schools in similar areas and an improvement on last year.The trouble began when teachers invited the actors to visit the school in May as part of a scheme that ends with a West End Shakespeare performance. When the company rang to change the dates, a teacher agreed to do so without realising that they clashed with the tests.When the clash was discovered, the school had already paid a deposit of pounds 200. Three letters were sent to exam officials at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which monitors the tests, asking for permission to change the dates.A spokesman for the authority said that schools were allowed to change test dates only if they had been given permission "As far as we are concerned, we did not receive any letters. The school's results were annulled because of an unauthorised variation in the test timetable. Our two parent governors say their children have talked about nothing else since."Here we are doing everything we can to enrich the children's experience of school and you would have thought people would be congratulating us.

We are in the 11th-most-deprived ward in the country and this was a once- in-a-lifetime chance for the children. A SOUTH London school occupies bottom place in the primary league tables - and Shakespeare is to blame. Chesterton School in Wandsworth scores zero because its results were annulled because the test dates were changed. Both a visit by the English Shakespeare Company to the school, and a later visit to a West End performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, came on days when pupils should have been sitting the national tests. Governors and teachers say exam officials ignored requests to change the dates, and they are furious that the results have been declared invalid.Yesterday, Tony Tuck, the chair of governors, said: "I totally approve of testing and common standards, but education is about much more. The literacy hour has allowed them to focus on their work in the classroom, says Mrs Hollows, whose daughter is at the school. Every child has had a home-school "contract" for two years, with targets in everything from television viewing to punctuality.Graham Lane, Newham's education chairman, said: "We sent one of our strongest governors on to the board and appointed a new head who is absolutely brilliant It is one of our real success stories.".

In some cases she snaps up promising teachers before there is a vacancy.Teachers have used the techniques of the national numeracy hour since 1996. She has overseen a near-500 per cent rise in the school's combined score for the percentage of children getting the expected standard in English, maths and science. She said: "It was taking children a long time to settle down and there were lots of squabbles."The school serves an area of high unemployment - 39 per cent of children are eligible for free school meals - and has to cope with languages from Portuguese to Bengali. There is a 10 per cent turnover among the 466 children because of families moving in and out of the area.Mrs Hollows, a Lancastrian, has taught in inner London for 20 years.