Punctuality, respect, constant exams: How Dame Sally Coates turned Burlington Danes around

It took Sally Coates a while to decide whether to take on the challenge of turning Burlington Danes Academy around. After all, she was happy in her role as head of the Sacred Heart Catholic School in south London – "a smaller but similarly gritty" school in which she had worked for 20 years. Burlington Danes, though, had been described to her as "feral". "While I've never been a pushover, I wouldn't class behaviour management as a particular strength," she says in her book, Headstrong: 11 Les