Whitehall education inspectors have judged Brixington Primary School as ‘inadequate’.

Now governors have lodged a formal complaint to Ofsted, claiming inspectors unfairly ‘downgraded’ one of the five sections that make up the overall grade.

They say that in a draft report, inspectors ranked the early years stage as ‘good’, before downgrading it to ‘requires improvement’.

It all follows an inspection in December, and the new overall grade means that the school’s standards have slipped since the last full inspection, two years ago.

Then the school was rated as ‘requires improvement’.

Although ‘leadership’ is ranked the same as in 2012, pupil behaviour/safety and quality of teaching has worsened.

This time round, Ofsted found that the quality of teaching at the school and the achievement of pupils was inadequate.

It said too many pupils were not making the progress they were capable of, especially in maths at the end of year six.

Some teachers, it said, set work that was too easy for some and too hard for others, leading some pupils to lose concentration and waste time.

But they recognised that Mr Galling was making improvements and lead inspector Rob Ridout said that the school was ‘capable of further improvement’.

Mr Galling said there had been a significant turnover of staff and these changes had improved the children’s education, but it had not been fast enough to satisfy the new, more rigorous Ofsted inspection regime.

Mr Galling said: “We are bitterly disappointed that, despite the progress we have made in the past two years, in some areas this progress has not been at a fast enough rate.

“We are all absolutely committed to addressing these areas and we will be receiving a wide range of additional external support, much of which has already begun and is having an impact.”