To many people, talk of “Dirty Den” would conjure up images of a morally challenged landlord of Queen Vic in East Enders. Not this dirty den, though. It stands for “Direct Improvement Review Time den” — the place where pupils go to if they have to catch up on school work after they have been struggling in class. They can even receive one-to-one tuition from a “DIRTy” teaching assistant to get them on a par with their classmates.

It&’s just one of the initiatives employed by Victoria Park Primary Academy in Smethwick in the West Midlands that has won international recognition for its efforts to ensure that the school is not just an “exams factory” but provides the kind of relevant education that will help its pupils make something of their lives.

“Children come to us from all four corners of the world,” says Andrew Morrish, who started his job as executive head of the school just over eight years ago when it was in “special measures”, ie. failing, as a result of its latest inspection from Ofsted.

“There are asylum seekers, refugees who have never been to school before,” he adds. “They can pitch up here aged 10 without a word of English — their parents may never have been to school before, either.”

Interestingly enough, though, he says the hardest-to-reach group in the school are the six or seven per cent of pupils who come from white British homes. “The Asian families understand the need for education — they see education as a way out of what has happened to them,” he says. “The Polish, too. We’ve got an awful lot of Eastern European children here.”

Half of the pupils are entitled to free meals — thus bringing with them a pupil premium for teaching the most disadvantaged children, amounting to an extra £500,000 to the school budget. That does not include the asylum seekers who are not initially entitled to the benefit, whom the school does not charge for their meals.

The school also has a quick turnover of pupils — with roughly half of those on the roll at age seven having left by 11, as a result of their parents being rehoused or moving out of the area for other reasons.

Therefore, according to Morrish, it does not make sense to offer a “Gradgrind” curriculum, coaching pupils for their national curriculum tests at 11 in English and maths. “We teach them the soft skills that employers are craving,” he says. “It&’s a duck and dive, wheel and deal, zig and zag curriculum. We want them to be creative, entrepreneurial, innovative — to have the work ethic from start to finish.”

The school&’s motto is summed up by the sayings displayed predominantly in its entrance hall, such as “If you can dream it, you can do it — now go out and change the world”, from Walt Disney.

One initiative that has just launched and which is central to the school&’s ethos is Ballot Street Spice (Ballot Street is the name of the street that the school is on). It has pupils working together with their parents to make spicy Indian dishes, which are sold to the community. One of the teachers is involved in preparing a wide range of masala spice dishes for the project. They are currently dealing with around 50 orders at a time but are expecting the numbers to increase as word gets around. As an example of the parent/pupil co-operation in the venture, 10-year-old Kyle Hussey is helping to pack the spices and his mother has just been employed as dispatch coordinator for the project. “We make masala to sell online,” says 11- year-old Jaskirat Kaur. “It brings a lot of people together to work as a team.”

The school’s international recognition has come from the Ashoka Foundation, the social innovations fellowship, which has awarded 130 schools around the world “changemaker” status — including five in the UK. From Victoria Park&’s point of view, this title helps them to develop cultural ties with schools internationally — a bonus given the diverse make-up of its pupils.

Ashoka says of the schools to which it awards “changemaker” status that they are institutions that have “ceased to operate as examination factories” and have embraced the development of skills such as empathy, leadership, teamwork and creativity in their pupils.

Viliana Dzhartova, from the Ashoka Education, says that Victoria Park was chosen as a “changemaker” because the foundation was impressed by the way the school had moved so swiftly from “special measures” to “outstanding”.