Riding high: Mr Friend - the model head teacher

It's one thing to run a school that produces happy children and does well in SAT tests. It's another to ensure this record continues once you've gone.

For 25 years Philip Friend has run a primary school which Ofsted, for the third time in a row, has just pronounced outstanding – and which is visibly a happy, purposeful place. But Friend is pushing 60, and fancies doing something else. Conventional wisdom has it that some decline is inevitable as Eccleston Mere Primary School in St Helens, Merseyside, adjusts to its first new head for a quarter of a century. The best the school can do is make the dip temporary.

But Friend thinks his long, careful succession planning will prove conventional wisdom wrong. In September 2008 his deputy, Yvonne Kirk, became acting head. Friend is now called executive head, and spends half the week in the school. The rest of the time, he is a roving adviser to four other heads whose schools are in trouble.

Kirk arrived at Eccleston Mere as a newly qualified teacher in 1985. Quite quickly, Friend identified her as his successor, and that early recognition, he says, is part of the secret: "They don't identify future heads early enough. They ought to identify them when they are newly qualified teachers."

What sort of school is Kirk inheriting? All those years ago, Friend set out to create the opposite of the primary school he attended in a South Wales mining village, where he remembers only playing football and being bullied. He keeps a mug in his office bearing a picture of that school – a Victorian brick building blackened by coal dust – to remind himself of what Eccleston Mere must never become.

So it's cheerful, noisy and colourful, like Friend himself, a small, bustling, restless, voluble Welshman. Every inch of wall is covered by children's work. As I walked round it, children fearlessly attached themselves to me, to introduce themselves, shake hands and tell me what they were doing. Outside, there is a wooded play area, with logs, a shed and a beached boat, which year groups take turns to play in, and which is also used for teaching.

A child who is unhappy for any reason takes a pebble from a pot – there's one in every classroom – and shows it to the teacher. The teacher asks no questions as the child leaves the classroom and goes to the office of the pastoral mentor Diane Riley. Anything said to Riley goes no further, unless a child protection issue comes up.

Sometimes she can deal with the problem easily. She keeps spare PE kits, for example. Sometimes it is something really big: bereavement, debt, divorce. Hers is an unusual role which Eccleston Mere pioneered two years ago.

Riley and Kirk are typical of the school's staff in that they have been there a long time. It's a small school – one-form entry, 300 children – and if teachers like working there, they like it very much. Friend calls it a family atmosphere, and the place has a quirky familiarity all its own. He routinely calls teachers by their first names in front of the children, a practice frowned on in many schools – but even in private, teachers refer to the head as Mr Friend. I ask why, and they say it's become something like a nickname, like Mr Smiley or Mr Blobby.

The approach to discipline is informal too. In assembly, there were no teachers pursing their lips and hissing "sh" while Kirk spoke, though the children were getting visibly restless; yet what goes on in the classrooms seems quiet and purposeful enough.

Yet it's not all nurturing and family atmosphere. Friend says you can have that, and still do well in SATs. Last year 91 per cent of pupils reached level four or better in English, 89 per cent in maths and 91 per cent in science – all well above the national average.

Several teachers have their own children at the school, though Friend himself had to send his daughter elsewhere until she was eight, because he does not live close enough to Eccleston Mere Primary – they are very strict about local authority admissions criteria, and there is no special treatment for staff. Once at the school, he says, she flourished, and is now a lawyer specialising in family and child cases.

Whatever the secret of the school's success, it does not rely on manipulating its intake. In 25 years Friend has only excluded two children, and in a very mixed area, 15 per cent of the children are eligible for free school meals, which is high but not exceptional. And although the proportion of children with special needs is not especially high, at about 16 per cent, the disabilities children have tend to be serious. This is because the school has a reputation for being good with problems like Down's syndrome, and parents with severely disabled children move house to get a place there.

A few years ago, struggling to find a way of helping a seriously disabled girl, Friend came across a little-known system called Brain Solutions, which he has helped to develop and used successfully. It begins with a detailed assessment to find which stages of a child's development were missed. For example, says Friend, if a child goes straight from lying to walking, without going through the intermediate stage of crawling, the missed stage is likely to cause a problem.

Developing Brain Solutions is partly what he will do with the unaccustomed leisure time when he finally cuts his last ties with the school in July 2010. The school he leaves behind is his lifetime achievement, and he is bursting with pride about it. The words he uses to describe it are "warmth", "happiness", "love" and – rather strangely – "spirituality." He is not a religious man – for him the word "spirituality" comes out of his childhood in the valleys, where God and socialism compete to make a joyful community of people who did the grim work of hewing coal from the ground.

But if you wonder how a head with these values survives in a target-centred system, you misunderstand him. Eccleston Mere is a National Support School and Friend has become a National Council for School Leadership National Leader of Education. He takes school assessment seriously. His first advice to heads is: monitor everything that goes on, never delegate the task to someone else, and be ready with every piece of evidence when Ofsted comes to call. It matters that his attendance rates are 95 per cent, that the school is ahead of the game when compulsory languages come in next year – they have been teaching French and Spanish for years.

"You have to play the Ofsted game," he says. "Not to do so is foolish. Every time you prepare for Ofsted, you school moves forward a bit."

To find out more about Brain Solutions, email philipfriend@hotmail.com