A damning Ofsted report has found major failings at a independent special needs school in Hartlebury, near Kidderminster.

An emergency Ofsted inspection was carried out following three complaints about the New Elizabethan School.

Barrister Annabel Goodman bought the school, where her dyslexic son was a pupil, after she discovered it was struggling to stay open in 2007.

Inspectors arrived at the school unannounced in November. They found it did not meet 18 independent school regulations and said some issues had been highlighted at a previous inspection, but not remedied.

The report read: “This inspection found the school was failing to adequately protect the welfare, health and safety of pupils, that there were inadequate arrangements for safeguarding and that the security arrangements for the school were insufficiently rigorous.” Problems raised included a high turnover of staff, a lack of checks into staff’s appropriateness to work with children and no safe outside place for children to play.

Mrs Goodman said: “I want to know what the factual basis is for these concerns.

“I intend to forensically address every single item.

“We do have a lovely fenced-off play area and the whole site is secured by hedging and then safety fencing.”

The report also called for an admissions register, but Mrs Goodman said the inspector was shown an updated version of the one in place at the time of the last report.Staffing was branded “unstable”, but Mrs Goodman said the average teacher stayed two years and nine months.

Jayne Govier, whose daughter Charlotte has attended the school for five years, said she was shocked at the report and had never felt her child’s safety or welfare were in jeopardy.

Mrs Goodman, a mother-of-three, claimed she had been targeted by a “malicious” action group, which included ex-parents in dispute with the school’s solicitors over non-payment of fees.

She also demanded to know how the action group obtained the report which it sent to local MPs before it was published officially.

A spokeswoman for the watchdog, said: “Ofsted acted according to the guidance for the publication of emergency reports.

“We presented the report to the Department for Education in the prescribed way and published it on our website following their request.”

Although Ofsted reports are usually made public, emergency inspection reports are only published at the request of the Department for Education if the complaint or emergency investigated was upheld or justified.

The 32-pupil school was rated good in June 2010 and charges fees of £11,000 a year.

Mrs Goodman intends to sell the school in May but said her departure was not related to the report.