LIZ Templar, the former headteacher of Urchfont Primary School near Devizes, received her OBE from The Queen at Buckingham Palace last week.

Miss Templar, who recently resigned from her post after being absent from school for 18 months with a stress-related illness, attended the investiture with family members, including her brother David and sister Christine.

Miss Templar received her award, announced in the Queen's Golden Jubilee birthday honours list last June, for services to education. She is credited with turning round Urchfont School from the first primary in the county to fail its Ofsted inspection to the first Beacon School in Wiltshire.

She arrived at the school in 1995. Her first achievement was to have the school taken out of special measures, the range of requirements demanded by the Government for failing schools. This happened within 18 months of her arrival, an astonishingly short time for this to take place.

The teaching and monitoring techniques that she put in place drew attention from many professional educationalists. Her leadership of the school led in 1999 to Urchfont Primary being selected as the first Beacon School in the county, attracting special funding to share best practice with other schools in its area. She won the Leadership Trust Award for Contributions to School Leadership in the Government's national teaching awards of 2000.

She left in 2001, but her legacy remains; the school has topped the national performance tables for the last two years running.