Dear Parents,

First, the Governors would like to thank the children, parents and staff for their continued efforts to improve the school. Although we are disappointed the school hasn’t yet achieved a “Good” overall rating and remains at “Requires Improvement”, we believe the school has undergone an incredible transformation this year and we’re confident it is on the right trajectory.

Second, although you may naturally be concerned about some of the weaker areas identified by Ofsted, we were encouraged to see that all of them had already been identified by the school for improvement, and we have specific plans to address these areas.

The inspection concluded the following:

• The quality of education – Requires improvement
• Behaviour and attitudes – Good
• Personal development – Good
• Leadership and management – Requires improvement
• Early years provision – Good

In the Ofsted framework a school cannot achieve good in leadership and management if they receive‘Requires Improvement’ in quality of education. The inspector was complimentary of the leadership the school has in place and confident with the actions they have already taken to address areas for improvement.

The inspectors made it clear in the report and in their verbal feedback that there are many areas where our children and staff are doing well:

• “All children now benefit from a consistently strong approach to learning and teaching.”
• “We are aspirational, community minded, curious, determined and independent.”

We were pleased to see Ofsted’s recognition of the school’s nurturing environment:

• “Pupils enjoy coming to this friendly and inclusive village school.”
• “Children look after each other.”
• “They are happy and feel safe.”

Our structured and positive learning methodologies were recognised:

• “Children in Reception get off to a flying start, learning how to use language to communicate effectively as well as learning the sounds letters make.”
• “In reading, mathematics and history, leaders have introduced a well-ordered curriculum that starts in the early years.”

The report identified three areas which require improvement:

The first of these is that “the school’s approach to teaching the weaker readers in Key Stage 2 is not well embedded”. This is something we had already identified and in October staff received training to use the Little Wandle Rapid Catch-up scheme. This has been put in place and we will be working closely with individual children to help them get to where they need to be.

The second area was that “in some other subjects, leaders’ work to design the curriculum is less well developed”. We have been working to make sure each subject follows a logical progression for each year group. We are doing this one subject at a time. History has been completed and we are currently focused on science.

Finally, we were pleased to receive positive feedback on our safeguarding culture: “leaders have created a safeguarding culture through the school”, and ultimately “the arrangements for safeguarding are effective”. However, the report identified that “safeguarding record keeping is not always accurate enough” and in this area we have fallen below the high standard we set for ourselves. Training on this issue took place for all staff at inset day in September and more training will take place at inset day in January.

Like you, the staff, leadership and Governors are very disappointed to have missed out narrowly on a “Good” status, but if we all continue to work together, support our school and keep the children the centre of everything we do we are confident we will be able to continue developing into a school community, which reflects all of our efforts, and we can be truly proud of.

We welcome any questions you might have about the report and please do get in touch with Mrs. Fraser or speak to one of the Governors.

You can find the Ofsted report here.

From the Governors.
Catherine Harrison, Fay Read, Al Higginbottom, Mark Warren, Lyndi Feather, Judith Baldwin, Paul
Wignall, Christina Warren, Clare Winterbourne, Amy Clarke.