The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You have strengthened leadership by building a strong team of leaders across phases and subjects. Your team bring valuable experience and stability but you have enriched this with changes to roles and responsibilities to widen experience and further enhance expertise. Teachers and teaching assistants work with a shared commitment to improve pupils’ progress and their wider personal development. As a result of good teaching, close tracking and effective support, pupils make very good progress. You and your teachers have responded extremely successfully to the increased demands of the new national curriculum and associated assessment tasks. You have strengthened the curriculum and provided regular assessment opportunities to support staff and pupils in the transition to more challenging assessment. As a result, in 2016 pupils made extremely strong progress in all areas at key stage 2. This success was further reflected at key stage 1 where the majority of pupils made good progress from their starting points. In addition, the proportion of pupils who reached the expected standard in reading, writing and mathematics was well above that seen nationally, placing the school in the top 10% of schools nationally on this measure. However, the overall proportion of pupils to achieve success at greater depth was below that seen nationally at key stage 2 and particularly at key stage 1. Leaders are aware of this and are currently strengthening the curriculum to accelerate pupils’ progress at key stage 1 and create further opportunities for learning in greater depth at key stage 2. Your focus on pupils’ development in literacy and numeracy has been complemented by curricular experiences that have developed a breadth of understanding of other subjects and promoted pupils’ wider development. Your school was recently awarded ‘beach school’ status and key aspects of the curriculum are influenced by the school’s proximity to the coastal environment. This unique experience provides pupils with meaningful settings that stimulate their poetry and creative writing and provides authentic contexts for pupils to explore coastal formations. The majority of pupils take part in a diverse range of extra-curricular clubs, including singing, street dance and writing club. In addition, pupils talk enthusiastically about their participation in football, netball and hockey but also about less conventional activities such as judo and hoola-hooping. Additional study support also takes place after school. Pupils also value the opportunity to carry out responsibilities as peer teachers, mentors and council members. These diverse experiences enhance pupils’ social and cultural development, and develop their selfconfidence. You have developed leadership capacity by giving colleagues leadership experience and responsibilities in areas such as special educational needs and governance. The school’s strengths are sought by other schools and you and your team have shared your expertise in leadership and in teaching and learning in the early years and at key stage 2. Subject leaders are increasingly involved in monitoring the quality of teaching and standards of work over time in pupils’ books. Pupils’ progress is regularly monitored and individual teachers have half-termly meetings to review the progress of pupils in their class. Leaders and teachers know their pupils very well and these reviews inform future improvement activities and interventions to support underachieving pupils, such as the well-focused mathematics support. Staff morale is high and teachers value their professional development. Teachers show accuracy in their assessment practices as a result of regular moderation with the local authority and partner schools. Your team are committed to the personal and social development of pupils. A specially trained learning assistant provides social and emotional counselling for pupils. Your actions to promote good attendance are successful and the attendance of disadvantaged pupils and pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities are improving and are in line with those seen nationally. These pupils also make very good academic progress. Links with parents are strong and the vast majority of parents who responded to Ofsted’s online questionnaire, Parent View, appreciated the support that teachers provide and the progress their children make. You have an experienced and committed team of governors who share a passionate commitment to the school. Their strategy of working in pairs to review particular areas of the school’s work, such as the use of additional funding, enables them to bring further scrutiny and shared reflections on the school’s performance. They make regular visits to the school and track progress at review meetings. Governors carefully question performance management processes and their links to pupil outcomes. Governors are keen to develop their expertise in their roles by embracing training opportunities and developing links with local governor networks. Safeguarding is effective. You and your team maintain a strong focus on pupils’ welfare. Staff receive up-todate training on a wide range of key safeguarding issues. The school has a specifically trained teaching assistant who provides emotional support for pupils. Appropriate checks are made on the suitability of adults working at the school. In discussion and in responses to questionnaires, the vast majority of pupils expressed that they felt safe and happy at the school and this is reflected in the above average rates of attendance. Any concerns over pupil welfare are swiftly addressed and the school has effective links with external partners, although in some cases these concerns are not as swiftly documented. Pupils spoken with were able to discuss the actions they could take to remain safe, for example the actions needed to stay safe online. The vast majority of pupils and their parents and carers feel that the school effectively addresses any incidences of bullying, although a small minority of pupils and parents expressed concerns over some aspects of the school’s responses to bullying. Inspection findings You and your team have instilled a culture of high expectation and built rigour into teaching, learning and assessment that has enabled pupils to respond well to more challenging curriculum demands. In the 2016 national testing at key stage 2, pupils achieved extremely good outcomes, achieving standards of attainment and progress that were well above those seen nationally. Teaching is consistently good across the curriculum and teachers work effectively with teaching assistants to support pupils in making good progress. Strong classroom teaching is complemented by sharp, well-paced interventions. In Year 6, there was evidence of considerable challenges as pupils explored the links between the style and language of a poem and other novels and poems that they had read. Teachers engender effective learning behaviours in pupils who are comfortable when asked to explain or develop a response to a question. Teachers provide valuable feedback in line with the school’s policy. Teachers and teaching assistants effectively develop pupils’ reading skills and achieve outcomes in the phonics screening check that are above those seen nationally. Pupils’ reading skills develop strongly as they progress through the school, so that by key the end of stage 2 they achieve much better progress than that seen nationally. Pupils develop strong writing skills and demonstrate accomplished writing in their books over time. They have the ability to write effectively in a range of genres and their work is underpinned by strong standards of grammar, spelling and punctuation. Teachers teach pupils an understanding of grammar and punctuation in creative and relevant contexts and this enables pupils to use these skills to considerable effect in their own writing.