The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. For all who work or learn at your school, it is a place of fun and enjoyment. Your outlook and approaches are positive and solution-focused, whether supporting pupils in tackling any problems that might arise or driving through school improvements. Your upbeat attitude permeates through to all staff, who fully share in your vision of what effective education should be for the pupils you serve. A very strong sense of teamwork and collaboration exists because of your care to recruit the right staff and governors. All who I spoke with during the inspection used the terms ‘honest, trusting and open’ to describe your leadership. Most importantly, pupils emulate these qualities in the way they conduct themselves, act towards each other and adults and tackle their work. Your open and inclusive manner fully meets your stated aims of being able to cater for all pupils’ needs effectively. Outside agencies and parents often elect to send children to your school, following recommendations about the success you have had in helping pupils overcome significant personal or academic challenges. This was evident last year when a significant proportion of the small Year 6 cohort arrived during key stage 2 having had challenging educational experiences elsewhere. Others had personal or medical circumstances that made them vulnerable. Despite your best efforts, their academic progress suffered. The school’s published data in 2016 does not represent pupils’ typical performance. Pupils make good academic progress and a high quality of work in pupils’ books is evident across a range of subjects. Diversity is celebrated and differences are promoted well through your inclusive ethos and broad curriculum. As part of your school motto says, ‘Everyone is welcome at our party, whatever they bring’. Pupils therefore learn in a very safe and caring environment where adults tailor activities to meet pupils’ individual needs exceptionally well. Because your school values and ethos are acted out by adults and pupils alike, all challenge injustice, and learn or play together at ease with one another. Pupils demonstrate a strong ‘moral compass’ of right and wrong. Your strong pastoral focus is supporting pupils to overcome emotional and social barriers to learning. It is also providing rich experiences for developing the skills required to enable pupils to face any future challenges with confidence. Parents are supportive of your approach. Humour is used to good effect by you, other leaders and teachers across your school when persuading, motivating or cajoling pupils to achieve as well as they can. You are careful to mix this approach with competitive activities that inspire all pupils to progress at a rapid pace. As a result, you have successfully tackled the areas for improvement identified at the time of the previous inspection. Pupils love coming to school and their attendance has improved. When entering classes, pupils light up, keen and eager to share their work and achievements. A ‘root and branch’ overhaul of the teaching of phonics by your leader for English has resulted in precise and technically accurate teaching by adults across the early years and key stage 1. High-quality activities develop pupils’ decoding strategies when reading unfamiliar words, alongside their understanding of this new vocabulary. A broad range of monitoring activities are used from which improvements are identified. Your new system to check the achievement of pupils includes significant amounts of information on the personal development and attainment of pupils. You agree that your written monitoring records now need a sharper focus on the precise gains in knowledge, skill and understanding made by different groups of pupils. This would allow even more penetrating analyses of the school’s strengths and weaknesses. Safeguarding is effective. You and your leadership team ensure that all safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose. Policies and practice keep abreast of recent legislation and good practice. Staff attend update training regularly so that they are vigilant and mindful of the potential dangers to pupils. Your close links and proactive work with other professionals, such as social workers, ensure that referrals for more specialist support are managed well. Your investment in supporting pupils’ emotional development is successful. Specific sessions for those pupils who may be vulnerable provide the time and space for a trusting relationship to develop between the adult and the child so that discussion is open and honest. Pupils quickly develop their own range of strategies for dealing with their feelings; this helps them prepare for challenging situations in the future. There is a strong sense of belonging in the school community. Parents recognise you as someone who will always listen to their views and who is willing to act to make a positive difference to their children’s lives and their own lives. Teaching pupils about the values of respect, tolerance and open acceptance is one of the cornerstones of your work. You and your team have created a culture where difference, in whatever form it may take, is accepted and celebrated. This prepares pupils well for the realities of life beyond the school gates. Inspection findings During this inspection we explored whether the gap in performance between girls and boys in reading and writing was closing. We also looked at how well teaching and the curriculum in mathematics is enabling girls to achieve as well as they can. Together we investigated how well the school’s strategy for supporting disadvantaged pupils was working and how effective support was for pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities. Your English subject leader has re-energised the teaching of phonics and early reading to meet the needs of boys better. Activities planned ensure, for example, that Year 1 boys accurately use ‘ai’ sounds to spell words such as ‘rain’ when writing. Work on sounds is reinforced well through homework activities such as ‘smoothie making’. Accurate spelling and letter formation and good presentation of ideas typify pupils’ work. As a result, standards in the Year 1 phonics check this year are on track to be above average. This good early start in phonics is built on well as pupils move through the school. Adults use mistakes such as ‘it creps from the tap, it has three grin feet’, to reinforce pupils’ learning well. When aspects of grammar and punctuation are explained alongside pupils’ understanding of letters and the sounds they make, progress is rapid, especially for boys. Older boys use their earlier grounding in reading well to identify time conjunctions and imperative verbs when writing instructions. Listening to adults’ good use of intonation and expression when reading stories aloud sparks boys’ enthusiasm for, and interest in, reading. Your approach to developing all pupils’ use and knowledge of new vocabulary to aid their writing is consistently applied across the school and is proving successful. Paired work, with a strong emphasis on talking about texts, words and themes particularly promotes boys’ use of language well. Boys’ work, when writing descriptions of characters, is therefore characterised by an impressive selection of adventurous words such as ‘atrocious’, ‘magnificent’ and ‘curiously’.