The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. Since that time, you have brought clear systems and rigour to the school and secured the confidence of staff and most of the parents. You have worked closely with senior leaders, subject leaders and the governing body to ensure that a good standard of education has been maintained. Your governors are knowledgeable, fully involved in the school’s work and offer you strong strategic support. Working together, you have developed an approach to teaching that has ensured that pupils have a secure grasp of the core skills they need to enjoy a deep and rich curriculum. The work planned for them is responsive to what they need and this helps them to achieve well. The head of school and deputy headteachers work closely with you and take on key areas of work, such as assessment. As a result, leadership capacity is strong. Classrooms and the main open vestibule are attractive places for learning to take place and are both well resourced and well managed. You use the public space well to celebrate pupils’ achievements, particularly in respect to writing and art work, which is of a high standard. There is great importance placed on fostering an inclusive culture here; in your words, ‘success no matter what’ is ensuring that all pupils are achieving well with the help of teachers and thoughtfully deployed teaching assistants. The development of writing and the teaching of mathematics have ensured that outcomes in these subjects are now as good as in reading. You have made sure that teachers teach key writing and mathematical skills so that these can be threaded through other areas of the curriculum. You have successfully addressed the areas requiring improvement identified during the inspection in 2013. Your determination to improve the quality of teaching and learning has helped the school to continue to improve, particularly in key stages 1 and 2. Teachers who are new to the school are helped to adopt the high standards you expect and are well supported in their development to become skilled practitioners who earn the respect of the pupils quickly. Safeguarding is effective. The leadership team has ensured that all safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose and records are detailed and of a high quality. All checks on the suitability of staff to work at the school are in place. The designated safeguarding leads are known to all and procedures are understood and followed. Clear systems are in place for making referrals when concerns arise, and subsequent actions are checked carefully. Links with external agencies are strong, including the early help team. Staff training, including ‘Prevent’ duty training, is kept up to date and your staff have a good local knowledge of potential problems present within the community, such as relationship breakdowns and health issues. Pupils report that they feel safe in school and they know that they are listened to when raising a concern. They say that behaviour is mostly good or very good and that bullying is rare. This is because of the strong pastoral systems now in place at the school, including the work of the learning mentors who are well known to the pupils and some of their parents. Inspection findings We agreed at the start of the inspection that my first line of enquiry was looking at the progress made in writing and mathematics so that it matched that of reading. You told me that your leadership team had already identified this as a priority for the school. On visiting classrooms and looking at pupils’ books, it became clear that pupils’ progress in these subjects is now strong and they benefit from clear advice from their teachers on how they can continue to improve. Having the ability to do more complex and challenging maths problems is helping them become more confident in applying their reasoning skills. The passion and drive shown by the subject leaders has been instrumental in embedding recent developments at the school. My second line of enquiry was about the quality of teaching for the school’s disadvantaged pupils. You believe that all pupils deserve to achieve well to overcome any barriers to learning that may hamper them. Staff have worked hard to eradicate any variability in the outcomes achieved by this group of pupils, and the difference is narrowing. Through the expertise present across the federation of schools, staff are now recognising the importance of ensuring that the needs of this group of pupils are met. You have an action plan to spend the pupil premium, additional funding given to schools, and are now starting to reflect critically on its effectiveness at the individual pupil level. To improve teaching still further, we agreed that a continued focus on improving the progress disadvantaged pupils make would be appropriate. My third line of enquiry was looking at provision for pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities. The most recent published information suggested that a small number of these pupils do less well than might be expected. Discussions with school leaders and scrutiny of records quickly explained why with individual pupils this may have previously been the case. In fact, this is now a strength of the school. The school’s inclusion manager has the confidence of the parents of these pupils and is working very effectively with them and various external agencies to ensure that the correct level of intervention, support or teaching approach ensures the best outcomes. A fourth line of enquiry we agreed upon was concerning the school’s curriculum. From visiting classrooms and discussions with senior leaders, it became apparent that this is an area of the school that you have thought deeply about and acted upon appropriately. The curriculum is well planned, with opportunities to adapt the work depending upon pupil feedback. Units of work are well thought out and allow pupils to extend their literacy and numeracy skills across other areas, such as in the Year 3 study of the life of people in the Stone Age. Regular opportunities for the whole school to study the same theme mean that pupils develop their learning in common with each other, irrespective of their age. At the time of the inspection, all classes were enjoying work on the contemporary novel ‘Jumanji’ and using this as a stimulus for their own work. Next steps for the school Leaders and those responsible for governance should ensure that: teaching approaches are developed to ensure that the school’s disadvantaged pupils make more substantial progress. I am copying this letter to the chair of the governing body, the regional schools commissioner and the director of children’s services for Hackney. This letter will be published on the Ofsted website. Yours sincerely Tim McLoughlin Ofsted Inspector Information about the inspection During this inspection, I held several meetings with you, the head of school and the deputy headteachers. I met with governors and a representative of the local authority. I scrutinised the safeguarding procedures with the business manager, pastoral care manager and senior staff. I met with members of the school’s middle leadership team. The deputy headteachers escorted me on visits to classrooms. I talked with pupils about their learning; I looked at their books and listened to a range of pupils read as they were engaged in their learning. I also made an evaluation of school documents provided by the school, including school development plans, reviews, safeguarding records and information about current pupils’ achievement.