The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. As headteacher, you have established an effective, committed leadership team. You are ambitious for your pupils, their families and the community you serve. As a result, your staff have raised their expectations of what pupils should be able to achieve. Over recent years, you have faced significant challenges related to staffing. It is a credit to your leadership that, within this context, pupils have continued to achieve good standards. Self-evaluation systems and procedures are well developed and support leaders and governors in correctly identifying the school’s strengths and weaknesses. The most appropriate priorities are then identified in the school improvement plan. The governing body is supportive, challenges you appropriately and makes a positive contribution towards moving the school forward. Governors know the school well and carry out their duties effectively. Consequently, there is good capacity to improve the school further. Local authority officers have much confidence in your leadership skills. They have a clear understanding of the school’s strengths and areas for development. They value your contribution to the improvement of local schools as a member of the local authority’s improvement team. Parents and carers I spoke to on the playground and the majority of those who responded to Parent View, Ofsted’s Online Survey, said they are happy with the school. One comment summed up the positive feelings: ‘Overall, this school has dedicated staff who help our children learn and develop and we would happily recommend it to others.’ Pupils told me they enjoy school and value the teachers. They stated that, ‘At Lingham, we treat each other with respect. We treat each other as we want to be treated.’ You have addressed effectively some of the areas for improvement that inspectors identified in the previous inspection report. You were asked to provide more opportunities to extend pupils’ learning. Effective questioning ensures that learning across the school has been extended in a successful manner. Teaching assistants help to ensure that pupils’ progress across the curriculum is strong. In mathematics, pupils are given challenges and activities that encourage them to reason and explain their mathematical thinking, while also developing their fluency. Evidence from current pupils’ books and the school’s own assessment information show that there has been strong improvement in pupils’ progress in mathematics, with progress by the end of Year 6 in 2017 being in the highest 10% of schools nationally. Teachers analyse pupils’ reading assessments to identify the key reading skills which need strengthening and plan daily lessons that focus on developing and extending these key skills. This helps pupils to make good progress in reading over time. In writing, a consistent approach has resulted in pupils having increased opportunities to write at length across the curriculum. As a result of these changes, progress in writing has improved across the school. During the inspection, we discussed the next steps required to enable the school to improve further. We agreed that pupils need to deepen subject-specific knowledge, skills and vocabulary across the wider curriculum to ensure that progress is as strong in these subjects as it is in English and mathematics. We also agreed that you should regularly review the strategies in place to promote good attendance, so that the proportion of pupils who are persistently absent continues to reduce. Finally, you accepted that pupils’ presentation should continue to improve to reach a consistently high standard. Safeguarding is effective. The leadership team has ensured that all safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose. The record of the checks made on adults so that they can be considered safe to work in the school is accurate. You and your business manager ensure that staff complete all of the required checks before they are allowed to work with pupils. You give safeguarding a high priority, and a strong safeguarding culture runs throughout the school. Your thorough knowledge of each and every child and their families helps you to know when pupils are facing difficulties. You and the family link-worker liaise closely with a wide range of agencies and the local authority to ensure that your pupils are safe and well supported. You are prompt in making referrals to the local authority when these are necessary. Together, you follow up all concerns and make sure that pupils are kept safe. The majority of parents responding to the Ofsted survey say that their children are safe at the school. Pupils with whom I spoke said that they feel safe at the school. They say that bullying among pupils is rare and is addressed well by staff on the few occasions that it happens.