The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the previous inspection. Through appropriate and realistic evaluation of the school’s performance, governors and leaders are well aware of the strengths of the school and the areas to develop further. Through your role as the executive headteacher of three small schools, you are able to maximise opportunities to share good practice. For example, you recognise that the teaching of mathematics, a strength in one school, can support the development of mathematics teaching in Rookhope School. You are proactive in ensuring that staff across the schools have an opportunity to learn from one another and implement improvements. You have created a caring and friendly school. Pupils say that they all get along well with one another and that bullying does not happen. They say that if they fall out, any disagreements are very quickly resolved with the help of each other and their teachers. Pupils love being at school. One parent said, ‘My child cannot wait to arrive.’ Pupils value the support that they receive from school staff and they very much enjoy the variety of extra-curricular activities and trips on offer. Together with highly effective support from the assistant headteacher, you have responded well to the areas for improvement identified at the previous inspection. The sharing of good practice within school and across schools and support from the local authority is leading to better quality teaching of key stage 1 pupils. The monitoring of teaching and learning is improving. Leaders use a variety of information to evaluate teaching and learning and ensure that teachers receive appropriate feedback to improve their practice. Leaders have made some progress in improving opportunities for pupils’ extended writing across the curriculum, although, due to some absence among the leadership team, you recognise that this is an area to continue developing. During this inspection, we identified some areas to continue to improve. These include ensuring that pupils who have low prior attainment make better progress and that you continue to improve the provision for children in early years. These are areas that you had already identified and begun to improve. Safeguarding is effective. Leaders have ensured that safeguarding is fit for purpose and staff receive appropriate training to keep pupils safe. Staff and governors have completed child protection training and ‘Prevent’ duty training, which ensures that staff have a good awareness of warning signs that may indicate that pupils need help. Appropriate risk assessments are in place to keep pupils safe in school and on school trips. Staff work effectively with external agencies should the need arise, and keep high-quality records of any concerns and actions taken. Pupils’ behaviour is exemplary and attendance is excellent, which reflects pupils’ love of the school and the excellent relationships among staff, pupils and parents and carers. The school has appropriate systems in place to check on pupils’ absence. Leaders are meticulous in working with the local authority and other schools if pupils transfer to or from another school in-year, ensuring that pupils are safe and in education. Pupils have a good knowledge of how to keep themselves safe in their community, for example when crossing roads and around water. Pupils are able to talk confidently about how to manage risks associated with being online. During the inspection, leaders identified and responded to minor errors on the single central record of checks made on adults who work at the school. Leaders also ensured that the latest version of the child protection policy was available to parents and updated on the school website. Inspection findings Overall, current pupils are making good progress from their starting points. The number of pupils in the school is too few to make meaningful comparisons with national performance information. Pupils’ work, over time, demonstrates that they make good progress in mathematics, reading and writing and across the wider curriculum. However, over time, pupils who had lower starting points did not make as much progress as their peers. Leaders are implementing appropriate action plans to address this.