The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You, the leadership team and the governors have shown a determination to provide the best for all pupils. Your evaluation of the strengths and areas needing further development is honest and accurate. Leaders at all levels know the school’s priorities for improvement and their respective areas of accountability. You and other leaders are clear on the steps you are taking to address these priorities. Leaders provide effective guidance, support and training for staff. They regularly check the difference their work is making to teaching and pupils’ achievement. Subject leaders demonstrate secure knowledge of the areas they lead. They make full use of their deep subject knowledge to support teachers. This has resulted in improvements in the quality of teaching and learning overall. Leaders and governors have taken effective action to address the areas for improvement identified by the previous inspection. They have reviewed the way mathematics is taught across the school. Teachers were trained to enable them to be better at probing pupils’ understanding of the concepts they are learning in mathematics. As a result, the proportion of pupils who met the expected standards in 2017 and 2018 was above the national average. The proportion of pupils who achieved greater depth in 2018 was also higher than in previous years. Pupils are confident, articulate and courteous. Pupils I spoke to were unanimous in their praise for the school and of the support their teachers gave them. Pupils are kind to each other. During our discussion, the older pupils supported the younger ones to ensure that they understood the questions I posed. The majority of pupils who responded to Ofsted’s pupil survey said that they would recommend the school to a friend moving to the area. Parents support this, and typical of their comments was: ‘The school successfully drives a culture of belonging, nurturing, and growing.’ Governors have a secure understanding of your work. The governing body is a strong and effective team. Governors undertake a broad range of training and are regular visitors to the school. They work alongside leaders and local authority advisers to gather credible information necessary to offer sharp and timely challenge. Safeguarding is effective. Safeguarding is seen at St Matthew’s as being everyone’s responsibility. Staff training is regular and continually updated in response to national and local issues. Governors and leaders ensure that checks on the suitability of staff are rigorous. They regularly commission external reviews to evaluate the effectiveness of the school’s safeguarding procedures. Safeguarding records are organised, detailed, and fit for purpose. Leaders and staff know pupils and families well. This enables them to identify safeguarding concerns at the earliest possible time. They work alongside external agencies effectively to ensure that pupils and families who are vulnerable are supported well. Governors are clear about their responsibility to ensure that the school’s safeguarding arrangements remain robust and effective. They monitor these arrangements regularly during their school visits, and also when scrutinising reports they receive from leaders. Pupils feel safe at school. They say that if they have any concerns or worries they know who to go to. They are adamant that bullying does not exist in their school and the one time that it happened, their teachers dealt with it promptly and effectively. During our discussion, pupils talked about how to keep themselves safe at home, at school, or when online. They talked about the many opportunities in the curriculum where they learn about road safety, stranger danger, and e-safety, for example. Inspection findings During our initial discussion, we agreed to look at writing across the school. This was because in the past three years the progress pupils made, including disadvantaged pupils, was significantly below average. There were also fewer pupils in key stage 1 who achieved the expected standard in writing, compared to the national average in 2018. Leaders have identified writing as a priority and have invested in training leaders and teachers in driving improvements in this subject. Building on from strong outcomes in writing in the early years, pupils in key stage 1 engage in a wide range of activities to develop their skills. Teachers provide pupils with tasks which are aimed at developing their spelling, grammar and punctuation skills. Pupils make strong progress in these areas of writing. However, pupils are not always able to use and apply these skills when writing extensively. As a result, they are not reaching the standards of which they are capable.