The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You lead a committed team of staff who have built upon the strengths that inspectors previously noted. They share your energy and passion for pupils’ learning and achievement. Your school motto, ‘Be the best that you can be’, is a driving force for the school community. It helps pupils to try hard with their learning and inspires staff to develop their professional expertise. Parents and carers recognise the determined way that you care about their children’s success. They strongly support you and your staff and are delighted by the progress that they see their children make. Typical of many parents who spoke to inspectors was one who said, ‘My child has progressed more than I could have hoped, with teachers making the most of abilities rather than looking at the disabilities.’ When the school was last inspected, inspectors asked you to make sure that pupils make the best possible progress in every lesson by using learning time well. Leaders have tackled this recommendation successfully by developing all of the current staff’s skills so that they carefully match teaching and learning activities to each pupil’s needs. Your school has grown in size since the previous inspection, resulting in a larger team of staff. You encourage each of them to develop their professional expertise. Teachers access regular and specific training, both in school and with other special schools. Senior leaders provide effective training for teachers and support staff, for example by helping new class teachers to understand how to plan the very small steps in learning that are appropriate to each pupil. All staff are proud to work at the school and positive about the many ways in which leaders are always on hand with advice and challenge. Teachers welcome the opportunities to share their professional learning with colleagues and are enthusiastic to implement new approaches. Although subject leaders are well placed to monitor the quality of teaching and learning in their subject area, you are aware that they do not currently have enough opportunity to work with you to evaluate whole-school performance information. You plan to address this by extending the roles, responsibilities and influence of leaders at different levels of the school. You are relentless in your drive to ensure that every pupil, including a high proportion without verbal skills, will transfer into secondary school with an effective means of communication. Through the consistent use of picture exchange, assistive technology or signing, all pupils learn to communicate their feelings and needs. The school’s relentless emphasis on communication means that pupils develop these skills throughout the day, including at breaktimes when adults work skilfully to engage pupils in purposeful activity and interaction with each other. Staff do not miss any opportunity that helps to develop pupils’ confidence. Parents told me how successfully pupils learn what happens at school on each day of the week because their children wear a different coloured T-shirt. This simple means of communication helps pupils to express their thoughts and ideas. Many parents use the same idea to help provide a structure for weekends and holidays. You hold regular meetings with teachers to ensure that pupils are doing as well as they can to reach the challenging targets that you jointly set. Most pupils make strong academic gains in reading, with their learning in phonics clearly linked to letter formation and writing. By the time the most able transfer to secondary school, they can read and write a series of sentences with increasing fluency and independence, for example to make a diary entry. Pupils learn to recognise numbers and shapes well, which helps them to tackle some challenging mathematical ideas. In the school’s Year 5 and Year 6 ‘core’ class, we saw how well pupils were able to read coordinates on the island maps they had designed. Governors know the school well and have a visible presence, which staff appreciate. The governing body has a strong sense of its responsibilities and carefully reviews leaders’ progress with the agreed development priorities. Governors share your high aspirations for pupils. Consequently, they challenge you and your leaders effectively, helping the school to improve. Governors are as enthusiastic as you are for the school to be a hub of expertise for mainstream schools on the Isle of Wight by equipping their teachers to meet the needs of pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities. Pupils’ behaviour continues to be a strength of the school. They concentrate hard on the tasks that teachers give them. Teachers make lessons fun, engaging pupils’ senses using sound, touch and movement. Sometimes, a pupil’s behaviour can be challenging. The staff’s very thorough training helps them to understand that such behaviour communicates emotions and needs. They work skilfully to adapt difficult behaviour so that it becomes manageable and sociably acceptable. Staff are caring and kind, but they are also persistent and firm so as to maintain the school’s high expectations.