The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You and your senior colleagues provide strong and effective leadership and you have built a committed staff team. Your leadership is successfully combining the school’s long-standing caring and compassionate ethos with a greater focus on ensuring that pupils achieve in line with their capabilities. Since taking over as headteacher after the last inspection you have established a clear vision and brought about a more aspirational culture. You have ensured that leaders track and monitor pupils’ achievements more effectively and plan interventions where appropriate. While, overall, you demonstrate that you know your school well, your selfevaluation of the quality of some areas is over-generous. The areas you identify that require improvement match those identified by inspectors. For example, you have identified that more needs to be done to ensure that pupils make more progress in some subjects to match the rates of progress reached by pupils in the highest performing subjects in the school. Your detailed plans to address any areas that require improvement are clear and appropriate. Consequently, you are able to improve on the school’s many strengths and address its areas of weakness. Your governors have a clear and detailed awareness of the school’s strengths and the areas requiring development and what needs to be done to bring about improvement. Consequently, they are well placed to provide appropriate challenge and support to you and your leaders. During the inspection, pupils’ behaviour around the school was of a very high standard. Pupils were polite and well mannered. Teachers and pupils have very positive relationships. As a result, pupils behave very well in lessons. Pupils demonstrate positive attitudes to learning and take a pride in their work. Pupils follow instructions quickly and lessons flow with minimal disruption. Instances of serious poor behaviour are rare and, consequently, exclusions are low. The vast majority of parents and carers who responded to the Ofsted online questionnaire, Parent View, were very positive about the school. Pupils are clearly very happy at the school and said that behaviour seen during the inspection was typical. Leaders’ actions to improve teaching and learning have had some success. Time is usually used well in lessons and questioning is used effectively to probe pupils’ knowledge and understanding. Pupils take a pride in their work and appreciate the feedback they get from teachers to help them improve it. Consequently, most pupils make progress in most subjects. However, leaders recognise that there is further work to do to ensure consistency and further improvement in some subject areas. At the beginning of the inspection, we agreed the key lines of enquiry to be considered during the day. These included establishing the effectiveness of leaders’ actions to improve the progress of all pupils and, specifically, girls in the sixth form. We looked at the progress you have made in addressing the areas for improvement identified in the school’s last inspection. We also considered the extent to which absence is reducing for disadvantaged pupils and pupils who have special educational needs (SEN) and/or disabilities. Lastly, we checked whether safeguarding is effective. These lines of enquiry are considered below. Safeguarding is effective. A strong culture of safeguarding exists in the school and you have ensured that safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose. Record-keeping is detailed and records are of high quality. You work well with external agencies. There are suitable systems in place to check on the recruitment of staff. Staff and governors are trained and regularly updated on how to keep children safe from abuse, sexual exploitation, radicalisation and extremism. Staff know how to raise and report any concerns they might have. Pupils and parents agree that the school is a safe place. Pupils also say that the school prepares them well for managing their own safety. Pupils feel listened to and know who to turn to within the school if they have concerns. They told inspectors that your staff deal promptly with rare occurrences of bullying.