The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You lead the school with passion, clarity of mission and a vision to improve the lives of all your pupils. Your leadership and that of your team is successfully establishing a culture of excellence. The improvements that you have made since your arrival are now seen in the positive achievement of current pupils. You, your leaders and your staff demonstrate a commitment to high expectations and for most pupils this is demonstrated in their examination results. You demonstrated to us that you know your school well and have an accurate picture of where your strengths and weaknesses lie. You have taken and continue to take effective action to address the relative weaknesses you have found. You had pre-empted all the issues we identified from our pre-inspection analysis of the available information. The frustration for you is that the improved outcomes in some areas are only now beginning to appear. For example, historic performance information over time shows disadvantaged pupils consistently doing well in English compared to all pupils nationally with similar starting points, but less well than their peers in mathematics. Your internal monitoring suggests that this will no longer be the case with the current Year 11 because of the actions you are taking. In the past students in the sixth form were not making the progress that they should. Major changes to provision in the sixth form are now being reflected in outcomes for learners. At the previous inspection, the sixth form was judged to be less effective than the rest of the school. A short inspection does not provide enough evidence to change judgements, but we found no evidence to suggest that the sixth form is currently less effective than the rest of the school. In fact your actions and those of other leaders have brought about rapid improvement in the sixth form with strong evidence that these improvements are sustainable. Governors are highly supportive of your work. You have established a culture where pupils have excellent attitudes to learning. They are proud of their school, are self-disciplined and their conduct around the school is exemplary. Safeguarding is effective. You have developed a culture where staff and pupils understand their safeguarding responsibilities, systems and policies. Clear records demonstrate how well staff are inducted and regularly updated on child protection and safeguarding requirements. Staff are able to explain how referrals to partner agencies work. The climate of care and responsibility is clear. Staff and pupils’ views help shape and change policies. Pupils and staff feel safe. The school building and security systems help keep them secure. Pupils’ conduct around the school also adds to the safe environment as they behave very well around the site and ‘look out for each other’. The needs of children looked after are managed well. All statutory requirements for safeguarding are met. Inspection findings The progress of pupils across a range of subjects is close to or above average. English has a long and successful track record of above-average pupil progress and strong results. The picture in mathematics is more mixed. Historically disadvantaged pupils in the school have made as much progress as all pupils nationally given their starting points. However, in mathematics disadvantaged pupils have made markedly less progress than other pupils. The school’s teaching of and support for current pupils is resulting in pupil performance information suggesting that all pupils are now making similar progress. In 2016, Year 11 pupils gained notably strong outcomes in a wide range of subjects including health and social care, child development, hospitality and catering, English language, drama and physical education. During the inspection pupils’ behaviour was excellent. At change of lessons pupils moved around the school quickly and purposefully, allowing learning to get off to a good start. Ofsted’s online parent survey, Parent View, received 137 parent responses. Most agreed that the school deals well with behaviour, but 30% disagreed. We spoke to pupils about behaviour and they told us that even at its worst, instances were limited to ‘low-level disruption’ (their words) and even this was rare. We judged that this view of parents was not well founded.