The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You ensure that Hillside Primary School is a delightful place to learn where pupils behave well and take pride in their learning. Right across the school, you cultivate a vibrant and purposeful learning environment. Pupils enjoy their lessons and adults enjoy teaching them. As a result of continued good teaching, coupled with your programme of rich extra-curricular activities and your striking commitment to pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, pupils continue to flourish in your care. Without doubt, you educate pupils to be resilient and resourceful individuals. You clearly fulfil your mission to enable pupils to grow and develop ‘loving learning, loving life’. You, your leadership team and the governing body continue to ensure that pupils achieve well at Hillside Primary School. This is because you and your governors have a sharp insight into the quality of education that the school provides. You evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the school with honesty and exactitude. Your school improvement plan reflects precisely the areas for improvement that will improve the quality of education for your pupils. You are not afraid to take calculated risks to improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment across the school. You and your leadership team believe that to maintain the status quo is just not acceptable. One such example of your willingness to make calculated changes is your drive to overhaul the teaching of mathematics. This is so that pupils can make better progress and achieve to a higher standard. Now your staff ensure that the development of pupils’ problem-solving and reasoning skills are at the heart of every mathematics lesson. Problem-solving was a key area for improvement at the previous inspection. Since you have overhauled provision in mathematics, teachers and pupils have a renewed passion for the subject. Pupils say that they love mathematics and teachers describe the ‘buzz’ in the staffroom as they discuss and debate how best to teach the topics. You acknowledge that now is the time to enhance and embed pupils’ skills in reasoning and problem-solving skills in mathematics. This is so that pupils make even more progress and achieve at a higher standard. Aside from problem-solving, since the previous inspection you have also ensured that the progress made by the least able pupils continues to improve. In 2016, in every subject except writing, the least able pupils made good or better progress, which is a significant improvement. Not content with this, you have insisted that the provision for writing now improves. Across the school, teachers routinely plan resources that support and challenge pupils so that they can achieve well, regardless of their starting points. You have also renewed and reinvigorated teachers’ approach to teaching writing because you knew that this was the weakest area, especially for the least able and for boys. Now pupils are inspired to write and they achieve well. Another improvement priority from the last inspection was to extend learning for the most able pupils. You and your staff have embraced this challenge and the most able pupils achieve above the national average in reading and writing and around the national average in mathematics. Leaders ensure that teachers use effective questioning techniques to stretch and challenge pupils’ conceptual understanding. Pupils habitually complete higher-order extension activities in their subject journals. To raise expectations even further, you now ensure that middle-ability pupils are also stretched in the same way as higher prior-attaining pupils. While provision for the most able and least able has been improved since the previous inspection, you acknowledge that the achievement gap between boys and girls has not yet been eradicated. Until recently, boys have performed less well than girls, especially in the early years and across the school in writing. You recognise that a key priority for leaders is to continue to build on the work that has already been started to diminish the gender gap. Your action plans accurately reflect this and your systems to monitor provision rightly focus on evaluating the impact of your actions to improve the progress and attainment of boys. One way you have already begun successfully addressing the gender gap is in the early years. You have recently acquired the pre-school because you recognise the importance of supporting the development of your children from a very early age. You and your early years leader are personalising programmes for two- and threeyear olds so that gaps in development, particularly for boys and disadvantaged children, close. During the inspection, you acknowledged that, despite the positive changes already made to provision, you still need to accelerate further the progress and development of boys and disadvantaged children in the early years.