The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You lead the school very well. You are clear and accurate in your evaluation of what needs to be done to ensure that the school continues to improve. You are resolute and imaginative in your pursuit of this success. Since your appointment as headteacher, you have created a collaborative approach to leadership. This means that, increasingly, everyone, including the pupils and their families, feels both involved and responsible for the success of the school. This visionary approach has led to improvements in the quality of teaching and learning. This is because all staff work more collaboratively in both the planning and the assessment of the effect of their teaching. It has also meant that parents are more involved and knowledgeable about how their children are doing and what they, as parents, can do to support learning. You have also been successful in developing the expertise of your subject and year leaders. Under your guidance, this group of middle leaders is making a very positive contribution to the continued success of the school. This is because you encourage them to develop and implement strategies to improve the provision at the school and eliminate any inconsistencies in the quality of teaching. You know that the expertise and drive of your middle leaders are vital to the continued success and improvement of the school. For example, middle leaders have worked effectively to develop a whole-school, shared approach to monitoring the quality of teaching. This approach encourages the sharing of good teaching and helps pinpoint where improvement could be made to pupils’ experience of learning at school and at home. This initiative has been in place for a comparatively short time, however, inspection evidence suggests that it is already having a positive effect on pupils’ writing at greater length in subjects other than English. Governors know the school and the community it serves well. They share your pursuit of excellence. They measure the impact of leaders’ actions to improve the school through regular, carefully informed visits and challenging meetings with you and your team. Governors are also directly linked to subject areas and classes at the school. This means that they are successfully able to see for themselves how the school is progressing and what needs to be done to assure further improvement. Governors also share your view about the importance of establishing and maintaining effective and fruitful links with others schools and providers across the local authority. These links help ensure that governors, you and your team of staff are able to share and develop expertise. For example, governors are, rightly, confident about the judgements you and your staff make about the pupils’ progress because you work with other schools, particularly in the Keighley cluster, to check their accuracy. Pupils love Eastwood Community School. They enjoy coming to school and they know that they can rely on adults at the school to keep them safe and teach them well. They told me that bullying is very rare and that if they did feel anxious or unsure they would tell an adult and that any problems would be dealt with promptly and well. They follow a rich and varied curriculum. This involves a carefully planned outdoor experience for all classes for a half day every fortnight, where pupils explore their surroundings and the natural environment. The curriculum is underpinned by a range of extra-curricular activities, opportunities and events. For example, outside speakers visit the school regularly. The group of Year 6 pupils with whom I spoke were very complimentary and excited by a recent talk on selfesteem. They told me that it made them think more carefully about themselves and the importance of understanding others’ points of view. Parents and carers are generally very complimentary about the school. The parents with whom I spoke at the start of the school day were very positive about the highquality teaching and communications at the school. They said that you and your staff were accessible and very ready to address any issues they may have. They also said they acknowledged and welcomed the ways in which the school offered them opportunities to see their children’s work and success in school. I was able to see this for myself during one of the very regular parent sessions that take place first thing in the morning on three days of the week in the Reception classes. During the session, I saw over 30 mothers and fathers working very happily with their children on a range of interesting activities. Parents told me that they really welcomed the insights these sessions gave them into their children’s learning. They also told me it helped them to support their children’s learning at home. The school’s previous inspection in January 2013 identified the need to raise attainment in reading and provide more opportunities to improve pupils’ comprehension across the curriculum. You and your team have addressed this effectively. Outcomes and pleasure in reading across the school have significantly improved. You have achieved this by raising the profile of reading and giving pupils more opportunities to read and enjoy books together as classes, small groups and individually. The relatively new library provision is attractive, well supervised and imaginatively stocked with a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books. The teaching of reading is good. Phonics teaching is effective and outcomes at the end of the Year 1 check are improving year-on-year so that they are now above the national average. You have also put in place effective strategies to help parents support their child’s reading at home. This includes staff sharing insights with parents into how best to support children’s reading during parent consultations and making sure that a wide range of interesting and challenging books are readily available for pupils to take home. Safeguarding is effective. The leadership team has ensured that all safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose and records are detailed and of high quality. You have created and maintain a strong and pervasive culture of safeguarding at the school. This culture is underpinned by very efficient and detailed records and systems. You, all the staff at the school and the governing body take your safeguarding responsibilities very seriously. You ensure that there is regular and effective training for all staff and governors to ensure that they are up to date in their knowledge and understanding of safeguarding. You and one of your deputies, as the designated safeguarding leads, have strong and effective links with the relevant outside agencies. You record your dealings with these agencies in a detailed and meticulous manner. You follow safeguarding issues through effectively and engage with external agencies, including the local authority, promptly and tenaciously. You have formed a six-person safeguarding team that meets fortnightly to review particular issues and reflect on ways to improve overall safeguarding practice, including attendance. This is an imaginative approach, which helps to ensure that safeguarding has a high and effective profile. Overall, attendance is above the national average. This is because of the actions you and your team have taken to encourage and regularly reward good attendance. You have worked diligently and closely with parents to help remove the barriers that some pupils and their families have to good attendance. Inspection findings Children settle well into your pre-school, Nursery and Reception classes because your staff are skilled and well led. The environments, both inside and outside, are appropriately stimulating and help children both settle into and explore the space around them. Positive and open links are quickly established with parents. Parents spoke very positively about the care with which staff kept them informed and involved. Staff assess children’s needs effectively and shape activities that engage and interest them. As a result, children quickly adopt positive routines and enjoy their time at school. Children are safe and happy. The activities that staff plan for them are well balanced and encourage children to work collaboratively and happily together. They make very good progress through the early years. The proportion of children who reach a good level of development by the end of their Reception Year has been increasing year-on-year over the past five years and is now close to the national average. This is particularly the case for children who have been at the school from pre-school onwards. Children enjoy books and the habit of taking books home is established during their time in the early years. Phonics is well taught and is a strength of the school. A good proportion of pupils achieve the expected standard in the Year 1 phonics screening check. Overall, boys do not do as well as girls in this check in Year 1 but they catch up by the end of Year 2. Your staff, both teachers and teaching assistants, are skilled and show good levels of subject knowledge. Pupils enjoy a rich and varied curriculum that is well taught. This curriculum is supported by a wide range of additional activities and out of school clubs. The school’s own evaluation suggests that there is still some inconsistency in the quality of teaching between years and classes, particularly when it comes to writing. Inspection evidence supports this view. Leaders and staff are aware of this and have put in place effective and detailed checks and systems to address it. However, there is still some work to be done to ensure that all pupils, including the most able, have more opportunities to write at length in subjects other than English. Writing at greater length would allow pupils to explore and practise the particular skills and knowledge associated with, for example, science, the humanities and religious education. You and your staff know your pupils well. This is particularly the case with those who have special educational needs and/or disabilities. You use the additional funding for these pupils well. As a result, these pupils make generally good progress from their starting points. You focus support precisely and flexibly. You monitor the effect of staff actions carefully to ensure that they lead to the desired outcomes. As the leader of the school, you are determined to ensure that these pupils get the very best support so that they make the progress that they need. You are diligent and determined in your engagement with external support services to make sure that these pupils succeed. You and your governors also use the additional funding you receive to support disadvantaged pupils well. You and your team carefully monitor the progress and well-being of your disadvantaged pupils. You use this knowledge to target support and remove barriers to rapid progress. School information and externally verified outcomes show that disadvantaged pupils are making better progress than their peers because of the effective, targeted actions of the school. You are clear, however, that there is still more to do if the differences in outcomes between disadvantaged pupils and others at the school are to disappear. You are determined that this shall be the case. Next steps for the school Leaders and those responsible for governance should ensure that: any remaining inconsistencies in the quality of teaching and learning are removed and the school continues to share expertise all pupils, including the most able, have more opportunities to develop their skills as writers by writing at greater length across the curriculum in subjects other than English. I am copying this letter to the chair of the governing body, the regional schools commissioner and the director of children’s services for Bradford. This letter will be published on the Ofsted website. Yours sincerely Mark Evans Her Majesty’s Inspector Information about the inspection I visited 11 classes, most of them accompanied by you, to observe teaching, learning and assessment. During these visits, where appropriate, I spoke with teachers and teaching assistants about their work. I also checked pupils’ progress in their books, talked formally with a group of pupils from Year 6 and talked informally with pupils in lessons and around the school at lunch and breaktimes. I also listened to a group of Year 2 pupils reading and discussing books. I met with groups of parents at the beginning of the day. I met with you to discuss the school’s effectiveness and what you have done to ensure that the school continues to improve. I also met with the early years, mathematics and literacy leaders, key stage leaders and the chair of the governing body and with the coordinator of the school’s work to support pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities. I spoke with the school’s external adviser on the telephone about the progress the school has made. I also spoke on the telephone with an officer from Bradford local authority about the authority’s view of the school and the accuracy of its assessments. I read a range of documents, including your evaluation of the school’s effectiveness. I also scrutinised the school’s safeguarding systems, records and associated documents. I checked information about pupils’ achievement and records of the monitoring of the quality of teaching. I also read minutes of meetings of the governing body. I considered 29 responses to Ofsted’s online questionnaire, Parent View, eight freetext comments from parents and 33 responses to a recent school survey of parents’ views. I also took into consideration 16 responses from staff to the online questionnaire.