The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You and your staff show a genuine desire and drive to achieve the best for pupils and their families. You have successfully channelled this energy into making considerable improvements to the school since the previous inspection. Together, you have created a supportive climate in which teachers feel empowered and trusted to improve the school further. You work well as a team and know your school extremely well. You have not allowed improvements made in the early years, in phonics and in pupils’ progress in writing and mathematics to foster complacency. Your own evaluations of how well the school is doing are accurate and honest. As a result, you have chosen the right priorities for improving the school further, including improving pupils’ progress in reading and making sure more pupils achieve better than expected levels in reading, writing and mathematics by the end of key stage 1. You are taking effective steps to enhance the capacity of leaders within the school. You have carefully checked the skill gaps some leaders have and are providing quality training, advice and guidance to ensure that the school goes from strength to strength. You work well with parents and the local community. You and other leaders have gone to great lengths in stressing to parents the role that they must play in making sure their children attend school regularly. You have not shied away from fining parents for their child’s lower attendance. Despite this, some parents are still not heeding this advice. You have rightly highlighted attendance as an area that needs to improve further. Overall, governors provide good levels of challenge. However, this is not always reflected in the minutes of governing body meetings. They have a clear grasp of the school’s strengths and priorities. They have a good strategic overview of how additional funding is being used and how training can help them improve further. Leaders and governors agree that improvement plans could be sharper. Sometimes targets for improvement lack clear timescales for when improvements will be made. As a result, governors are not always clear on whether improvements are happening fast enough. At times, this sometimes hinders their ability to challenge leaders. Safeguarding is effective. Keeping children safe is on everyone’s radar, including teaching staff, lunchtime supervisors, the caretaker and those who work in the office. Staff that we spoke to are not complacent when it comes to looking out for potential signs that children are at risk. Effective training has helped staff better understand issues related to extremism, child protection and the Department for Education’s latest guidance, ‘Keeping children safe in education’. School leaders have created valuable links with other agencies and professionals. The case files that we sampled show that vulnerable pupils are being helped to overcome the challenges they face. Case studies show the lengths you and others will go to in order to try to improve the life chances of pupils and their families. These include the successful use of home visits to dramatically improve the attendance of some pupils, helpful parenting classes and working with families to help them find employment. Inspectors agree with parents and pupils when they praise the school for their levels of care and keeping children safe. Pupils feel confident that there is always someone they can go to for help and feel sure that any problems they have will be successfully resolved. Bullying is infrequent and dealt with well. You take effective steps to check that staff are suitable to work with pupils in school and your record of these checks complies with statutory requirements. Leaders have improved site security in the Nursery and Reception areas. Inspection findings Leaders are working extremely hard to improve attendance. Good attendance is high profile across the school. Pupils enjoy school and value the range of rewards on offer for good attendance including non-uniform days, prize draws, getting to keep ‘Attendy’ bear for a week and limousine rides. However, those parents who continue to take their children on holiday during term time are dragging down overall attendance figures. Leaders continue to seek ways of tackling this ingrained habit in some families and are stressing the impact that this is having on the progress their children are making. The quality of leadership in the early years is a real strength. Two-year-olds quickly settle into school routines and this helps them settle quickly when they enter Nursery. As a result of improvements to indoor and outdoor learning environments, there are now many interesting and exciting areas where all children can develop a range of skills including mark making, speaking and listening, music and science. Good use has been made of additional funding to employ staff who are helping those children who need to improve their progress. Leaders in the early years and key stage 1 have worked hard to make sure that children move seamlessly from Reception into Year 1. Consequently, Year 1 teachers know their pupils very well and pupils are able to hit the ground running in key stage 1. This is helping those children who did not reach a good level of development at the end of their Reception Year to make better progress, catch up quickly and be ready for learning in key stage 1. The teaching of phonics is a strength of the school. Teachers deliver phonics lessons on a daily basis and in a consistent way. Teachers are quick to spot any errors pupils make and they tackle them quickly. Teachers are very effective at adapting their teaching to meet the needs of individual pupils. Consequently, outcomes in phonics are above the national average. Leaders recognise that pupils need to make better progress in reading. Sensible plans are in place to improve pupils’ comprehension skills but it is too soon to say whether these are having a positive impact. Pupils study a broad range of subjects. A wide range of trips enriches and widens pupils’ experiences of the world around them. However, there are times when teaching across the wider curriculum is not challenging enough, especially in science. At other times, pupils do not study some subjects in sufficient depth including history, geography and French. Next steps for the school Leaders and those responsible for governance should ensure that: they continue to work with parents and the community to develop and implement strategies that will improve attendance plans for improvement have clear timescales for when actions will occur and clearly show what impact this will have on pupils’ progress, especially in reading the wider curriculum provides pupils with more challenge and opportunities to study topics in more depth.