The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. You and your staff team work effectively together to ensure pupils’ learning and emotional needs are met in this small and inclusive school. You have a clear understanding of the school’s strengths and the areas that require further work. You are working on the right aspects for improvement. For example, leaders’ recent actions have brought about improvements to pupils’ outcomes in writing. At the previous inspection, you were asked to ensure that pupils were better able to improve their work. Your work in this regard is mostly effective. Teaching builds on what pupils already know, understand and can do. Pupils respond well to teachers’ assessment and make adjustments routinely to their work. This is particularly effective in writing. Pupils have a good stamina for writing. They present their work well and use precise language to add detail and impact in their writing. On occasion, the writing of the middle-attaining and the most able pupils does not give sufficient detail or extension. This hinders pupils’ progress. Pupils benefit from a varied curriculum and are encouraged to apply their mathematical and writing skills well. For example, in Years 5 and 6, pupils can use and apply their mathematical skills to plot a cross section of a river. They apply their writing skills to explain their understanding of geographical skills well. The views of parents are generally positive. Almost every parent who responded to the online questionnaire, Parent View, stated that their children are taught well. A small minority of parents raised concern about pupils’ behaviour and how quickly leaders respond to their concerns when they arise. You, along with governors, acknowledge that there is more to do to secure parental satisfaction. The vast majority of pupils demonstrate resilience in their learning and present consistently good attitudes to learning. School records and inspection evidence indicate that the school is managing the challenging behaviour presented by a very small number of pupils effectively. Safeguarding is effective. You have ensured that safeguarding requirements are fit for purpose. Statutory safeguarding duties are met. All staff training is up to date and in line with current legislation. Governors undertake regular checks of the school site to ensure health and safety requirements are met successfully. Staff vetting checks are carried out rigorously to ensure staff suitability to work with children. However, some record keeping needs to be strengthened. Staff routinely apply their understanding of their training. They refer any concerns promptly to designated safeguarding leaders. You work closely with external agencies to ensure that you are doing all that you can to support the most vulnerable pupils and minimise their risk of harm. Pupils who present challenging behaviour are managed well. Risk assessments and procedures in place to support these pupils are robust; external agency support is used well. As a result, exclusions are reducing after an increase in recent months. Pupils spoken to on inspection said that they feel safe at school. Pupils say adults help them resolve any issues quickly and they are confident to talk to any adult if they have concerns. Pupils understand how to stay safe online. Supervision at playtime and lunchtime is good. Pupils enjoy the wide variety of activities on offer at playtimes to suit their individual needs. This helps pupils develop their personal and emotional needs well in a supportive, nurturing and inclusive environment. Inspection findings In order to ascertain that the school remains good, a key line of enquiry was to establish the effectiveness of the teaching of writing across key stages 1 and 2. This is because published pupils’ performance information indicated that a small number of middle-attaining pupils did not meet expected standards in 2016. Leaders, including governors, acted swiftly to put plans in place to develop the relative weaknesses in writing identified last year. You, ably supported by the English leader, have driven up standards in writing. Additional staff training and regular moderation of work have strengthened the robustness of teachers’ assessment and their subject knowledge. Teachers’ understanding of the skills that pupils must apply to write at the highest standard has improved. The greatest impact can be seen in Years 5 and 6. As such, pupils in key stage 2 are able to apply their understanding of sentence structure and punctuation with greater success and impact. Occasionally, greater expansion of their ideas would strengthen pupils’ writing even further.