St Mary’s RC Primary is a welcoming, caring school where staff work closely with one another to create a supportive learning community, sharing the school’s vision to ‘work, pray, share and learn together’. Leaders and staff develop positive relationships with pupils, parents, governors and the wider community, to create a successful learning environment where everyone feels valued, respected and included. Across the school, staff work closely to support all members of the community, providing valuable support for new families, especially those new to the community and whose first language is not English. They provide beneficial opportunities for families to participate in school life, both during the school day and after-school events. The school places pupils’ well-being at the heart of their work, and provides effectively for vulnerable pupils. Across the school, many pupils, including those with additional learning needs (ALN), make suitable progress from their individual starting points. Most pupils develop their numeracy and reading skills well. They apply their numeracy skills to support their learning in other areas of the curriculum, for example when completing bar graphs to record distances travelled by athletes. Many pupils develop appropriate digital skills to produce presentations and create simple animations. However, pupils’ oracy and writing skills are less developed and they do not have enough opportunities to build on their literacy skills progressively in their work across the curriculum. Where teaching is effective, teachers use assessments appropriately to plan lessons that build on pupils’ prior learning, and they ensure that there is suitable challenge for all pupils. However, in a minority of lessons, teachers over-direct learning, expectations are too low and there are limited opportunities for pupils to develop their independence. Leaders are developing self-evaluation processes to evaluate and monitor the progress pupils make and these are beginning to have a positive impact, especially in reading. However, overall, leaders’ use of self-evaluation and monitoring to support improvement planning is broad and lengthy and does not focus well enough on the most important areas to bring about improvements in the quality of teaching and learning. Leaders work closely with the governing body to manage the school’s budget appropriately and to ensure that safeguarding procedures are robust. The newly formed leadership team work well together and participate in joint monitoring activities to identify the school’s improvement priorities. They liaise with teachers to strengthen their knowledge of recent reform, including ALN reform and Curriculum for Wales. Leaders establish effective relationships with other schools and this supports teachers’ professional development, strengthening their knowledge and skills in relation to curriculum changes.