The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the previous inspection. Since your appointment as headteacher in January 2016, you have improved the quality of teaching. The effective training you have provided for all teachers has raised their expectations and developed their skills. Leaders have also refined the school’s assessment procedures and the curriculum in response to national changes. Accurate assessments have helped make your checks on teaching and learning more rigorous. The leadership team uses detailed information about pupils’ progress to provide teachers with support and feedback about their quality of teaching. Teachers also learn from the work of other schools. Consequently, teaching promotes good and sometimes even stronger progress in reading, writing and mathematics. Past variability in the progress made by different groups of pupils has reduced, including in the early years. Pupils learn well, as shown by their positive attitudes, the support they provide for each other and their increased self-reliance. Pupils engage in a wide variety of opportunities to learn about becoming active and knowledgeable citizens. Pupils told me about their trips to places of cultural and historical interest and their involvement in musical performances outside the school. Governors demonstrate a strong commitment to the school and have high expectations for pupils’ academic success and their well-being. Governors are rightly proud of their work to develop the confidence and skills of parents so that the school’s expectations for academic success and children’s well-being are mirrored at home. Parents and carers overwhelmingly agree that the school is welcoming and inclusive. They value activities provided to help them to understand how they can best contribute to the work of the school. An increasing number of parents are attending additional workshops and events at the school. You recognise that pupils’ progress is not as strong in some subjects, particularly computing, history and geography, as it is in others. Safeguarding is effective. The leadership team has ensured that all safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose and records are detailed and of high quality. Regular training, open communication and the regular sharing of information ensure that staff have an up-to-date understanding of the risks to pupils’ safety and well-being. Communication with parents, through newsletters and information sessions in school, helps them understand these risks. For example, as well as helping pupils understand how to use the internet safely, leaders have made sure that parents understand the risks of their children using the internet unsupervised. Leaders also give effective guidance about how to respond to local and national incidents which put people at risk. As a consequence, parents, staff and pupils are more confident about how to respond should any emergency occur that has an impact on the school community. Parents say they value the way that the school involves them in helping to keep their children safe. Leaders ensure that they give equally strong attention to safeguarding pupils as they do to pupils’ academic progress. Pupils say they know who to ask for help if they need it. Staff understand the school’s rigorous procedures for reporting concerns about pupils’ safety and use the reporting system well to share any concerns. Detailed records, timely responses and partnerships with external organisations ensure that any referrals are resolved as quickly as possible. Governors have a strong understanding of safeguarding. The school’s collaborative focus on safeguarding contributes to a secure culture of vigilance and safety across the school community. Inspection findings A particular focus for this inspection related to the accuracy of the school’s selfevaluation and how well this is used to ensure that pupils, including the most able pupils, make strong progress across a range of subjects. Your checks on the quality of teaching and its impact on pupils’ progress are accurate and reliable. The local authority has helped you and the school’s governors to pinpoint the school’s strengths and areas for improvement. Through their reviews of the school’s work, governors hold leaders to account for how well the school is meeting pupils’ needs. On the basis of accurate evaluation, leaders have taken steps to improve teaching, learning and assessment across the school. Teachers now use detailed assessment information on pupils’ progress as a starting point for their planning. Skilled teaching ensures that classroom activities are now well matched to pupils’ different needs and abilities, including those of the most able pupils. Accurate evaluation also enables senior and middle leaders to work effectively with teachers to identify any differences in the progress being made by different groups of pupils. As a consequence, leaders and teachers are able to act quickly to help pupils catch up if their progress dips. You identified that less experienced middle leaders need more time to develop their skills in observing teaching and learning and giving more precise feedback to teachers. A second focus for the inspection was to evaluate leaders’ actions to reduce variations in rates of progress made by different groups in the early years and in key stage 1. This is because by the end of Reception in 2016, girls had attained less well than boys; and no disadvantaged pupils had reached higher levels of attainment by the end of Year 2. Teachers and other adults in the early years have made good use of the training they have received in the use of assessment information. Their work with other schools has also helped to ensure that assessments are more accurate. This enabled them to identify that girls in particular were not making the progress that should be expected, and to take action accordingly. The school’s assessment information and wider checks on learning show that there is now very little difference between the progress made by boys and girls by the end of Reception. The school’s assessment information shows that the most able disadvantaged pupils are now attaining in line with other most able pupils. Differences in rates of progress between groups of pupils are diminishing. A further focus of the inspection was to establish whether the school has taken action following the 2016 key stage 2 results. These showed that pupils had made slower progress in reading and mathematics than in writing. Teachers’ expectations of pupils as readers have risen as a result of support from school leaders and observation of good practice in other schools. Teachers plan and teach reading sessions that help pupils understand what is expected of them as good readers. As a result, pupils’ progress in reading is now strong. In mathematics, you correctly identified that it was pupils’ reasoning skills that were holding them back. Inspection evidence indicates that more pupils are now able to show how they arrive at answers and to explain their reasoning. This deeper understanding of mathematics and more developed reasoning skills combine to secure good and sometimes stronger progress by the end of Year 6. The improvements in teaching include opportunities for pupils to attempt more challenging work in reading, writing and mathematics. Pupils say they understand that even if they find activities hard at the beginning of the lesson they will know more about what they are learning by the end. This is partly because pupils are becoming more resilient in their learning. Observations show that pupils work with positive attitudes, that they learn from making mistakes and that they help each other learn when needed.