Summergil House School is a happy and welcoming school. Its peaceful rural location has an extremely positive effect on pupils’ well-being and provides many opportunities for pupils to take exercise, explore nature and self-regulate when they need to. The school provides a suitably varied range of learning experiences that reflect the wide range of pupils’ needs, abilities and interests. Teachers and learning support assistants know their pupils well and form positive working relationships with them. Over time, this caring support helps many pupils to settle in well and make worthwhile progress from their starting points. Many pupils make beneficial progress in developing their physical skills and most become more independent during their time at the school. However, shortcomings in teachers’ planning and the quality of learning support mean that pupils do not make the progress in developing their literacy, numeracy and digital skills that they are capable of. Although the majority of pupils become more successful learners during their time at the school, a minority do not engage with classroom-based learning consistently enough. This is partly because the size and number of classrooms are not sufficient to accommodate the wide range of pupils’ complex needs. In addition, the work of the clinical team in supporting teaching staff with behaviour management and communication strategies is not co‑ordinated well enough. Leaders promote a caring ethos across the school and have established strong working relationships with parents and carers and staff working in the residential setting. Their calm and purposeful leadership has helped the school navigate considerable challenges during the pandemic when the homes were forced to lockdown on successive occasions. Staff from the education and residential sides of the company worked together constructively to provide a caring and supportive community for pupils throughout this period. However, quality assurance and improvement planning processes are not self-critical enough and do not focus well enough on improving the skills of teachers and learning support staff. The school does not comply fully with the Independent School Standards (Wales) Regulations 2003.