Mayfield Primary School Ofsted Report

Full report

What does the school need to do to improve further?

• Sharpen leaders’ and governors’ self-evaluation and strategic planning by:
  • ensuring that self-evaluation is balanced in summarising what is working well and what the weaknesses are
  • ensuring that success criteria for each action in the school strategic plan are measurable so that progress towards them can be judged accurately
  • setting explicit group targets for the achievement of disadvantaged pupils and pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities.
• Ensuring that planned activities for learning in the early years, especially outside, are challenging enough to help children to make rapid progress towards the early learning goals.

Inspection judgements

Effectiveness of leadership and management Good

• Senior leaders work together as a cohesive, effective team. Their ambition for staff and pupils to be the best that they can be is tangible. They lead by example and are expert in determining how best to support staff in developing their teaching and leadership skills. During the inspection, many teachers confirmed that leaders provide the support they need to become better teachers.
• The headteacher, deputy headteacher and assistant headteacher each have clearly defined roles, responsibilities and lines of accountability to maximise the impact of their work in continuously improving the quality of teaching and pupils’ achievement.
• Senior leaders pool their in-depth knowledge of how well staff are performing and, importantly, how well pupils are learning. They use this information intelligently to make adjustments in provision, for example in revising initial targets, to secure pupils’ ongoing good progress in all subjects. Even so, written evaluation of the school’s performance is heavily weighted towards those aspects that are working well. Aspects of teaching and learning that are not as effective are not evidenced well enough.
• Leaders responsible for the provision for pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities and pupils accessing additional support for their hearing are effective in overseeing the pupils’ progress in relation to the extra support that they receive. This ensures that the provision is, as intended, making a difference and enabling the pupils to learn well.
• Subject leadership is strong across all subjects, including English and mathematics. This contributes to pupils’ good achievement in other subjects, such as art and design, history and physical education, as well as in English and mathematics. Subject leaders make regular rigorous checks to see that pupils are learning all that they should and that their achievement is assessed accurately. The leaders provide effective training and support for staff and the support is appreciated.
• Leaders at all levels prioritise disadvantaged pupils’ achievement as an area for improvement. The deputy headteacher has revised the provision for each pupil with greater emphasis on how the pupil premium can be used effectively to meet their academic needs, and to build their confidence and self-esteem. A bespoke package is tailored to individual pupils’ needs. This group of pupils are making faster progress this year than previously as a result. However, challenging targets for their progress and attainment as a group have not been set for the school to work towards.
• The breadth and depth of the curriculum prepares pupils well for life in modern Britain and promotes their spiritual, moral, social and cultural development effectively. A broad range of experiences such as educational visits and a very wide range of before-, during- and after-school clubs capture pupils’ interests and increase their engagement in learning even more. There is something for everyone to try at Mayfield from performing arts, sports clubs, chess and Latin, to visiting the library which stays open until 5pm twice a week. Twenty-four clubs are on the timetable for this term and disadvantaged pupils have access to them through the ‘Mayfield offer’.
• The sports premium is used effectively to extend the range of non-traditional sports for pupils to try, such as ultimate frisbee, quick sticks hockey and clubs such as the change for life club. The funding supports pupils’ participation in intra- and inter-school competitive sports events and specialist coaches to work alongside teachers to develop their teaching skills.
• Most parents are supportive of all that the school provides. Of the 97 parents who responded to Parent View, 94% would recommend the school to another parent. Some parents added a written comment on the free-text option available during the inspection. Many of these were exceedingly complimentary about the school saying how happy their children are, how well the school keeps them informed and gives them tips on how to help their children at home, the wide range of extra-curricular activities that the school provides and how friendly and inclusive the school is.

Governance of the school

• Governance is effective.
  • The governing body is forward-thinking in its approach to governance. It looks at all available options to enhance provision to sustain and improve outcomes for pupils by recruiting and retaining quality teaching staff.
  • Governors are well-informed of their roles and responsibilities in ensuring that they fulfil their legal duties and meet statutory requirements. They are strong supporters of the school and ambitious for continuous improvement.
  • All governors know the school well and visit regularly. As well as visits with a particular focus such as looking at progress towards targets set in the school’s plans for improvement, they also undertake spot checks where they drop into classes unannounced to observe at first hand how well pupils are learning.
  • Parents’ and pupils’ views are sought and taken into account in the governing body’s decision-making.
  • Governors ensure that the school regularly receives an external view of its performance. They attend meetings with the school’s improvement adviser and senior leaders.
  • Governors are familiar with internal information about pupils’ achievement and their behaviour as well as the school’s published data. This places them in a strong position to pinpoint any groups of pupils who may be at risk of falling behind and discuss with leaders how best they can be supported to catch up.
  • Spending of the pupil premium, the sports premium and funding for special needs is checked to ensure that spending has an impact on pupils’ achievement. Governors are rigorous in keeping up to date with the achievement of disadvantaged pupils, who are a target group for improvement.
  • Scrutiny of minutes of governors’ meetings shows that they are entirely confident in holding leaders to account. They provide leaders with support and challenge in equal measures. The governing body does not waver in making challenging decisions in the best interests of pupils.
  • The school’s finances are monitored diligently. The finance committee ensures that value for money is achieved, for example in reviewing catering arrangements or upgrading the school’s wireless networking technology (wi-fi).

Safeguarding

• The arrangements for safeguarding are effective. All staff and governors receive regular training to fulfil their collective responsibility to safeguard pupils. The school’s systems and record-keeping are of high quality.
• Safeguarding is seen as an essential priority by everyone. Examination of documentation showed that, over time, concerns have been raised by a wide range of different members of staff for the designated leads to follow up, which they do, quickly.
• Written records show that the designated leads for safeguarding do not hesitate to seek advice from professionals in children’s services or the local authority’s designated officer for child protection to guide them in taking the right action to protect pupils.
• The safeguarding policy has been updated and it is implemented consistently. The policy reflects the latest guidance from the Department for Education.
• The single central record of statutory checks on all staff and adults working with pupils is completed properly to ensure their suitability to work with children. Requirements for recruiting staff are followed carefully and documents to evidence this are held securely in staff files.
• Staff receive regular training and updates about safeguarding to ensure that they are kept informed of any key changes. All staff and governors have received training in the ‘Prevent’ duty to ensure that they are alert to possible signs of radicalisation and extremism.
• Confidential information is kept in good chronological order for easy access and retrieval of information.
• Monitoring of health and safety is robust to minimise risks to pupils’ safety. Risk assessments for educational visits are thorough.

Quality of teaching, learning and assessment Good

• Teachers and teaching assistants are keen to develop their professional skills to be the best that they can be. Many commented in the staff questionnaire on how well leaders help them to achieve this through ongoing professional development and effective appraisal that identifies their training needs.
• Strong leadership of mathematics is helping teachers to develop their confidence and skills in teaching pupils how to solve problems, apply reasoning skills and foster pupils’ deeper understanding through the use of practical resources and visual images. Pupils are making significantly better progress in mathematics this year than previously as a result of the strong leadership of the subject.
• Teachers have good subject knowledge and value pupils’ contributions during lessons. They choose from a variety of different approaches that encourage pupils to talk about their learning and use questioning effectively to challenge pupils to think more deeply about what they have learned. Teachers press pupils for more information to test their understanding by asking, for example, ‘how do you know?’ ‘why is that?’ and ‘do you agree?’
• Good relationships are evident in all classes and these lend confidence to pupils’ learning. A pupil in key stage 1 commented that ‘making mistakes helps you to learn and school is a safe place to make mistakes’. Teachers ensure that their classrooms are welcoming spaces for learning where pupils’ work and achievements are celebrated and acknowledged.
• Teachers have high expectations for pupils to behave well and take pride in their written work.
• The headteacher ensures that teachers are accountable for the progress of every pupil in their class. While teaching assistants may deliver small group and individual programmes for pupils, teachers take responsibility to check that pupils are helped appropriately to make good progress. Teachers prepare updated information on every pupil’s learning to share with senior leaders at regular progress meetings.
• Teachers make good use of the school’s guidance for assessment to support their curriculum planning in all subjects. They make accurate judgements about what pupils already understand and can do so that they can plan what they need to learn next. They set work at the right level of difficulty for pupils with differing needs and abilities and provide them with useful feedback about how they can improve. These were aspects of teaching that were identified as areas for improvement in the previous inspection; they are now strengths.
• Where teachers identify gaps in pupils’ knowledge and understanding they ensure that extra help is triggered quickly. Specialist teachers for reading and mathematics contribute to programmes that enable pupils to catch up and fill the gaps.
• All teachers and teaching assistants use visual references well to explain key teaching points. Signing is a regular feature in teaching. These approaches are beneficial to all pupils but particularly useful for pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities such as hearing loss, or for pupils who are in the early stages of learning to speak English. The pupils receive skilful support from teaching assistants in class who encourage them to do as much as possible for themselves.
• Inspectors found some variation in the quality of teaching across some year groups. Sometimes the most able pupils’ learning is not moved on quickly enough when they show that they are ready to do so, and occasionally teachers do not check that pupils correct mistakes in their written work carefully.

Personal development, behaviour and welfare Good

Personal development and welfare

• The school’s work to promote pupils’ personal development and welfare is good. The curriculum supports and promotes good spiritual, moral, social and cultural development through focused teaching, assemblies, cultural and personal celebrations and community events.
• From the early years onwards, most pupils develop and show positive attitudes to learning. As one parent commented, ‘Mayfield children seem very proud of their school.’
• Pupils enjoy school. Some girls and boys arrive well before the start of the school day to participate in choir practice, sensory circuit training and other activities. Others stay after school to take part in clubs, to make use of library or join in with other activities such as nature explorers in the school grounds.
• In all classes, staff support pupils’ emotional well-being and individual needs sensitively. Vulnerable pupils and those new to the school are particularly well supported to make friends and socialise. Staff are adept at settling new pupils in quickly.
• Pupils of all ages have a good understanding of what bullying is. The youngest pupils know the difference between someone being ‘mean’ and persistent, deliberate unkindness. Older pupils talk about cyber bullying confidently, understanding its seriousness and the necessity to report online abuse. A few parents are not convinced that the school deals with bullying effectively. However, discussions with pupils and scrutiny of incident records provided evidence that while it is rare, pupils do learn about different types of bullying and know who to go to if they feel unsafe.
• The school ensures that pupils learn how to keep themselves safe online. The older pupils said they were glad not to be legally old enough to use social networking sites. Pupils talk knowledgeably about the e-safety rules on show throughout the school and especially in the library, where pupils are also able to access computers.
• Pupils told inspectors that they think school is a safe place and that teachers listen to them and take them seriously. Almost all parents responding to Parent View and staff confirmed that children feel safe at school.
• Pupils generally mix well with one another and respect differences. They explained that they do not judge people by their disabilities and help everyone to settle in and be friends.

Behaviour

• The behaviour of pupils is good.
• Pupils know the rules and the majority stick to them most of the time. A few pupils find consistently good behaviour hard to achieve but staff manage this well so that they quickly recover and get back on track with their learning.
• Most pupils attend school regularly and enjoy school. Attendance is close to average. Pupils who miss school regularly do so only because they have significant health needs requiring time out of school for medical appointments or treatment.
• Pupils value books and equipment. They look after the extensive range of reading material available to them around the school and in classrooms.
• Pupils follow instructions well. In the early years, for example, children are taught how to move seamlessly from one activity to the next without fuss and this continues throughout the school.

Outcomes for pupils Good

• Overall, Mayfield pupils make good progress in reading, writing and mathematics, often from lower starting points on entry than are typical for their ages. Usually, pupils leave at the end of Year 6 with attainment that is above average, placing them in a strong position to be successful learners when they move on to secondary school. The proportion of the most able pupils working at greater depth by the end of Year 6 is well above average.
• There have been years when attainment has risen to above the national average and years when it has dipped below average. In 2016, for example, pupils’ progress and attainment in mathematics were lower than they should be. Incisive action taken by leaders has addressed this assertively and currently, pupils in all classes are making considerably better progress. Gaps in their learning are being filled through extensive catch-up programmes and better teaching of the subject generally.
• Pupils’ attainment in spelling, punctuation, grammar and science is close to or above average for their ages.
• All pupils excel in reading, which supports successful learning across the full range of subjects. This is because the school’s extensive provision for books, underpinned by good systematic teaching of phonics from an early age, fosters within them a love of books and enjoyment in reading at home and in school.
• Most pupils move into Year 3 having achieved the expected standard in the Year 2 phonics screening check.
• Pupils of different abilities who read to inspectors showed that they are able to break words down into separate sounds or blend sounds together to read them. The most able readers read suitably challenging texts to inspectors and spoke authoritatively about their favourite authors and characters in books they were reading.
• The good phonics teaching benefits pupils in their writing. Pupils write extensively in a range of subjects and make good progress towards achieving the expectations for the end of each year.
• Disadvantaged pupils did not achieve as well as other pupils generally in the previous school year. Adaptations to their extra provision are enabling them to gain ground rapidly in their learning this year. The difference between their attainment and other pupils is diminishing rapidly.
• Pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities and those who speak English as an additional language make good progress from their individual starting points through a combination of expert support in class and bespoke programmes designed specifically to meet their individual needs.
• In addition to reading, writing and mathematics, pupils do well in other subjects too. They achieve well in music. They enjoy singing, samba and many other musical activities. Many pupils, including disadvantaged pupils, learn to play tuned instruments and some are involved in playing in the school orchestra.
• In art and design, pupils’ drawing is well developed. They handle two- and three- dimensional media competently and produce original art work.
• History is another subject where pupils achieve well with their interest often ignited through access to local museums and artefacts that bring history to life.

Early years provision Good

• Overall, the provision in the early years is good and it enables children to make good progress from their varied starting points. Even so, the proportion of children reaching a good level of development by the end of Reception, to prepare them well for learning in Year 1, has been in decline for three years.
• The early years leader is working with staff earnestly to rectify the weaknesses. The most recent information about children’s learning shows that the percentage of children achieving a good level of development is set to rise significantly this year. In particular, children’s reading, writing and mathematics are developing well because there are ample opportunities for them to practise literacy and numeracy skills through purposeful play, both indoors and outside.
• One member of staff has particular responsibility for overseeing provision for vulnerable children, including disadvantaged children and those who have special educational needs and/or disabilities, and ensures that their needs are met effectively.
• All areas of learning are catered for throughout the day with a good balance of activities that adults lead and those that children choose for themselves. Some of the activities that children choose to try are not challenging enough to sustain their interest for any length of time, especially outside.
• Staff foster close communication with parents. Parents receive a warm welcome when they bring their children to school and collect them. Parents told inspectors that they appreciate digital photos and text about their children’s learning, which they receive by phone and have the option to reply to.
• Teachers ensure that children’s starting points are assessed accurately and evidence is gathered going forward to keep track of how well they are progressing towards the early learning goals.
• All of the statutory welfare requirements for the early years are met. Staff ensure that children learn to play safely. Children generally cooperate with each other, take turns and behave well.

School details

Unique reference number Local authority Inspection number 110666 Cambridgeshire 10023409 This inspection was carried out under section 8 of the Education Act 2005. The inspection was also deemed a section 5 inspection under the same Act. Type of school Primary School category Age range of pupils Gender of pupils Community 4 to 11 Mixed Number of pupils on the school roll 390 Appropriate authority The governing body Chair Headteacher Telephone number Website Email address Judith Greenwood Jaspaul Hill 01223 712127 www.mayfieldcambridge.org/ office@mayfield.cambs.sch.uk Date of previous inspection 6–7 June 2013

Information about this school

• The school meets requirements on the publication of specified information on its website.
• This is a multicultural school with pupils from a wide range of ethnicities.
• Around a third of pupils speak English as an additional language with 47 different home languages represented within the school.
• The proportion of disadvantaged pupils is below the national average.
• The percentage of pupils receiving support for special educational needs and/or disabilities is above average. The proportion needing more support through an education, health and care plan is above average.
• The school has specially resourced provision for up to eight pupils who need support for hearing.
• Pupil mobility is above average with a high turnover of families moving into and away from the area that the school serves during the school year.
• The majority of the teaching staff have been appointed within the past two years.

Information about this inspection

• Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector has the discretionary power to inspect any school in England under section 8 of the Education Act 2005. The inspection began as a one-day, short section 8 inspection led by one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI). During the first day, the HMI converted the inspection to a full section 5 inspection. The HMI was joined by three Ofsted Inspectors on the second day of the inspection.
• Inspectors observed teaching and learning in all classes, sometimes jointly with the headteacher, the deputy headteacher or the assistant headteacher.
• Pupils in key stage 1 and key stage 2 read to inspectors and talked about their books.
• Inspectors looked at pupils’ written work in their books, and on display in classrooms and corridors. The school provided information about the progress that pupils are making currently. Published information about pupils’ attainment and progress in relation to all pupils nationally was considered.
• Pupils were observed having their lunch and at play during breaktimes. Inspectors spoke to pupils while they worked in class and more formally in groups.
• Inspectors met with the headteacher, the deputy headteacher, the assistant headteacher, the coordinator of special educational needs, the lead teacher for hearing support, the chair of the governing body and three other governors, leaders of subjects, a group of teachers newest to the profession, and members of staff responsible for administration.
• The views of 92 parents who responded to Parent View and 45 members of staff who completed the staff questionnaire were considered.
• Inspectors looked at a range of the school’s documentation including policies and record-keeping for safeguarding pupils. The single central record of statutory suitability vetting carried out on all staff, volunteers and governors was checked.
• The school’s information about how well it is performing and its plans for future improvements were evaluated. Minutes of the governing body’s meetings were examined.

Inspection team

Linda Killman, lead inspector Henry Weir Gay Whent Jacqui Frost Her Majesty’s Inspector Ofsted Inspector Ofsted Inspector Ofsted Inspector