Kerr Mackie Primary School Ofsted Report

Full report

What does the school need to do to improve further?

• Accelerate improvements to the quality of teaching and pupils’ progress by:
  • implementing new strategies in mathematics consistently across all year groups to enable pupils to make stronger progress
  • pitching work at levels that enable pupils, including disadvantaged pupils and pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities, to make good progress
  • moving pupils on more swiftly in their learning when they are ready to experience new knowledge and skills
  • providing further opportunities for pupils to work at greater depths of understanding across the curriculum, including in science.
• Enhance the effectiveness of leadership and management by:
  • further developing the roles of middle leaders so that improvement strategies can be implemented to consistent effect across all year groups
  • developing the expertise of leaders responsible for SEN provision to more effectively diagnose pupils’ needs and put effective teaching and support in place
  • further refining new assessment and accountability systems by using information on pupils’ progress more deftly to accelerate the pace of school improvement
  • building upon recent improvements to governance to ensure that governors can clearly hold leaders to account for the effect of additional funding for pupils eligible for the pupil premium and for pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities.

Inspection judgements

Effectiveness of leadership and management Requires improvement

• The headteacher has taken decisive action since her arrival in September 2016 to address declining standards. She arrived at a school that was judged to be ‘coasting’ by the department for education because of weaker outcomes at key stage 2 in 2015 and 2016. She introduced a sustained focus on raising standards in reading, writing and mathematics and developed the roles of middle leaders. While these actions are beginning to result in improvements in pupils’ outcomes, this is not yet consistent across subjects and phases.
• The headteacher and her senior colleagues have revised staffing structures to give middle leaders a stronger role in raising standards. Middle leaders are developing a better awareness of priorities in their areas of responsibility, although they are less adept at measuring the effect of improvement strategies.
• The headteacher commissioned a local authority review to assess provision for pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities. This helped to identify areas for improvement, but leaders have not acted promptly enough to address these priorities and develop staff expertise.
• Leaders are monitoring the use of pupil premium funding more closely and tracking the progress of disadvantaged pupils regularly. More focused teaching and interventions are beginning to improve pupils’ progress in a number of year groups, although differences in attainment and progress remain.
• Leaders have worked closely with local authority partners and a local teaching alliance to develop subject expertise and build stronger leadership capacity. This has already led to a marked improvement in phonics teaching and better provision for pupils who speak English as an additional language. The impact of improvement strategies on pupils’ progress in mathematics and on support for pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities is less developed.
• Leaders have worked with local schools to develop a much stronger understanding of standards. This work made middle leaders aware of how far outcomes had declined in recent years. External moderation of pupils’ work in 2018 at key stage 1 found teachers’ standards to be accurate. While some aspects of school self-evaluation are generous, leaders are aware of improvement priorities and have a better understanding of standards.
• Leaders have introduced new systems to enable regular checks to be made on pupils’ progress. Phase leaders meet with their teams of teachers to check pupils’ progress and consider those changes to teaching and support that can overcome barriers to learning. These processes are at a relatively early stage but are beginning to lead to more timely action to address underachievement.
• Leaders, including middle leaders, have a clear vision of the strategies required to accelerate pupils’ progress in mathematics. New routines are being introduced to build reasoning and problem solving consistently into lessons. These new approaches are not implemented to regular effect across all year groups.
• The headteacher has refined performance management arrangements to link teachers’ performance targets more closely to whole-school priorities. She has introduced higher standards of accountability across the school.
• The early years leader has worked with the local authority to enhance provision and check standards. The early years leader has recently moved from Nursery to Reception class to improve transition within the early years. Stronger leadership of the early years is contributing to improving progress for children.
• Leaders provide a broad and balanced curriculum, although, on occasions, pupils do not have sufficient opportunities to work at greater depths of understanding across a wide range of subjects. As a ‘Rights Respecting School’, pupils have a good understanding of their rights and responsibilities. A cohesive programme of activities enhances pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.
• Leaders are using additional funding to increase pupils’ participation in a wider variety of sports and physical activity, including dance, gymnastics, rugby league and boccia. Pupils have worked with specialist coaches in a range of sports to develop their skills and physical fitness.
• The headteacher has shared improvement priorities with parents and carers in a clear and open manner. A large number of parents responded to the inspection questionnaires and the overwhelming majority were highly appreciative of the care and support their children receive. Many commented upon recent improvements at the school. One parent captured the views of many in writing: ‘The school promotes a respectful and inclusive community and I feel they are educating the children academically but also supporting them to become responsible citizens.’

Governance of the school

• Governors have reviewed their practice in response to a decline in standards in recent years. With the headteacher, they have reviewed their committee structures and their monitoring activities to bring fresh challenge to school leaders. This has improved their capacity to hold leaders to account for important aspects of performance.
• Governors are reflective and have a good awareness of school improvement priorities. They review their own progress against the targets they set on their own governor improvement plan. Governors now receive much more regular insight into pupils’ progress. Minutes from governors’ meetings show that they are asking leaders more searching questions on important aspects of school performance.
• In the January 2018 inspection, governors were asked to improve their understanding of the difference additional funding was making to the pupils’ sports skills and fitness, and the progress of disadvantaged pupils and pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities. While governors have a better understanding of the effect of sport funding and, to some extent, funding for disadvantaged pupils, their actions to check the progress of pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities are much less developed.

Safeguarding

• The arrangements for safeguarding are effective. The headteacher and her team take their responsibilities for pupils’ safety extremely seriously. The headteacher has commissioned safeguarding audits to ensure that policies and practice are fit for purpose. She ensures that safeguarding training is up to date.
• Leaders carry out appropriate checks to ensure the suitability of adults working on site. Leaders pursue concerns over pupils’ welfare thoroughly and record them effectively.
• Leaders are continually mindful of pupils’ welfare and adapt training and interventions to address any emerging concerns. The headteacher commissioned specific training for pupils on the dangers posed by gang behaviour when she became concerned over aspects of the language and behaviour of a small minority of pupils.
• Pupils feel safe and happy in school. They feel that bullying is rare and are confident that adults would address any concerns over bullying. Parents are particularly appreciative of the safe environment provided by teachers and of the consistently high levels of care and support that their children receive.

Quality of teaching, learning and assessment Requires improvement

• The quality of teaching varies between subjects and phases. This contributes to varying rates of progress across subjects and for different groups of pupils.
• While there is evidence that teachers are pitching work more appropriately to enable increasing proportions of pupils to reach expected standards, teaching does not consistently enable pupils to move on in their learning rapidly enough.
• Leaders are introducing new lesson structures and routines to support colleagues in meeting the heightened demands of the new mathematics curriculum. Teachers are providing immediate feedback to pupils and providing regular opportunities for pupils to apply their reasoning skills. Leaders have a clear rationale and purpose behind these initiatives, but they are not yet being implemented to consistent effect across classes.
• Leaders and teachers have worked with external partners to improve support for pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities. Teachers are developing their diagnosis of pupils’ needs and exploring ways to measure pupils’ progress more deftly. These initiatives are at an early stage of development and progress for these pupils remains uneven.
• Senior leaders have worked with teachers and teaching assistants to refresh phonics teaching. Teachers effectively model sounds and develop pupils’ abilities to recognise the links between letters and sounds. These approaches contributed to much stronger outcomes in the 2018 phonics screening check.
• Inspectors listened to pupils read across key stages 1 and 2. Key stage 2 pupils read with confidence and fluency, showing understanding of the texts they had read. At key stage 1, pupils were, on occasions, less fluent, but they were generally able to use their decoding skills to pronounce words.
• Teachers successfully encourage the majority of pupils to develop positive attitudes to learning. Teachers provide engaging activities to provide a context for writing. They model writing carefully and develop pupils’ awareness of the effects of grammatical devices. These approaches are improving pupils’ progress in writing, although girls’ writing is typically better than that of boys.
• Subject leaders have worked with external partners to develop their expertise and bring increasing levels of challenge to their teaching. Teachers are more mindful of the needs of pupils who speak English as an additional language and are developing strategies to enrich pupils’ vocabulary and their knowledge of grammatical structures.
• There are strengths in aspects of the wide curriculum. Pupils were seen enthusiastically exploring geographical and cultural differences between Barcelona and Leeds. In books, the picture is less consistent, as pupils are, at times, not given opportunities to develop specific knowledge and skills in sufficient depth in subjects such as history and science.

Personal development, behaviour and welfare Good

Personal development and welfare

• The school’s work to promote pupils’ personal development and welfare is good. The headteacher and her inclusion team are developing initiatives that are responsive to pupils’ needs. Pupils develop skills such as anger management and resilience to help them to control their emotions.
• Teachers have created a cohesive community in this culturally diverse school. Pupils develop a strong understanding of a range of different faiths and cultures. The school team has actively promoted pupils’ understanding of diversity in themed weeks. Teachers have used circle time to discuss different family structures. The school’s success in this area has been rightly recognised with a ‘Rights Respecting Schools’ Award.
• The inclusion team has developed a close awareness of pupils’ social and emotional needs. Its members are particularly attuned to the needs of more vulnerable pupils and are developing a nurture facility to offer customised social and emotional assistance for vulnerable pupils.
• Pupils develop a sense of responsibility through roles such as food ambassadors and school council members. They contribute to the wider community through their charity work, singing carols at a local old people’s home and taking part in events such as refugee awareness week.
• Pupils believe that bullying does not happen often, and they are confident that, if it did occur, teachers would address their concerns effectively.
• Leaders have developed pupils’ awareness of the threats they may face online. Pupils were able to talk about the school’s actions to help to keep them safe on the roads and how to avoid the potential threats caused by strangers.

Behaviour

• The behaviour of pupils is good. Pupils are polite and helpful, holding doors open for one another and visitors. They move around the building in a calm and respectful manner.
• Pupils are articulate and willing to discuss their learning and their views of the school. They show a pride in many aspects of their school community.
• Pupils typically work productively, although a minority can become distracted when work lacks challenge or is not pitched effectively to meet their needs. On some occasions, learning behaviours are not fully developed, as pupils are not as clear on the steps they can take to make stronger progress.
• Overall rates of attendance showed a slight decline in 2018. However, the inclusion team is developing more effective strategies to improve attendance. It meets regularly to review attendance and leaders, including governors, check the effect of interventions more closely. Case studies show that the work of the inclusion team is reducing rates of persistent absence.

Outcomes for pupils Requires improvement

• Pupils’ outcomes require improvement because current pupils do not make strong progress across a range of subjects and differences exist between year groups and between different groups of pupils.
• The headteacher inherited a school judged to be a ‘coasting school’ by the department for education due to weak outcomes at the end of key stage 2 in 2015 and 2016. Her actions, and those of her team, are securing improvements in many areas but overall outcomes are not yet good.
• At key stage 2, pupils are making improving progress in reading and writing. However, pupils’ progress in mathematics remains weaker as improvement strategies have not had sufficient time to yield better results.
• In 2018, provisional, unvalidated results indicate that the proportion of pupils reaching expected standards in reading, writing and mathematics declined at the end of key stage 1. Although this decline was influenced by specific challenges faced by that cohort of pupils, the pattern of improvement from the previous year was nevertheless not clearly sustained.
• Over time, teaching does not provide sufficient challenge to enable pupils to work at greater depths of understanding. The proportions of pupils working at greater depth have been below those seen nationally. Leaders are introducing greater challenge into the curriculum, but this is not consistently implemented across all year groups.
• Disadvantaged pupils do not make consistently strong progress. The proportions that have achieved the expected standard in reading, writing and mathematics at key stages 1 and 2 have been below those seen nationally. Although there is evidence of improving outcomes for current pupils, differences in their attainment and progress persist and have not diminished rapidly enough.
• The progress of pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities is mixed. New leaders are improving provision and developing systems to provide a more incremental picture of pupils’ progress. However, these developments are at an early stage and pupils’ progress remains variable, with pupils continuing to make weaker progress in external assessments and school assessments.
• Leaders have successfully prioritised phonics teaching as an area of improvement. Their actions increased the proportion of pupils reaching the required standard in 2018.
• While pupils benefit from a broad and balanced curriculum, they do not always develop subject-specific skills in the wider curriculum in sufficient depth, particularly in science.
• Outcomes in the early years are improving and, in 2018, the proportion of children achieving a good level of development increased, representing good progress from their starting points.

Early years provision Good

• Improving leadership in the early years is contributing to effective provision that is leading to better outcomes for children. The early years leader has recently moved from Nursery to Reception class to develop a more cohesive view of provision and to improve transition between different phases of the early years.
• Adults are attentive to children’s needs and, as a result, children in the Nursery are happy and confident in their learning environment. Children play and learn cooperatively with one another, for example sharing roles and resources in the construction area. Adults effectively use questioning to extend children’s learning, for example by asking children to count and consider the meaning of words.
• In Reception class, teachers were seen capturing children’s imagination with animated readings of picture books. Pupils listened attentively and were able to describe a pirate’s curse and intelligently explain the meanings of more challenging words. One child explained that disguise was ‘something to hide the truth’.
• Adults use links with texts to imaginatively develop children’s reading skills. The indoor and outdoor environments provide regular opportunities for children to practise their emerging writing skills. Pupils were also seen developing their counting skills by counting different values of pirates’ coins.
• The renewed focus upon effective phonics teaching in key stage 1 is also apparent in the early years, where adults effectively enable children to develop their understanding of the links between letters and sounds.
• Teachers involve parents in their children’s learning by sharing examples of their children’s learning online. Teachers have provided reading workshops to help parents to support their children’s reading at home.
• Early years teachers have visited local schools and worked with local authority partners to build expertise and improve the quality of provision. The early years leader has built a strong team ethos that is supporting improvements in provision and in children’s outcomes.
• Children’s work and progress are captured through a wide range of tasks. This work shows that children make good progress from their starting points. Teachers monitor children’s progress closely and modify their teaching to meet children’s needs. Teachers have developed an accurate picture of children’s abilities and learning needs and pitch activities in a manner that enables children to make good progress.
• Safeguarding practices in the early years are effective. There are no breaches of statutory welfare requirements. The emphasis on children’s welfare that characterises much of the school’s work extends to the early years.

School details

Unique reference number Local authority Inspection number 107910 Leeds 10048568 This inspection of the school was carried out under section 5 of the Education Act 2005. Type of school Primary School category Age range of pupils Gender of pupils Community 3 to 11 Mixed Number of pupils on the school roll 477 Appropriate authority The governing body Chair Headteacher Veena Murray Jennifer Millington Telephone number 01133 368499 Website Email address www.kerrmackie-primary-school.org.uk office@kmps.org.uk Date of previous inspection 31 January 2018

Information about this school

• The school is much larger than the average-sized primary school.
• The proportion of pupils eligible for the pupil premium is below average.
• The proportion of pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities support is average.
• The proportion of pupils who speak or are believed to speak English as an additional language is well above average.
• The school has pupils from a wide range of ethnic groups. Of these, the largest ethnic group comprises pupils from Asian or Asian British Pakistani backgrounds.
• The school holds the Rights Respecting School Award (Silver), the Healthy Schools Award and the Youth Sport Trust Silver Quality Mark.
• The school meets the government’s floor standards, which set out the minimum expectations for attainment and progress.

Information about this inspection

• Inspectors observed learning in a wide range of lessons taught by teachers and teaching assistants, covering the vast majority of classes in school. They observed pupils at breaktimes and lunchtimes.
• Inspectors met with senior leaders and middle leaders. Inspectors also met the chair of the governing body.
• Inspectors met the school improvement partner from the local authority.
• Inspectors met groups of pupils and talked to pupils about their learning and experiences at the school in lessons and at breaktimes. They also listened to pupils read in different year groups.
• Inspectors talked to parents as they dropped their children off at school on day 1 of the inspection.
• Inspectors carried out an extensive review of pupils’ books.
• Inspectors looked at the school’s development plans and information on pupils’ progress. They also considered arrangements for safeguarding and scrutinised records relating to attendance and behaviour. Inspectors looked at leaders’ records evaluating the quality of teaching, learning and assessment.
• Inspectors considered the 98 responses to Ofsted’s online survey, Parent View, and the 58 free-text responses. They also considered the 102 responses to the pupil questionnaire and the 58 responses to the staff questionnaire.

Inspection team

Malcolm Kirtley, lead inspector Andrew Soutar Fiona Dixon Her Majesty’s Inspector Ofsted Inspector Ofsted Inspector