Settrington All Saints' Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School Ofsted Report

Full report

What does the school need to do to improve further?

• Improve the good quality of teaching, learning and assessment further by:
  • developing staff skills to plan consistently challenging activities across the curriculum with greater precision
  • developing staff skills further to identify when they can move pupils on to consolidate skills and stretch their learning in lessons.
• Improve the quality of leadership and management further by:
  • sharpening planning across the school, including in the early years, so that success criteria are explicit
  • using monitoring activities more precisely to evaluate fully the impact on pupils’ learning, so that governors can hold leaders more effectively to account.

Inspection judgements

Effectiveness of leadership and management Good

• The headteacher embodies the school’s values, reflecting them in her interactions with staff, pupils and the school’s wider community. She is highly ambitious for all pupils. Staff are energised and motivated as a result. They work effectively to secure pupils’ exceptional personal development and good levels of achievement. For their part, pupils thrive as learners and flourish as individuals.
• Governors and leaders work effectively to sustain excellent standards of personal development. They seek to make improvements in pupils’ outcomes, including in English and mathematics. They know their school well and what needs to be done to develop it further. This year, for example, they supported and challenged the school to improve further pupils’ reading and writing. Governors build incrementally on previous improvement work, for example in problem solving in mathematics, so that it is sustained and becomes the norm.
• Governors and leaders do not plan the school’s improvement and development work precisely so that there are specific enough measures for success. This blunts the sharpness with which leaders and governors can evaluate incisively the impact of their work to develop teaching, learning and assessment.
• Leaders make effective use of the information they gather about the quality of teaching and pupils’ learning. Staff share effective practice and value their whole-staff and individual development opportunities. Pupils’ learning is enhanced, because teaching is consistently good as a result.
• Leaders ensure that the curriculum is rich and balanced. It provides pupils with a wide range of learning experiences that engage and motivate them to achieve well. The additional experiences pupils enjoy broaden their horizons and stimulate their interest in the world around them. For example, they receive visitors into school, go on visits and trips, including abroad, and take part in a range of clubs and activities.
• Leaders skilfully interweave pupils’ personal development and learning. The personal, health, social and economic programme is very well thought through. It infuses many aspects of the subject curriculum. Pupils develop the skills to work individually and together, and solve problems, for example through singing assemblies, reading and the forest school.
• Leaders ensure a consistent focus on pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. This supports the school’s work to promote diversity and meet its duties under the Equality Act 2010. Pupils develop the personal skills and understanding of their role in their community and society extremely well throughout their time at the school. They mature into caring, respectful, well-informed young people with a zest for life and ambition for their futures.
• Leaders make effective use of additional funding for disadvantaged pupils and the primary physical education and sport premium. Additional staffing and personalised learning opportunities promote pupils’ progress effectively. Pupils enjoy a wide range of sporting activities where they acquire specific sport-related skills, including team working. Pupils understand how sport contributes to their good physical and emotional health.

Governance of the school

• Governors have an unwavering commitment to the pupils in their care. They set about promoting their vision for the school by:
  • providing strong support to the headteacher and senior leaders and challenging them where they have any concerns about the school’s performance
  • knowing the school very well, making regular visits and find out for themselves how well the school is doing through discussion with pupils or by looking through books, for instance
  • using their skills to analyse achievement information to inform improvement planning, but planning and targets for success are not precise enough
  • ensuring that the school’s finances are in good order
  • ensuring that the staff development opportunities are linked to improving outcomes for pupils.

Safeguarding

• The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.
• Governors and leaders ensure that safer recruitment processes and pre-employment checks on staff are carried out and recorded carefully. They receive regular updates from the headteacher so that they can check that arrangements to keep pupils safe are working effectively.
• Leaders have thought through carefully how they can best help pupils develop the skills and knowledge they need to recognise risks to their well-being and how to avoid or minimise them. For example, pupils learn about bullying and the harm it causes. Staff are well trained to spot and report any concerns they might have about pupils’ well-being and ensure that pupils learn key information about how to keep safe, including when they use the internet.
• Leaders work with a range of teams to ensure that pupils get the support and help they need.
• The school curriculum, especially its personal development programme, helps pupils to learn how to keep well physically and emotionally. They learn to recognise risks to their well-being, including when using digital technologies.

Quality of teaching, learning and assessment Good

• Teachers plan learning well, using their very detailed knowledge of pupils’ needs and prior learning. They have good subject knowledge to underpin their planning. Teachers ensure that teaching assistants are well informed about planned learning activities and know what to do to support pupils’ learning.
• Staff have consistently high expectations of pupils’ conduct. As result, pupils find their lessons interesting and engage very positively in activities. Pupils work by themselves or with others on shared tasks enthusiastically. They are keen to talk about their learning and want to keep improving it. Pupils present their work well.
• Staff establish day-to-day routines for lessons and very positive relationships with their pupils. As a consequence, time is not wasted in lessons.
• Mostly teachers provide activities that build on pupils’ learning well. For example, during the inspection, pupils consolidated their measuring and calculation skills effectively by applying their classroom learning to measuring the circumference of trees to calculate their age. Even so, occasionally, staff do not plan challenge for learning with enough precision. Staff are adept at using pupils’ answers to their questions to spot when pupils have misunderstood or are struggling. They help pupils to correct their mistakes effectively through skilful use of modelling and further examples. For example, staff made effective use of pupils’ answers in a phonics lesson to identify where pupils had confused sounds, and, in their writing, to identify where they had written some of their letters back to front.
• Across the school, staff develop pupils’ skills in communication, literacy and numeracy effectively, because they have used analysis and checks on pupils’ progress to identify accurately weaker areas in their learning.
• Staff have increased the focus on reading widely, often and also for fun. This has engendered a real love of learning through reading and engages pupils’ imagination. Guided reading sessions are well planned and used effectively as a stimulus for writing and, as a result, pupils’ writing skills develop well. For example, pupils put themselves in the roles of different characters from a story, inferring how the character felt from their reading. They then wrote an interpretation of the part of the story through the eyes of the character, demonstrating how their inference skills had developed.
• Staff provide frequent opportunities for pupils to improve their speaking skills. For example, in art, pupils are given opportunities to express their own interpretation of well-known paintings, such as Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’.
• Teachers promote equality and diversity by modelling respect for others. They also develop pupils’ understanding of important concepts such as equality for women. In a lively singing assembly, for example, pupils linked their learning about the suffragette movement to a song.

Personal development, behaviour and welfare Outstanding

Personal development and welfare

• The school’s work to promote pupils’ personal development and welfare is outstanding. Pupils thrive on the wide range of opportunities they have to learn across the various areas of the curriculum, including access to many clubs and activities. They respond to staff encouragement and expectations very well.
• The very positive relationships established between staff and pupils enable them to become self-aware, thoughtful young people and assured, self-confident learners. Their thirst for learning confirms their understanding of the importance of their very positive attitudes to learning. It prepares them well for the next stage of their education.
• They take pride in their learning and are equally proud of the contribution they make to the positive and supportive environment of the school.
• Pupils show respect for others in the school. They also have many opportunities to meet young people through the many visits and trips that complement their learning in classrooms. As a result, they understand that others come from different backgrounds from their own. They are respectful of and curious about differences in others’ beliefs, cultural backgrounds and family arrangements. They value the opportunities they have to learn about others and themselves, for example meeting them in sporting competitions, singing and debating events, and trips abroad. They are thoughtful about their experiences. Their discussions with the inspector reinforced their deep interest in their wider community and society and the part they play in it.
• Pupils from the youngest age upwards show consideration and care for each other. They talk about how they help each other in their learning and help each other behave well. Older pupils are highly effective role models for younger pupils. Pupils have a very well-developed sense of right and wrong. They know, for example, that bullying is unacceptable and hurtful. They said, ‘it doesn’t really happen’ in the school, but, if they had any concerns, they are confident that staff would always listen to them and help them.
• Older pupils develop their understanding of bullying very well. They talk insightfully about how it is linked to issues such as racism in wider society.
• Pupils’ zest for life is sustained by their understanding of how to keep well physically and emotionally. The wide range of sporting activities available from the breakfast club before school to after-school activities are well supported.
• Pupils relish the opportunities to sing together and enjoy music and to explore the outdoor world in the forest school. The prayer life of the school complements these opportunities in enriching pupils’ spiritual development.
• Pupils know the care staff have for them helps them stay well, because they know they can always get help. They learn about healthy relationships, and this helps keep them safe. Pupils understand how digital technologies are an important part of life in modern Britain and learn how to keep themselves safe when they use the internet. They know for instance that they should not engage with people on the internet who they do not know personally, ‘because it might be someone different, who’s just pretending’.
• Pupils know they have an important part to play in the school and the wider community and are enthusiastic participants in both. Their personal development prepares them for their future roles in society very well.

Behaviour

• The behaviour of pupils is outstanding. Pupils are not just compliant with school rules: they actively contribute to the safe, healthy and joyful environment of the school. Their behaviour is exemplary during lessons and at lunch and breaktimes, including at the breakfast club. Pupils’ behaviour makes a strong contribution to the good progress they make.
• Staff engender in pupils a sense of self-worth and responsibility towards others that enables them to thrive. Pupils show care for each other and for the adults who work with them.
• Leaders have worked hard with pupils and families to improve attendance. Compared to a similar period from the beginning of the first term in the previous school year, pupils’ attendance has improved markedly and is currently above the national average. Rates of attendance for different year groups or groups of pupils are very similar, reflecting pupils’ very positives attitudes to the school.

Outcomes for pupils Good

• Current pupils make good progress. Well-focused learning in lessons and pupils’ very positive attitudes enable them to do well across a range of subjects, including English and mathematics. Pupils achieve well across key stages 1 and 2, with only small variations between year groups.
• In 2017, outcomes were below the national average for reading, writing and mathematics. Some improvements compared to performance in 2016, for example in mathematics at key stage 2, brought performance closer to the national average. Progress in writing at key stage 2 was well below the national average. However, the proportion of pupils achieving the higher standard was well above the national average. Variation in achievement in different years is closely linked to the differences in the school’s population.
• Work in pupils’ books confirms their own view that they learn well. Their work shows incremental growth in their knowledge and skills, as well as the development of their understanding of key ideas. Parents and carers who spoke to the inspector and almost all those who responded to Ofsted’s online questionnaire agree wholeheartedly.
• The good quality of teaching and assessment enables pupils who come from disadvantaged backgrounds to make the same good progress as other pupils. In some elements, disadvantaged pupils make more progress than other pupils.
• Careful planning that responds to the individual needs of pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities is effective. These pupils achieve well. For example, effective support and communication strategies help them focus well on their learning and promote their good progress.
• The most able pupils, including those who are from disadvantaged backgrounds, sustain good rates of progress over time. More challenging tasks engage them in honing higher-level skills.
• All pupils who are given additional support in a range of different ways to make sure they do not fall behind others respond positively and so gaps in their learning close.
• Reading is a growing strength of the school. Pupils enjoy reading for pleasure. They are able to tell each other and visitors about the books they are reading, including the context and why they like or dislike them, and give their own points of view about them. They read with increasing fluency and effective intonation, informed by their recognition and understanding of punctuation.
• In 2017, all pupils met the expected standard in the end of Year 1 phonics screening check. They and older pupils make good use of their phonics skills to sound out and try to make sense of unfamiliar words. This helps them access the wider curriculum more readily.
• Teachers plan learning that is well pitched to the different needs of pupils overall. This helps pupils make the good progress seen, especially in areas that the school has focused on most. For example, staff have emphasised in recent terms the quality of writing, the use and range of vocabulary, accurate spelling and grammar as well as problem solving in mathematics. Very high proportions of current pupils in both key stages 1 and 2 are making consistently good progress. However, the challenge for learning is not wholly consistent, and, as a result, pupils do not make all the progress they could.

Early years provision Good

• The early years setting here is led and managed well. Leaders use the information they gather from parents, alongside their own observations and checks on children’s development, effectively.
• Across different years, children enter the Reception class at developmental stages that vary between below that which is typical for their age to above. Outcomes at the end of the Reception vary too, reflecting the different cohorts on entry. They show that children whose starting points are below those of others for their age catch up quickly.
• Children who enter Reception with starting points above and well above those of others for their age continue to develop quickly across the full range of the early years curriculum and into Year 1 and beyond.
• Teachers help children learn effectively. Although there are missed moments to question and challenge children’s thinking further, staff plan carefully for their development. They know their children very well. As a result, children quickly develop their self-confidence as learners, showing the ability to concentrate and readiness to get help when they need it.
• Phonics teaching is effective. The successful teaching of phonics complements very well the school’s work to develop children’s early reading and writing skills. As a consequence, children are well prepared for the next stage of their education in key stage 1.
• Staff plan a range of activities to reflect children’s current needs to explore number and early writing development. Records of learning confirm that children make good progress. This supports them well as they move into key stage 1.
• Staff ensure that children’s interests and developmental needs are met through a wide range of experiences. For example, children used paint to add both colour and texture in decorating their ‘bugs’ and described the thinking behind their choices. For example, ‘I’m putting more paint on to make it softer.’
• Children make consistently good progress from their starting points, in particular in their personal development, literacy and communication skills. For example, boys and girls played together outside, using their imaginations and sharing their ideas to dress up ‘in character’ and re-interpret their class story for themselves.
• Staff record children’s development carefully and use the information to re-shape children’s learning and developmental targets accordingly. As a result, leaders have an accurate understanding of how effective the provision is. However, they do not make all the use they could of monitoring and evaluation to plan next steps of development with precision and quantifiable success criteria.
• Leaders ensure that all the required early years welfare arrangements are met and that the arrangements to safeguard children are secure. Children can then engage in their various activities safely. They too learn how to take care of themselves and others by moving around carefully and sensibly. They develop their personal and communication skills to understand and act on instructions that help to keep them safe, for example wearing hats in the hot sun and using sun cream.

School details

Unique reference number Local authority Inspection number 121538 North Yorkshire 10047596 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 Voluntary controlled 4 to 11 Mixed Number of pupils on the school roll 69 Appropriate authority The governing body Chair Headteacher Telephone number Website Email address Penny Aspey Mari Palmer 01944768238 http://www.settrington.n-yorks.sch.uk/ admin@settrington.n-yorks.sch.uk Date of previous inspection March 2016

Information about this school

• Settrington All Saints Voluntary Controlled Church of England Primary School provides education for boys and girls between the ages of 4 and 11. It is a smaller than the average-sized primary school. The school roll is increasing.
• Pupils attending the school come from the immediate locality and other villages in the surrounding area.
• Almost all pupils come from White British backgrounds. A small proportion of pupils come from a range of other ethnic backgrounds.
• The headteacher and current chair of the governing body have taken up their posts since the previous inspection. A small number of other staff have also been appointed since the previous inspection.
• The school is an active member of the Esk Valley teaching alliance. It is the research school for North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area.
• The school was last subject to a section 48 inspection of religious education in March 2016.

Information about this inspection

• The inspector talked with pupils from different age groups during lessons, lunchtimes and in a formal pupil meeting. He listened to several pupils from different age groups read. He also considered pupils’ learning in a broad sample of their work seen in their books.
• The inspector observed teaching and learning in all classes.
• The inspector considered the views of parents he spoke with at school and the responses made by parents to Ofsted’s online questionnaire Parent View. He also took into account the views expressed in Ofsted’s staff questionnaire.
• The inspector held meetings with the headteacher and other leaders in the school. He also met with governors and a representative of the local authority.
• The inspector considered a wide range of documents, in particular those regarding safeguarding, the curriculum and the schools’ records of pupils’ progress.

Inspection team

Chris Campbell, lead inspector

Ofsted Inspector