Al-Ashraf Secondary School for Girls

Overview: Al-Ashraf Secondary School for Girls is a non-selective, independent all-girls school with a Muslim religious ethos. The school has met all the independent school standards and has a strong standard in attendance and behaviour, personal development and wellbeing, and inclusion. The school's leaders are highly reflective and committed to embedding improvements and moving forward with new priorities.

Strengths:

• Attendance and behaviour are strong, with leaders carefully tracking pupils' absence and lateness and providing early support and intervention for individual pupils.
• Personal development and wellbeing are strong, with leaders creating an extensive yet coherent personal development programme that provides pupils with a set of deliberately selected wider opportunities and experiences.
• Inclusion is strong, with leaders ensuring there is a clear process for identifying pupils' needs early and providing effective support to pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities.
• The school environment is calm and purposeful, with pupils being welcoming to visitors and always well mannered and respectful.
• Pupils benefit from an extensive range of wider experiences and opportunities, including the annual enrichment week, visits from renowned artists, and working with local primary schools.

Areas to improve:

• Leaders should ensure that teaching precisely and consistently checks pupils' understanding of what they have been taught and that this information is used to carefully plan the next steps for pupils' learning.
• Leaders should ensure that the professional learning programme is more extensive to carefully match the needs of individual staff while also supporting whole school priorities.
• Leaders, including governors and the proprietor, should further strengthen their strategic oversight of the school's performance in order to achieve consistently strong standards across all areas of the school's work.

Safeguarding: The safeguarding standards are met, with leaders and/or those responsible for governance and oversight fulfilling their specific responsibilities and having established an open culture in which safeguarding is everyone's responsibility and concerns are actively identified, acted upon and managed.