Alfred Lord Tennyson School

Overview: The Alfred Lord Tennyson School has made significant progress since its amalgamation in September 2023, becoming a cohesive community with many improvements, including to the curriculum, teaching, behaviour, phonics, and provision for pupils with SEND. However, the school still requires improvement in the quality of education.

Strengths:

• Pupils are well looked after and kept safe, with a well-tailored support system that enables them to behave well and work hard.
• Pupils with SEND achieve well, with their needs fully understood and catered for.
• The school's phonics programme is systematic and well-organised, with pupils remembering sounds and using them to decode new words.
• The school's programme for personal, social and health education (PSHE) prepares pupils well for life in modern Britain, with pupils knowledgeable about a wide range of religions and cultures.

Areas to improve:

• The school's curriculum is at an early stage of implementation and does not make clear which are the most important parts that pupils need to know and commit to their long-term memory, resulting in inconsistencies in how well pupils recall what they have previously learned.
• In some subjects, curriculums have been developed by bringing different resources together, but the school has not ensured that these resources align precisely to form one, coherent, progressive curriculum, resulting in disjointedness in what pupils learn.
• In some lessons, pupils are expected to complete a series of tasks in a specific order, with some pupils receiving work that is too easy or too hard for them, and some pupils not getting to undertake some of the tasks that are designed to help them think more deeply about what they have learned.

Safeguarding: The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.