Belswains Primary School

Overview

Belswains Primary School continues to be a good school, where pupils, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities, “learn and achieve well.” The report highlights a positive environment where pupils “feel safe and are kept safe,” behave very well, and develop trusting relationships with staff who provide high levels of care and nurture.

Strengths

• Pupils’ learning is enriched by a wide range of in-school experiences, visits, and clubs, fostering wider interests.
• Staff teach phonics with precision from the start of early years, ensuring children quickly learn to read and become “confident and fluent readers.”
• Teachers in well-established subjects break learning into manageable chunks and use effective assessment to ensure pupils “remember what they have studied and can apply it to new learning well.”
• Leaders have successfully managed considerable growth in pupil numbers and redesigned the curriculum to better enrich pupils’ experiences of the wider world.
• Governors work well with school leaders, challenging them to ensure a good understanding of the quality of education.

Areas to improve

• In a few subjects, teachers lack clarity on the important skills and knowledge to teach and do not check pupils’ understanding well enough.
• Leaders should ensure teachers know curriculum expectations and that the curriculum is implemented as designed, so that pupils learn well in these areas.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective, with staff keeping up to date with training and leaders acting “quickly and diligently” on concerns to ensure pupils receive necessary support.