Cloughwood Academy

Overview: Cloughwood Academy is a school that has made significant improvements in recent years, particularly in attendance and behaviour, and has established a strong culture of safeguarding. The school has a calm atmosphere and pupils feel safe and included in all aspects of school life.

Strengths:

• Attendance and behaviour are strong, with leaders working tirelessly to establish positive relationships with parents and carers.
• The school has highly effective strategies in place to support pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities.
• Inclusion is strong, with leaders having introduced the 'Cloughwood profile' to help staff identify and address pupils' needs.
• The school provides an extensive range of wider opportunities, including trips, enrichment activities, and learning experiences outside of the classroom.
• The careers information, education and guidance programme ensures that students are being better prepared for their next steps.

Areas to improve:

• Leaders should refine the curriculum to be even more specific about the key knowledge that they want pupils to know in some subjects to help deepen pupils’ understanding.
• Leaders should ensure that staff are provided with the support they need to deliver the phonics curriculum with greater precision to help pupils make even better progress in securing and applying their reading knowledge.
• Trust and school leaders should check on the quality of the curriculum and teaching more closely to ensure that subjects are consistently and highly effectively taught to promote even higher expectations for pupils’ achievement.

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.