Echt School

Overview

Education Scotland inspectors visited Echt School and Nursery Class in January 2024, finding a school where staff maintain "positive, caring and respectful relationships" with children. The report highlights effective leadership and a strong sense of belonging, noting that the school has the capacity to continue improving without further inspection visits.

Strengths

• Staff foster a "secure sense of belonging" where children feel "valued as part of the school community."
• The headteacher and nursery manager provide "effective leadership" that supports staff and improves outcomes.
• Leaders are "proactive in ensuring children receive tailored support," helping them attain and achieve well.
• Nursery practitioners offer experiences that support children to be "creative, imaginative and problem solve during play."
• Children are "confident, articulate" and have a "strong understanding of their rights," with meaningful opportunities to share views.

Areas to improve

• Senior leaders should support staff to have a "deeper level of involvement in monitoring and leading change" to increase ownership of improvement priorities.
• Nursery practitioners should develop approaches to "planning and checking children’s learning" to gather robust information on progress.
• Senior leaders should support staff to develop a "consistent shared understanding of high-quality learning and teaching" to ensure more active learning experiences.

Safeguarding

The report states that the evaluation for "Ensuring wellbeing, equality and inclusion" is "very good" for both the primary stages and the nursery class.