Impact Independent School

Overview: Impact Independent School is a school where pupils are welcomed each morning by staff who help them feel safe, calm and ready for learning. The school has a calm and supportive environment where pupils can learn, and relationships between staff and pupils are consistently positive. However, the school has not met the expected standards in the quality of education provided and the quality of leadership and management.

Strengths:

• Pupils are made safer and feel safe due to the school's open culture of safeguarding.
• Leaders create a calm and supportive environment in which pupils can learn.
• Relationships between staff and pupils are a strength, with pupils confident that staff respond fairly when issues arise.
• Staff understand behaviour policies well and apply them consistently.
• Pupils have access to a broad range of qualifications through the school's ambitious curriculum.
• Pupils benefit from mentoring, pastoral support, targeted interventions and carefully planned transitions.
• Staff express high confidence in leaders, who give thoughtful consideration of staff wellbeing and provide professional development opportunities.

Areas to improve:

• The achievement of many pupils is inconsistent, with too many pupils not securing the knowledge they need to make steady progress.
• Gaps caused by disrupted education, irregular attendance or missed lessons are not addressed well enough.
• There is no whole-school approach to help pupils catch up on learning missed because of absence or disrupted prior education.
• Reading provision remains underdeveloped, with new systems for checking pupils' reading and planning the right support not used as well as they should be.
• Leaders have not fully addressed weaknesses in assessment, and work to improve reading provision remains at a very early stage.
• The proprietor does not ensure that the teaching at the school shows a good understanding of the aptitudes, needs and prior attainments of the pupils, and does not ensure that these are taken into account in the planning of lessons.

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.