Jewell Academy Bournemouth

Overview

Jewell Academy is described as a school that “sits at the heart of its diverse community” with a “nurturing and caring ethos.” Inspectors found that pupils enjoy school, viewing it as a “safe, happy place” where they “rise to” high expectations and achieve well. The report highlights a “calm and purposeful” atmosphere with high standards of conduct and an ambitious curriculum designed to remove barriers to learning.

Strengths

• Staff warmly welcome families, helping pupils, including many who speak English as an additional language, to “settle quickly.”
• The “personal development programme is a strength,” offering activities like the ‘Jewell Promise’ and ‘careers days’ that promote an “aspirational culture.”
• Teachers provide “clear modelling of new learning” and use effective questioning to help pupils make links with existing knowledge.
• Reading is a “central focus” from the pre-school stage, with most pupils learning the phonics code well through strong teaching of letters and sounds.
• The school promotes leadership skills and cultural understanding, ensuring pupils are “well prepared for life in modern Britain.”

Areas to improve

• In some subjects, teachers do not use assessment information well enough to match work to pupils’ abilities, leading to tasks that are “too easy or too difficult.”
• A small number of pupils who have fallen behind in reading are given books not “closely matched to the sounds they know,” hindering their ability to read unfamiliar words independently.
• Persistent absence for disadvantaged pupils remains high, causing them to miss out on “important learning opportunities.”

Safeguarding

The report states that “the arrangements for safeguarding are effective.”