Mickley First School

Overview

Mickley First School is judged as ‘Good’ across all inspection categories, including the quality of education, behaviour, and leadership. The report describes a school with a ‘strong sense of community and inclusion’ where staff foster ‘strong relationships with parents and carers’. Pupils are ‘eager to learn’ and benefit from a curriculum that is ‘well sequenced’ in most subjects, ensuring they build knowledge cumulatively.

Strengths

• The school ‘prioritises reading’, with staff teaching phonics well and ensuring books align with taught sounds, resulting in pupils who are ‘fluent and accurate readers’.
• Leaders have implemented a curriculum that ‘matches the breadth and ambition of the national curriculum’, with strong sequencing in subjects like geography.
• The early years provision is a ‘warm and nurturing space’ with a ‘well-planned and sequenced curriculum’ that prepares children effectively for Year 1.
• The school ‘identifies, assesses and meets the needs of pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities successfully’, providing safe spaces and specialist support.
• Staff value collaborative opportunities within the trust and appreciate that leaders ‘consider their workload when introducing new initiatives’.

Areas to improve

• Curriculum plans in some subject areas are ‘not sufficiently personalised to meet the needs of the school’, leading to inconsistencies in delivery.
• The school should ‘prioritise the development of oracy across the curriculum’ as many pupils struggle to explain their thinking.
• Staff must be ‘consistent in terms of expectations of behaviour for learning’ to address low-level disruption and disengagement.

Safeguarding

The report states that ‘the arrangements for safeguarding are effective’.