Northallerton School & Sixth Form College

Overview: Northallerton School & Sixth Form College has been judged to be an "Exceptional" school, with leaders and governors working above the standard expected of them. The school has made significant improvements in attendance, behaviour, and curriculum implementation, and has a strong focus on safeguarding.

Strengths:

• The school has a strong culture of safeguarding, with leaders and governors fulfilling their responsibilities and establishing an open culture where safeguarding is everyone's responsibility.
• Attendance at the school is improving, with the number of persistently absent pupils reducing, although it remains below national averages.
• Pupils behave well across the school, with most enjoying their learning and bullying being rare.
• The school has a well-planned and ambitious curriculum, with leaders regularly checking its implementation and making informed changes.
• Staff have good subject knowledge and are well-trained to adapt the curriculum for pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities.
• The school has a strong focus on inclusion, with leaders quickly and accurately identifying pupils who may have additional needs and providing effective support.
• The school has a new senior leadership structure with clearly defined roles, and leaders at all levels make decisions that are in the best interest of pupils.
• The school has a clear structure to support curriculum and teaching, and governors meet their statutory duties and apply their skills and experience effectively.

Areas to improve:

• The school needs to ensure that actions to raise pupils' achievement are robustly embedded, so that pupils are well-prepared and this is reflected in their attainment and progress in national tests at the end of key stage 4.
• The school needs to ensure that the teaching of the revised curriculum is of a consistently high quality across subjects and year groups, so that pupils make strong progress as they move through the school.
• The school needs to sustain its work to improve the attendance of groups and individuals, so that pupil attendance continues to positively increase.

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.