Read Academy Education

Overview: Read Academy Education is a good independent school where pupils are very happy to come to school, describing it as a family where everybody looks after each other. Leaders have high expectations for all pupils, and the school provides a broad and ambitious curriculum.

Strengths:

• Pupils are very happy to come to school and feel safe.
• Leaders have high expectations for all pupils and provide a broad and ambitious curriculum.
• The school provides a culture of mutual respect and reflection, with a behaviour policy that rewards good behaviour and gives time for reflection when behaviour does not meet expectations.
• Pupils are well prepared for the next stage of their education or the world of work, with a wide range of subjects and extra-curricular activities.

Areas to improve:

• In some subjects, the sequence of the curriculum is determined by the curriculum strands rather than by the subjects themselves, which means that subject knowledge is not built up sequentially and pupils struggle to build their knowledge to attempt more complex tasks.
• The books that pupils take home to read are not always sharply matched to their stage in the phonics programme, which reduces how well pupils develop their accuracy and fluency in reading.

Safeguarding: The arrangements for safeguarding are effective, with leaders making sure that all staff receive safeguarding training each term, and secure systems in place to record concerns.