Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School, a Voluntary Academy

Overview: Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School is a close-knit, caring and vibrant school where staff have built a community with kindness and compassion at its core. Pupils are polite and considerate to each other, staff and visitors, and live the school's values through their actions. The school is a happy place to be, with pupils beaming with pride when they talk about their school.

Strengths:

• The school has a culture of mutual respect and togetherness, with leaders leading the school with integrity and fortitude.
• Staff are valued and their ideas are listened to, with a culture of kindness and compassion at its core.
• Pupils benefit from an effective personal, social and health education curriculum, which equips them with the knowledge they need to navigate their changing world.
• The school has prioritised reading, with staff delivering the phonics curriculum effectively and pupils learning to decode texts and read with increasing accuracy and fluency.
• The school has designed an effective curriculum in the early years, which sets out clearly what children should be learning and helps them develop and extend their vocabulary.

Areas to improve:

• The school does not use the information it gathers about gaps in pupils' knowledge when they join the school partway through key stage 2 effectively, which means that some pupils do not catch up as quickly as they might and do not gain the knowledge and skills they need for their next steps in education.
• In a small number of subjects, the curriculum does not identify the prior knowledge that pupils should have learned and the important foundational knowledge that they will need for future learning.

Safeguarding: The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.