St Colum's Primary School

Overview

This follow-up inspection confirms that St Colum’s Primary School has successfully addressed the important area for improvement identified in 2015 regarding middle management. The report concludes that the school now demonstrates the capacity to identify and bring about improvement in the interest of all learners, with strategic leadership and action rated as good.

Strengths

• Strategic leadership and middle management are now “good”, with the principal and governors providing “close and highly effective oversight”.
• Leadership at all levels uses data and evaluation to “identifies the individual needs of the children and tracks their progress with accuracy”.
• Co-ordinators for literacy, numeracy, and ICT are “growing in confidence” and embedding effective monitoring systems.
• The team approach reflects a “distributive approach to leadership”, ensuring capacity building and sustainability.
• Lessons observed were “consistently very good”, and children’s written work shows improvement, particularly in “good quality extended writing”.

Areas to improve

• The school must focus on “embedding further the self-evaluation processes” to drive improvement in future prioritised areas.

Safeguarding

The report does not contain specific commentary or findings regarding safeguarding arrangements.