St Crispin's School

Overview: St Crispin's School is a high-performing school that has made significant improvements in recent years. The school has a strong focus on inclusion, attendance, and behaviour, and has a highly effective approach to safeguarding.

Strengths:

• Strong attendance and behaviour, with pupils' overall attendance above national figures for several years.
• Pupils' behaviour is impressive, with calm and respectful conduct, and relationships between pupils and staff are positive.
• Inclusion is a strong standard, with leaders' passionate commitment to inclusion underpinning the school's 'excellence for all' ethos.
• Personal development and wellbeing is at the heart of the school, with a comprehensive and age-appropriate curriculum that meets all statutory requirements.
• Careers education, information, advice and guidance are a significant strength, with high-quality work experience, strong links with employers and alumni, and impartial guidance.

Areas to improve:

• Teaching is not yet consistently effective across the curriculum, with some pupils' prior gaps in learning not as effectively addressed.
• Leaders should continue to build on their post-16 provision, ensuring that higher proportions of students achieve the top academic grades.
• Leaders should ensure that teaching is consistently effective across the curriculum by providing teacher strategies to narrow gaps in disadvantaged pupils' knowledge and skills and support pupils who are at an earlier stage of reading.

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.