St Hilda's Church of England High School

Overview: St Hilda's Church of England High School is a school that has made significant improvements in recent years, with a strong focus on attendance, behaviour, and safeguarding. The school has a positive culture and a calm and purposeful learning atmosphere, with pupils feeling happy and safe.

Strengths:

• Attendance is consistently high, with a strong culture of promoting attendance across all phases of school.
• Pupils behave well in lessons and around school, creating a calm and purposeful learning atmosphere.
• Leaders respond quickly and thoughtfully to the rising number of pupils joining the school with special educational needs and/or disabilities.
• The school has strengthened its support for pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities, with clear systems in place to understand pupils' vulnerabilities.
• Pupils feel extremely happy and safe in school, with behaviour across the school being exemplary.

Areas to improve:

• The school should ensure that the choice of learning activities and work to improve pupils' extended writing are embedded securely across school so that pupils consistently develop their skills and knowledge across subjects.
• The school should use the evidence that they gather about pupils' learning to help them to make astute decisions about how the curriculum and teaching need to adapt and improve.
• The school should continue to embed the careers programme to ensure that students are very well prepared for later life and proceed to highly appropriate education, employment or training.
• The school should sharpen how they monitor and oversee which pupils benefit from the wider curriculum offer so that they can better tailor the programme to promote personal development, ensuring that pupils, including disadvantaged pupils, benefit and participate fully.

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.