St Joseph's Primary School

Overview

This sustaining improvement inspection was conducted while teachers engaged in industrial action, refusing to cooperate with inspectors. Consequently, the ETI could not evaluate classroom teaching or fully assess safeguarding practices, limiting the scope of the findings. Despite these constraints, the report highlights that senior leaders and governors provided effective strategic leadership, with evidence showing sustained improvement in literacy and numeracy outcomes.

Strengths

• Senior and middle leaders provide "high-level strategic leadership and self-evaluation," with improvement work since the last inspection being "highly effective."
• Planning for non-narrative writing shows "significant breadth and depth," using children’s everyday experiences to produce "very high quality, thought-provoking and carefully crafted written work."
• Numeracy planning includes specific strategies to support understanding, with ICT used "very effectively" to underpin learning.
• Monitoring of individual learning is "frequent, detailed and robust," enabling children to make "excellent progress."
• Children demonstrate "very high levels of fluency and expression" in reading and exhibit "exemplary" behaviour, describing the school as "very welcoming and friendly."

Areas to improve

• The report does not identify specific areas for improvement but notes the ETI was "unable to evaluate fully the quality of learning and teaching within the classrooms."
• The ETI was also "unable to evaluate fully the outworking of the arrangements for safeguarding in the school" due to staff non-cooperation.

Safeguarding

The school provided evidence that safeguarding arrangements "reflect broadly the guidance from the Department of Education," and children reported feeling "very happy and safe," though the ETI could not fully evaluate the practical implementation of these measures.