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St Mark's Catholic Primary School

Birmingham, B42 1NU · Birmingham · primary school

Ofsted: Not judged · 2025 Mixed Primary Roman Catholic
OfstedNot judged
Pupils208
FSM43.3%
KS2 expected60%
AI summary of the Ofsted report Inspected 2025-03-14 · Tap to collapse

Generated by AI from the official inspection report — not written by Ofsted or SchoolsGPT staff. Always read the full Ofsted PDF before relying on this summary.

Overview: St Mark's Catholic Primary School is a vibrant and caring school community where pupils see school as a happy and safe place. They enjoy coming to school and attend well. The school has developed a broad and ambitious curriculum and puts pupils' personal development at the front and centre of its work.

Strengths:

  • The school is a vibrant and caring school community where pupils see school as a happy and safe place.
  • Pupils are polite, kind, and diligent, and know how they should behave in lessons and at breaktime and lunchtime.
  • The school has developed a broad and ambitious curriculum and has identified the important knowledge that pupils need to learn.
  • The school has put reading at its heart and pupils read and listen to a wide range of texts across genres.
  • The school has constructed a coherent and high-quality personal development programme for pupils.

Areas to improve:

  • The school has not ensured that staff use assessment effectively to check pupils' understanding, identify misconceptions, and deepen their thinking.
  • The school does not monitor or evaluate the impact of its work to improve the quality of education consistently well.
  • The school should ensure that all teachers have the pedagogical expertise to respond to individual pupils' learning needs, including those with SEND, so that they all learn the curriculum well.

Safeguarding: The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.

Open official report ↗

Catchment / designated area

LA-wide default is distance-based (nearest-school priority), but individual community schools can and do define their own catchment area on top — varies school by school, not a single LA-wide rule.

Source: Birmingham admissions policy

Ofsted judgement breakdown (2025-02-04)

Overall effectiveness
No overall grade — Ofsted paused single-headline judgements from September 2024
Quality of education
Good
Behaviour and attitudes
Good
Personal development
Good
Effectiveness of leadership and management
Good
Safeguarding is effective?
Yes
Early years provision (where applicable)
Good

What the entrance test covers

One shared test for all eight Birmingham grammar schools, arranged by the King Edward VI Foundation and provided by GL Assessment: two papers of about an hour each, covering English comprehension, verbal reasoning, mathematics, and non-verbal/spatial reasoning. Answers are multiple-choice and scores are age-standardised. There is no fixed pass mark — after the test, each school sets its own qualifying and priority score thresholds, so the same result can qualify a child for some of the eight schools but not others. Camp Hill schools have historically had the highest cutoffs. Register once (online, via the West Midlands Grammar Schools website, historically by late June of Year 5); the single result is used by every Birmingham grammar school named on your Common Application Form.

Similar schools nearby

Same area, prioritising the same phase — useful for shortlisting alternatives.

Dorrington Academy 0.4 mi · Primary · Outstanding Birmingham, B42 1QR Ferndale Primary School 0.4 mi · Primary · Good Birmingham, B43 5QF Hamstead Primary School 0.7 mi · Primary · Good Birmingham, B43 5BE Calshot Primary School 0.7 mi · Primary · Good Birmingham, B42 2BY Holy Name Catholic Primary School 0.9 mi · Primary Birmingham, B43 6LN Grestone Academy 0.9 mi · Primary · Good Birmingham, B20 1ND

Data sourced from GIAS, Ofsted and official Birmingham admissions publications. Figures can change year to year — always confirm with the school before applying.

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