St Mary Magdalen's Catholic Primary School

Overview: Pupils thoroughly enjoy attending this happy school, where they appreciate the caring relationships with staff and each other. However, the school requires improvement in the quality of education and leadership and management.

Strengths:

• Pupils behave well in lessons and move around the school in a calm and orderly manner.
• Staff understand how to positively manage pupils' behaviour and use consistent, nurturing strategies to support pupils who struggle to regulate their emotions.
• The school prioritises teaching pupils to read from the moment they join, with staff delivering the phonics programme well and providing targeted support to pupils who find reading difficult.
• Pupils have opportunities to develop their talents through attending a range of extra-curricular activities, including music, singing, and sports clubs.
• The personal, social, health and economic education curriculum is delivered well and is woven into the wider school life.

Areas to improve:

• The school has not finalised the identification and order of key knowledge that pupils should learn from the early years to Year 6, making it difficult for teachers to deliver these subject curriculums well.
• The curriculum in some subjects is not implemented consistently well to enable pupils to make connections with, and to build on, prior knowledge.
• In many subjects, the school does not have assessment systems in place to check whether pupils have learned the intended curriculum knowledge, making it difficult for staff to identify gaps in pupils' knowledge.

Safeguarding: The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.