St Mary's Catholic Primary School

Overview: St Mary's Catholic Primary School is a warm and welcoming school with high expectations of pupils' achievement. Pupils demonstrate good behaviour and attitudes, and show a strong sense of character, with a focus on kindness, respect, and equality.

Strengths:

• Pupils demonstrate the school's mission of 'live, love, believe' and show kindness, respect, and equality.
• Pupils behave well and are polite and courteous to visitors.
• The school has a highly comprehensive and purposeful programme for pupils' wider development, enabling them to grow into well-rounded individuals.
• The school has embedded its phonics programme successfully, with most pupils learning and recalling letter sounds well by the end of key stage 1.
• Pupils read with fluency and confidence, and are motivated to read more challenging texts.

Areas to improve:

• In some subjects, and in the early years, the important knowledge pupils should learn is not always defined as clearly as it could be.
• At times, the systems in place to check and evaluate what pupils know and can do are not used as effectively as they could be.

Safeguarding: The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.