St Mary's Catholic Primary School, Ulverston

Overview: St Mary's Catholic Primary School, Ulverston, is a well-performing school that has been rated as 'Exceptional' by Ofsted. The school provides a welcoming and supportive environment for pupils, with a strong focus on personal development and wellbeing. Pupils achieve well, with a significant proportion meeting the expected standard in reading, writing and mathematics.

Strengths:

• Leaders have planned an early years curriculum that is well structured and focused on the essential knowledge children need.
• Staff teach the curriculum through a range of imaginative and engaging tasks, developing children's thinking, problem-solving and reasoning skills.
• The school has a strong focus on developing children's communication and language, with a highly effective support system for children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND).
• Leaders have a clear focus on developing reading in the early years, with children starting to recognise letters and the sounds that letters represent.
• The school's relationships and sex education programme ensures that pupils have a detailed and age-appropriate knowledge about what makes a healthy relationship.

Areas to improve:

• Leaders should ensure that all staff consistently and effectively address basic errors in pupils' handwriting, spelling and punctuation so that these do not persist.
• Leaders should ensure that all teachers apply consistent expectations of behaviour in lessons so that pupils remain focused and do not distract others from their learning.

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.