St Teresa's Catholic Primary School

Overview

St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School has “taken effective action to maintain the standards identified at the previous inspection.” The report confirms that pupils are “happy to attend school” and “achieve well” within an inclusive community where values such as kindness and respect are well understood. Despite recent leadership changes, the multi-academy trust has provided “much needed stability,” ensuring that the focus on children remains central to decision-making.

Strengths

• Pupils celebrate the “inclusive nature of this school community,” where different cultures are actively celebrated and everyone feels welcome.
• The school has developed a “clear curriculum” that is “carefully sequenced” to help pupils build a secure body of knowledge and skills.
• Phonics is “taught well by staff with appropriate expertise,” with effective interventions in place to support reading confidence and fluency.
• Staff provide “adept training” and careful identification of needs for pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND).
• Pupils are given meaningful opportunities to develop leadership skills through roles such as school council members and ‘buddies’ for younger children.

Areas to improve

• The school needs to develop assessment practices so that checks on pupils’ understanding are “consistently as precise” across all subjects, ensuring misconceptions are picked up quickly.
• Staff must ensure a “consistently sharp link between the activities planned in lessons and the intended learning” to help pupils understand and recall their learning more effectively.
• In some instances, learning for pupils with SEND is not “consistently adapted well enough,” meaning some pupils cannot access activities as readily as they could.

Safeguarding

The report states that “the arrangements for safeguarding are effective.”