Tashbar of Edgware

Overview

Tashbar of Edgware is an independent day school for boys aged three to eleven with an Orthodox Jewish ethos. The inspection judges the school as ‘Good’ across all categories, noting a significant improvement from its previous ‘Requires improvement’ rating. The report highlights a ‘warm, close-knit community ethos’ where staff form ‘nurturing, supportive bonds’ with pupils, fostering a safe and respectful environment.

Strengths

• Pupils behave ‘responsibly and respectfully’, playing cooperatively and trusting staff to resolve problems ‘fairly’.
• The school places ‘high importance on reading’, using a structured phonics approach that enables pupils to become ‘fluent and confident readers quickly’.
• The curriculum is organised effectively so that subject knowledge ‘builds sequentially from the early years onwards’, allowing pupils to build on previous content.
• Support for pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) is ‘effective’, with ‘purposeful collaborative working’ ensuring quick identification and appropriate adaptations.
• Personal development is ‘well thought through’, promoting understanding of life in modern-day Britain and teaching age-appropriate information about healthy relationships and online safety.

Areas to improve

• The school must ensure that the curriculum makes ‘essential knowledge explicit’ and that staff check pupils remember it, rather than focusing too much on activities.
• Staff must have the expertise to identify writing weaknesses and address them ‘swiftly’, as errors in pupils’ writing sometimes persist for too long.

Safeguarding

The report states that ‘the arrangements for safeguarding are effective’.