The Flying Bull Academy

Overview: The Flying Bull Academy is a school that has made significant improvements in recent years, with a new leadership team in place. While the school has made progress, it still requires improvement in several areas.

Strengths:

• Pupils are benefiting from recent significant changes at the school, with a genuine sense of improvement and a sense of belonging.
• Pupils are well-prepared for life in modern Britain, developing an understanding of a range of faiths, cultures, and different types of families.
• The school's new leadership uses its well-informed understanding of high-quality primary education effectively, with leaders' clear, thoughtful actions resulting in the gradual improvement of the quality of teaching.
• The school's phonics programme is delivered well, with many pupils becoming fluent and confident readers quickly.
• The school's early writing and mathematics focus is having a positive impact, especially in younger year groups.

Areas to improve:

• Pupils have not achieved as well as they should by the time they leave the school, with weaknesses in the curriculum and teaching resulting in pupils having gaps in important aspects of their knowledge and skills.
• Attendance remains too low, with persistent absence for some groups still high.
• The quality of work in books remains variable in different classes.
• The school's recent results in national tests in Year 6 show pupils achieve well below the national average.
• The school's curriculum and teaching are inconsistent, with some staff's expectations of what pupils should achieve unclear and lack ambition.
• The school's early years provision requires improvement, with staff sometimes missing opportunities to maximise children's learning and language development.
• The school's support for pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) does not always meet their specific needs well enough.
• The school's leadership and governance require improvement, with leaders' actions not focused sufficiently well on ensuring that all pupils gain the essential knowledge and skills across the curriculum.
• The school's personal development and wellbeing programme requires improvement, with changes at an early stage and not yet having the impact that leaders intend.

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.