The Ursuline Academy Ilford

Overview: The Ursuline Academy Ilford is a school that achieves exceptionally well, with pupils making strong progress and achieving well above national averages in public examinations. The school has a strong focus on personal development and wellbeing, with a rich and comprehensive programme that reflects the school's ethos and welcomes pupils from all faiths and cultures.

Strengths:

• Pupils achieve very well across the breadth of subjects, building strong knowledge over time and talking with precision about what they have learned.
• Pupils benefit from a rich and comprehensive personal development programme that reflects the school's ethos and welcomes pupils from all faiths and cultures.
• Pupils develop a strong understanding of how to stay safe, learning about online risks, healthy relationships, mental health and the challenges they may face as they grow older.
• The school offers a wide range of clubs, trips and experiences that many pupils take part in, including disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs and/or disabilities.
• Careers education is of a high quality, with pupils receiving clear, impartial advice and taking part in work experience, meeting employers and visiting universities.

Areas to improve:

• The quality of the curriculum and teaching is not consistent across all subjects in the sixth form, meaning that students' achievement is not as high as it could be.
• Students' outcomes in public examinations have been below the national average for some time, although leaders understand the reasons for this and have recently introduced new courses, clearer entry guidance and stronger study support.
• The school needs to ensure that its strategies to improve how well students learn and achieve in the post-16 provision become embedded.

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.