Baildon Glen Primary School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 7 May 2025

Baildon Glen Primary School has recently gone through a period of rapid improvement. The trust and leadership team have made many positive changes to the school. This includes increasing curriculum ambition and raising expectations of pupils' behaviour. The curriculum is now broad, ambitious and well designed. However, some other changes are new, and leaders recognise there is more to do. These positive curriculum changes have not had enough time for their impact to be realised in pupils' published outcomes. Pupils are happy and safe at school. Many pupils are respectful, kind and considerate of others. Pupils know their teachers care about them. They say that bullying is rare, but that when it happens, teachers sort it out. Recent changes to the way staff deal with behaviour is reducing the frequency of incidents. However, too many pupils continue to disrupt the learning of others and make inappropriate language choices. When this happens, some pupils find this upsetting and worrying. The recent introduction of the school's 'six ways to grow' recognises pupils' perseverance and effort with their learning. Through the behaviour points and stickers that they can earn, pupils are increasingly proud of their achievements. This is also reflected in the progress pupils are making with their learning.

What the school should improve

• The school's checks on pupils' learning in some wider curriculum subjects are not fully in place. As a result, the school does not have a clear picture of how well pupils have learned and remembered the intended curriculum. This also means that gaps in pupils' knowledge are not identified or addressed well enough. The school needs to refine its assessment approaches and ensure that teaching routinely and systematically identifies and addresses gaps in pupils' knowledge.
• The writing tasks that the school sets pupils sometimes require them to apply skills and knowledge, such as sentence construction, that they have not secured. This hampers the quality of pupils' writing. The school should ensure that the school gives sufficient focus to sentence construction and the foundational knowledge pupils need to be able to write with greater fluency and accuracy.
• Expectations of pupils' written work are not consistently high enough. As a result, there are some inconsistencies in the quality of pupils' written work and handwriting. The school should ensure that its high expectations of pupils' written work are consistently understood and applied by all staff, in all curriculum areas.
• The behaviour of pupils during lessons and at breaktimes is not consistently well addressed. When this happens, pupils' learning is disrupted, and some pupils can be worried during social times. The school should ensure that all staff are supported to implement its revised approach to managing pupils' behaviour consistently well so that learning is not disrupted.
• The school's attendance strategies are not reaching some pupils as well as others. For example, persistent absence for some disadvantaged pupils is too high. This means that some pupils miss out on important learning. Leaders must refine and focus their approaches to working with parents to reduce persistent absence rapidly for disadvantaged pupils so that they can benefit fully from the curriculum improvements that the school has made.

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