Franche Primary School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 1 April 2025

Pupils are happy and friendly. They enjoy school and attend regularly. The school ensures that everyone understands its golden rule to, 'treat other people as you would like them to treat you'. Its ethos focuses on care and nurture. Pupils feel safe and relationships with staff are positive and supportive. This starts in the two-year-old provision, where adults are attentive and responsive to children's needs. Following an unsettled period, the school has begun to address previous weaknesses evident in the below average results in published data. Some of these changes, particularly in reading, have been successful. However, the school's expectations of what pupils should achieve are not consistently high enough. This results in variation in pupils' learning across subjects. Pupils behave well. They know that adults and pupils, including the 'safeguarding action squad (SAS)', are there to support them at all times. This helps pupils to feel safe at school. Most parents and carers are positive about the school's caring and supportive culture. Pupils enjoy the range of clubs, visits and events the school offers. They readily take on additional roles and responsibilities, such as house captains and reading champions, to develop their leadership skills.

What the school should improve

• The school has not addressed some weaknesses in pupils' spelling, handwriting and punctuation, which hinders the quality of writing in English and other subjects. Additionally, older pupils have limited opportunities to write independently or at length because staff's expectations of them are too low. The school should ensure that the curriculum supports pupils to write with increasing accuracy and confidence over time.
• There are inconsistencies in the delivery of the curriculum in some foundation subjects and some areas of learning in the early years. This is due to insufficient curriculum coverage and limited expectations of what pupils should achieve. This restricts pupils' ability to secure key knowledge and deepen their understanding so that they achieve well. The school should ensure that the curriculum provides sufficient breadth and depth to enable pupils to be successful in all subjects, including in the early years.
• The school's approach to checking pupils' learning is not precise enough. This means that misconceptions and gaps in pupils' learning are not consistently identified or addressed. The school should ensure that staff check pupils' knowledge and work systematically to raise outcomes and ensure that pupils know and remember more over time.
• Some pupils with SEND do not have their academic needs identified swiftly or accurately enough. This has an impact on pupils' achievement, especially in English and mathematics. The school should ensure that pupils' needs are identified early and that learning plans identify the support needed to learn well across the curriculum.

Read the full Ofsted report (opens in a new tab)