Fred Nicholson School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 11 March 2025

Pupils are proud to be part of Fred Nicholson School. Some pupils have enjoyed visiting the new building, including signing steel work so that they will be part of the school forever. Pupils develop strong social skills. They regularly encourage each other to try things, even when they are hard. Pupils take part in a wide range of activities beyond the school, visiting workplaces and farms. These activities include pupils who have found it difficult to access trips in the past. Leaders are ambitious for what pupils will achieve. They have identified weaknesses in the quality of education and are taking actions to address them. However, currently, pupils do not consistently receive an education that matches these ambitions. Expectations of what some pupils can achieve are too low in too much of the work they do. Pupils learn to be able to name how they are feeling at any time. If they are upset or angry, staff are calm and patient in helping them get back to their 'green zone', ready to learn again. Highly consistent use of symbols and visual timetables around the school helps pupils know what is coming next and to communicate confidently with staff.

What the school should improve

• Expectations of what pupils can do and achieve are often too low. Staff too often set activities and work that pupils find too easy because they do not take into account what they already know. This means that pupils do not learn as much as they could. The school needs to ensure that activities are effective in deepening and extending pupils' knowledge so that pupils are challenged to a greater extent and are helped to achieve as well as they can.
• For those pupils at the early stages of learning to read, staff do not use their checks on pupils' phonics knowledge effectively. As a result, too many pupils are taught phonemes that they already know. This means that pupils are not supported to improve their reading as well as they should be. The school needs to ensure that phonics teaching is appropriately adapted to meet the varying reading stages in each class.
• The curriculum and assessment processes to guide what pupils should be taught are not fully planned out. The school has not identified precisely what knowledge will be taught and how to track this using assessment. As a result, some pupils are not supported as effectively as others to develop their knowledge and skills. The school needs to ensure that it is clear what all pupils are expected to learn and when.

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