Gillingham Primary School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 6 January 2026

This is a happy, welcoming and nurturing school. There is a culture of equality, where pupils feel special and cared for. Positivity ripples throughout the school. Pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities are fully included in all aspects of school life. However, their barriers to learning are not always fully understood, which limits the achievement of some pupils. The school is ambitious for pupils and wants them to achieve well. Pupils are starting to benefit from a wide range of improvements to the curriculum. In particular, the school supports pupils’ social and emotional development well. The academic curriculum is still developing and does not currently enable all pupils to achieve as well as they could. As a result, some pupils’ readiness for the next stage of learning is impaired. For older pupils who have fallen behind, gaps in pupils’ knowledge persist. Most pupils understand and live up to the school's rules of ‘be kind, be safe, be a learner’. Pupils show genuine care and politeness towards one another. Warm relationships exist between pupils and adults. This helps pupils to feel safe. While bullying does occasionally occur, pupils feel confident that trusted adults will help resolve concerns or worries they may have. They enjoy coming to school and attend well. Leaders enrich the curriculum with a wide range of trips and visits, both to the local area and beyond. Residential trips, swimming, mini-Olympics and tournaments through the local sports partnership all support pupils’ wider development. The very many contributions pupils make to their school and local community, such as visiting the local residential home, class litter picking or the harvest festival at the local church, help to build pupils’ character and prepare them for life in modern Britain.

What the school should improve

• Leaders should ensure that staff understand all the specific barriers that pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), including disadvantaged children, face so they can fully support these pupils to be successful.
• Leaders should ensure that the checks that teachers make on pupils’ learning are embedded across the school so that all groups of pupils, including disadvantaged and those with SEND, achieve well across all subjects of the curriculum.
• Leaders should ensure that pupils routinely develop the knowledge and skills they need in writing, with a particular focus on fluent handwriting, sentence structure and letter formation, so that pupils are ready for the next stage of their education.
• Leaders at all levels should strengthen their oversight of the impact of school improvement actions taken and ensure that all pupils receive the support they need to achieve as highly as possible across the curriculum.

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