Manor Wood Primary School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 23 April 2025

Manor Wood is an inclusive and welcoming school. It knows each pupil as an individual and prioritises their well-being. Pupils are polite and courteous. They are proud of their school and describe it, rightly, as a 'fair and kind community'. Pupils realise the school's values of peer generosity, team comes first and everyone is a learner through their positive attitudes to their work and respectful relationships with one another. Pupils feel happy and safe. Pupils are taught how to manage their emotions and to recognise when they need support. They describe bullying as rare. When it does happen, pupils know that staff help them to sort out problems by taking time to listen to them. For example, time is set aside each day for pupils to share feelings and emotions. Classrooms are calm and purposeful places for pupils to learn. Pupils work collaboratively, taking turns, sharing resources and enjoying the learning journey together. The school is highly ambitious for all pupils and determined that they will achieve well. The work pupils complete and the knowledge they gain over their time at the school demonstrates that these ambitions are fulfilled. At Manor Wood, every child does matter and every moment is made to count.

What the school should improve

• For some pupils at the early stages of learning their phonics, some transcriptional activities they complete are overly ambitious and unnecessarily complex. As a result, pupils are not able to apply their phonics knowledge and they make errors in their writing. The school should ensure that staff closely match the transcriptional activities pupils complete to the sounds they are learning, so that they can apply their phonics knowledge more accurately when they write.
• In some subjects, the opportunities that the school gives pupils to recall prior learning do not check the most important curriculum content that the school wants them to remember, in enough detail. As a result, key knowledge is not recapped sufficiently well, and pupils have some gaps in their knowledge. The school should ensure that the key knowledge and skills it wants pupils to remember are regularly practised so that pupils develop the depth of knowledge contained within the school's curriculum.

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