Meadowside Primary School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 17 June 2025

Meadowside is an incredibly warm and welcoming school. Pupils, parents and carers, and staff appreciate its family feel. Staff know pupils well. Pupils are well cared for through the school's nurturing and caring culture. They know that there are adults to talk to if they have a concern. As a result, pupils feel safe. The school is ambitious for pupils to do well. Pupils enjoy coming to school. They demonstrate positive attitudes to their learning. However, while the school has made a positive start to curriculum development, an ambitious curriculum is not securely in place. Pupils, including children in the early years, do not benefit from a high-quality education across the curriculum. The school has high expectations for pupils' behaviour. Recent work to improve behaviour has had a positive impact. Most pupils behave well. Bullying is rare. Pupils are confident that staff would deal with it effectively if it should occur. Across the school, pupils enjoy a range of leadership opportunities. For example, pupils participate in the school council, and they take on roles as playmakers and digital ambassadors. Older pupils are proud to be 'buddies' to children in the Reception Year. This helps pupils to learn about responsibility.

What the school should improve

• In some areas, including the reading curriculum beyond phonics and in the early years, the curriculum does not identify the important content that pupils need to learn and when they need to learn it. Consequently, pupils do not build their knowledge well or develop a secure understanding in those subjects. The school must ensure that the curriculum sets out the important knowledge that pupils need to learn in all subjects.
• In some subjects, teaching does not check well enough what pupils know and remember. Where this happens, pupils have gaps in their knowledge and understanding. This makes it difficult for them to build their knowledge over time. The school must ensure that assessment is used effectively across the curriculum so that pupils are supported to know more and remember more.
• The school's strategic oversight of some aspects of its work, such as the implementation and impact of the curriculum, is not sufficiently robust. As a result, leaders, at all levels, do not have a strong enough understanding of the school's work. The school should put in place stronger systems to check whether its actions have the impact leaders intend so that they can fulfil their strategic responsibilities more effectively.
• Some aspects of the school's safeguarding record-keeping are not robust. On occasion, the school does not record the important actions that leaders have taken to keep pupils safe. This means that some important discussions and decisions are not recorded. The school should ensure that safeguarding records are clear and provide coherent accounts of the actions that the school has taken to keep pupils safe.

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