Orion Academy

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 4 June 2024

This is a welcoming and supportive school where pupils receive a high level of support. Staff understand pupils' social and emotional needs well and build positive relationships. Pupils feel safe and trust staff to help them. Bullying is not an issue. When pupils display challenging behaviour, well-trained, caring staff are on hand to help them settle and refocus. However, pupils do not attend school as often as they should. Since joining The Gallery Trust in February 2020, leaders have overcome many challenges, such as the pandemic, staffing changes and transition to a new-build site. However, the trust has been too slow to implement an ambitious curriculum. Pupils are not taught well enough in all subjects, and the school has not given enough consideration to how learning will build year on year. As a result, pupils do not achieve as well as they should. The school is now improving. The new leadership team has successfully established a positive, aspirational community culture with high expectations for behaviour. The team is rightly focused on redesigning the curriculum. Improvements have been made, but there is still work to ensure the curriculum is ambitious and caters effectively for pupils' special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND).

What the school should improve

• Too many pupils do not attend school regularly, adversely affecting their education and causing them to miss out on important personal development opportunities. The school should urgently establish a coherent strategy to improve attendance, ensuring that rigorous oversight enables it to monitor and assure itself about the impact of this work.
• The curriculum is not currently mapped out clearly or implemented to a high enough standards. Consequently, pupils do not learn well enough. The school should ensure that curriculum planning clearly identifies what pupils must learn in each subject and that staff have the knowledge to teach this content successfully. They should also support staff in using assessment consistently well to check pupils' understanding and inform future teaching.
• There are gaps in how pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is promoted. This means pupils are not as prepared for life in modern Britain as they could be. The school must continue to improve the personal, social and health education curriculum to ensure that pupils gain the important knowledge they need, so they leave school with an understanding of different faiths and cultures, fundamental British values, and protected characteristics.
• Those responsible for governance do not always have an accurate view of the school's priorities and do not rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of improvement work. This means that they do not effectively challenge and support leaders, and have been ineffectual in addressing some important weaknesses in a timely fashion. Those responsible for governance must ensure that they are fully informed about the school's priorities and hold leaders accountable for addressing areas for improvement effectively and promptly.

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