Pictor Academy

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 21 January 2025

Pictor Academy is a caring, nurturing and welcoming environment for pupils. They are happy and enjoy school. Pupils behave well in school. This is due in part because they receive a high level of support. Relationships between staff and pupils are built on mutual trust and respect. Pupils know that they can turn to adults with any worries that they have. There are high expectations of pupils' achievement. However, the school is in a period of change. The school is rightly focussed on redesigning and improving its curriculum. Improvements have been made, but there is still more work for the school to do. This is to ensure that pupils, who all have special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), benefit from purposeful learning opportunities. The personal, social, health and economic curriculum and pupils' wider development help to prepare pupils well for the next steps in their lives. This includes ensuring that pupils know how to keep themselves safe and have a good understanding of consent. A variety of trips and experiences help pupils with their everyday lives. For example, they visit the local shop to learn about how to buy ingredients for different meals.

What the school should improve

• The school has not finalised its thinking in some curriculum areas. This means that teachers are not as clear as they should be about what pupils need to learn and in what order. The school should ensure that it finalises its curriculum thinking in these remaining areas to provide greater clarity for teachers about what pupils need to learn and by when.
• Some checks on pupils' learning are not as effective as they should be. Teachers are not able to securely check whether pupils have understood previous curriculum content. The school should embed these new ways of checking so that teachers understand more clearly what pupils have retained from their previous learning.
• From time to time, the targets that teachers set for pupils are not specific enough to ensure that pupils can meet the requirements in their EHC plan. This means that teachers sometimes do not identify the small steps that pupils should take so that they achieve all that they can. The school should ensure that teachers receive training so that targets are more closely linked to pupils' needs.
• Trustees' and governors' checks on the school's effectiveness sometimes lack rigour. This affects how well they can support and challenge the school to continue to improve the quality of education for pupils. Trustees and governors should ensure that they have effective systems in place to check on the school's performance.

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