Severndale Specialist Academy

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 5 November 2024

The school's vision of 'enabling communication, independence and enjoyment for life' is at the heart of everything it does for pupils. This helps to prepare pupils well to become valued members of society. The 'Severndale Way' ensures that there is a strong and consistent focus on supporting pupils to communicate their thoughts and learning. This means that children, pupils and students from the early years through to the post-16 provision have a voice in their learning and the pathways they follow. It also ensures that pupils can express their feelings. This helps staff to quickly identify and respond to any concerns about pupils' safety and welfare. The school has high expectations of what pupils can achieve. It has developed a curriculum that enables pupils to successfully work towards and achieve these expectations. Staff know and understand each pupil's pastoral needs very well, which enables them to help pupils engage positively with their learning. Pupils love coming to school and eagerly enter to be greeted by warm and welcoming staff. The positive relationships between staff and pupils are clear to see. This helps to create a calm environment where pupils display positive behaviours. A range of wider activities successfully develop pupils' independence, sense of belonging and responsibility.

What the school should improve

• At times, the school has not ensured that objectives on pupils' EHC plans are reflected as well in practice as they could be because targets on individual pupils' plans are not specific enough. As a result, teachers do not provide the precise support that pupils need to enable them to achieve as well as they might. The school should ensure that targets developed from pupils' EHC plans support them to meet specific needs and enable pupils to achieve highly across all areas of the curriculum.
• The school's checks on the curriculum are not focused well enough on how effectively it is being implemented by teachers. Consequently, the school is not identifying where some areas of curriculum implementation need further development. The school should ensure that the checks made on the curriculum are carefully focused to identify areas of inconsistency so that appropriate support can be put in place.

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