St Andrew's Church School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 1 October 2024

St Andrew's is a welcoming and inclusive place. Pupils enjoy coming to school. They benefit from warm and nurturing relationships with staff. This helps them to feel safe. Staff visit the children who are joining Reception Year at home and in any pre-school setting they attend. This enables children to build familiarity with staff and settle into school life quickly. Parents and carers appreciate the strong pastoral guidance that staff provide for their child. The quality of education that pupils receive requires improvement. Published outcomes at key stage 2 remain significantly below national expectations in key areas such as mathematics and writing. The school and trust have not tackled these weaknesses quickly enough. Some pupils do not gain sufficient knowledge and skills to be well prepared for their next steps into secondary education. Pupils show positive attitudes to their learning. The majority behave well in lessons and around the school. Pupils make the most of opportunities to take on leadership responsibilities. They demonstrate the school value of wanting to 'make a difference' through being sports leaders, pupil chaplains, librarians or a member of the school council. The school helps pupils to develop their independence and resilience through attending residential trips.

What the school should improve

• There has not been effective checking of the impact of changes on improving pupils' progress through the curriculum. This means improvement towards the school's identified areas of weakness has not been rapid enough. The trust should ensure that the impact of school improvement strategies is evaluated regularly, so that pupils are better prepared for their next steps.
• Across the curriculum, the knowledge that pupils need to learn is not broken down into sufficient detail. Therefore, pupils do not always build secure and consistent knowledge as they move through the key stages. The trust should ensure that the knowledge it wants pupils to learn is precisely defined in all subjects.
• The effectiveness of the delivery of the curriculum is variable across classes. Weaker classroom practice does not consistently check pupils' understanding of prior and new learning. This results in staff not addressing gaps in pupils' knowledge before they move on to delivering the next part of the curriculum. The trust should ensure that the quality of teaching is consistently high, and that assessment is being used effectively.

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