St Paul's Catholic Primary School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 23 April 2025

Pupils are happy and enjoy coming to school regularly. The school is a nurturing environment where relationships are strong. Pupils understand the school values, such as friendship, caring and thankfulness, which underpin daily life. Pupils respect each other and treat one another with kindness. This helps the school community to live the 'St Paul's way'. Typically, pupils achieve in line with national averages at the end of key stage 2. However, the school has not developed its curriculum with enough rigour. Weaknesses in curriculum design mean that pupils often experience a curriculum that does not deepen their knowledge. Pupils behave well. They know what teachers expect of them. Pupils mix harmoniously at breaktimes. However, the lack of ambition in the curriculum sometimes leads to pupils losing focus in lessons. When this happens, their attitudes to learning dip and the work they produce is not of a high quality. Pupils develop a sense of belonging because they have a strong voice in the school. For example, roles on the health and safety panel, as pupil chaplains and as part of CAFOD club enable pupils to make a genuine contribution to the life of the school. This helps pupils develop a sense of local, national and global citizenship.

What the school should improve

• The school has not identified the specific knowledge pupils need to learn, nor developed staff's subject knowledge well enough. Consequently, staff lack the skills and knowledge to help pupils to learn well. This is hampered further because they are not clear about the key knowledge pupils should learn. The school should identify the precise knowledge it wants pupils to know and develop staff's expertise so that pupils learn well across the curriculum.
• The implementation of the curriculum is stronger in some subjects than others. Staff use a range of teaching strategies with varying degrees of success. As a result, pupils do not learn evenly across the curriculum. The school should rapidly improve the consistency of the implementation of its curriculum so that pupils learn well across subjects and ages, including in the early years.
• Teaching is not consistently well matched or adapted to the needs of pupils with SEND. Consequently, pupils with SEND do not learn key concepts securely enough. The school should support teachers to adapt learning for pupils with SEND effectively so they build successfully on what they already know.

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