The Vine Christian School

What Ofsted said

From the inspection on 26 November 2024

Pupils enjoy attending this small friendly school. Staff treat pupils with genuine warmth. Pupils learn to do the same. Pupils show exemplary attitudes toward their education. This is reflected in their extremely high rates of attendance. Staff ensure that pupils are well prepared for life beyond the school. Across all phases, pupils make the most of their experiences in school and achieve well. Expectations and routines are quickly established from the early years and understood by all. During lessons, pupils display high levels of independence. They are both studious and inquisitive learners. Pupils are highly respectful to both adults and their peers alike. They speak out and challenge unkindness, so incidents are exceptionally rare. Pupils know who they can speak to if they are worried and are rightly confident that concerns will be addressed swiftly. Pupils enjoy active breaktimes, playing a range of sports, including table tennis and dodgeball. They benefit from rewarding opportunities, such as participating in the annual 'European Convention competition'. There are opportunities to demonstrate their talents in sports and other interests. Pupils also welcome the opportunity to interact and make friends with pupils in other schools across Europe.

What the school should improve

• In some lessons, staffs' checks on pupils' learning do not identify gaps in knowledge sufficiently well. This affects how well pupils acquire knowledge over time because teaching is not adapted quickly enough. The school should ensure that staff are equipped to identify and remedy gaps in pupils' knowledge swiftly and effectively.
• The writing curriculum is not as effective as it could be because expectations are sometimes too low. Pupils are not expected to write with sufficient quality across the curriculum and so some pupils do not write to the standard that they should. The school should ensure that pupils have more opportunities to improve and practise their writing so that it is of a consistently high quality across the curriculum.

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