Bosvigo School

Store Street Manchester M1 2WD T 0300 123 4234 www.gov.uk/ofsted

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Mr Chris Wallis Headteacher Bosvigo School Chapel Hill Truro Cornwall TR1 3BJ

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Short inspection of Bosvigo School

Following my visit to the school on 13 December 2016, I write on behalf of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills to report the inspection findings. The visit was the first short inspection carried out since the school was judged to be good in November 2011.

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Short inspection of Bosvigo School

You have maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. Your school is a place where pupils arrive eager to take part in the interesting activities planned for them. Parents, staff and pupils all used the word ‘welcoming’ to describe the friendly, caring atmosphere at your school.

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Short inspection of Bosvigo School

Your focus on developing a nurturing community in a secure environment is evident from first entering your school. Pupils learn well together, at ease with their peers and with the adults teaching them. They respect each other and play their part as responsible members of the wider school community. ‘Community values’ and ‘personal values’ are at the heart of the curriculum and underpin everyone’s approach. Values such as leadership, democracy and tolerance are strongly promoted and taken very seriously. Pupils understand that such qualities will enable them to become responsible citizens of the future.

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Short inspection of Bosvigo School

Alongside your strong commitment to developing pupils’ personal qualities sits an equally determined ambition that pupils will do well academically. The recent changes to leadership and governance have undoubtedly left your school in a much stronger position than several years ago. You now have the right people, in the right position. You and your new teams can move forward confidently in pursuit of full consistency in the quality of teaching and pupils’ outcomes. All those spoken to during the inspection understand that, above all else, you must now maintain the momentum and rigour shown in the last two terms to ensure that the new ways of working that you have introduced have maximum impact over time. You quickly undertook a root and branch review of what went wrong following a dip in pupils’ performance in 2016. Pupils’ outcomes were at odds with the typically good standards they normally reach when they leave your school. You and your

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Short inspection of Bosvigo School

leadership team have implemented the fundamental systems and processes needed to quickly address the identified issues and raise the overall quality of teaching and learning. The clear framework of accountability ensures that these new ways of working embed quickly and exert maximum influence over the quality of teaching. Leaders are also benefiting from the training, coaching and mentoring on offer. Already there is clear and tangible evidence in pupils’ learning and work that strategic decisions result in rapidly improved provision and outcomes. Work in pupils’ books indicates that pupils’ current progress is at least good. It is sometimes better than this for disadvantaged pupils.

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Short inspection of Bosvigo School

All involved in the school community are committed to keeping pupils safe. You make sure all necessary checks are made to confirm that those who wish to work with children are suitable. Training for safeguarding and child protection is up to date, regular and welcomed, enabling staff and governors to fully discharge their duties. Pupils and parents are confident that issues are followed up. Pupils are knowledgeable about matters of safety through activities planned in the curriculum. For example, routine activities such as walking into the city centre are used well to reinforce aspects of road safety.

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Short inspection of Bosvigo School

Your strong emphasis on pupils’ personal development promotes their positive behaviour, with respect and courtesy as the norm. De-escalation strategies are emphasised through your anti-bullying and behaviour approaches. Should pupils display any inappropriate behaviour, staff have been trained to use the established strategies to deal with any incidents safely. Effective links are evident with outside agencies to cater for vulnerable pupils. Your strong commitment to pupils’ safety is demonstrated through your plans to further develop your work on ‘the digital curriculum’. While perfectly adequate, you feel that greater involvement from staff, pupils, parents and governors would further enhance this area. Overall, the leadership team has ensured that all safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose and of a high quality.

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Inspection findings

 Following the disappointment of mathematics outcomes in 2016, your thorough analysis has resulted in a culture shift at the school. Training and a new approach to developing pupils’ mathematics skills is bearing fruit. On our learning walk, we particularly noted pupils’ readiness to think more deeply and explain their reasoning. For example, Year 5 and 6 pupils were keen to explain their understanding of the relationship between fractions, decimals and the link to percentages. Pupils confidently tackled questions that challenge assumptions such as ‘6 divided by ½ = 3’ and provided a deeper explanation of why this mistake is often made. From looking at work in pupils’ books, this type of questioning is a more consistent feature of everyday mathematics work. Your strategy for identifying and following up pupils’ misconceptions immediately is reaping very positive benefits, especially for disadvantaged pupils.

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Inspection findings

 Several new approaches to the teaching of mathematics have been implemented already this term. Your evaluation of these new strategies has been equally swift. As a mathematics team, you have observed teaching, scrutinised pupils’ work and discussed pupils’ progress with each teacher. To date, these monitoring activities have focused on how well staff have applied knowledge gained from recent training to improve the overall quality of teaching. You have not yet focused on the learning and progress made by different groups of pupils. Given the proportion of disadvantaged and middle-ability pupils who did not make the expected rate of progress last year, a brighter spotlight needs to be shone on the teaching, curriculum and outcomes of these groups in order to raise their achievement.  You acknowledge that you were too slow to establish news ways of assessing pupils’ learning to accompany the introduction of the new national curriculum.

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Inspection findings

You now have significant amounts of information on the attainment and progress of each individual pupil. However, you have yet to use the new systems to analyse pupils’ outcomes across the school. This will be vital in identifying areas of strength and those still to be addressed to secure the very best education for all pupils. You agree that there is a need for a sharper focus on how far you expect different groups of pupils to have progressed at set milestones in the year. This would allow even more penetrating analyses of the school’s strengths and weaknesses.  Following a thorough review of the impact of pupil premium spending, all staff share your vision of what you all want to achieve as a school. Teaching is therefore typically characterised by high expectations, strong relationships with pupils and happy, productive classroom environments. Your approach to the curriculum is also benefiting all pupils and especially disadvantaged pupils. The

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Inspection findings

observations we made during my visit, and the pupils’ books we reviewed, show that disadvantaged pupils are making strong gains in their knowledge, skills and understanding. Exciting and creative topics are energising everyone to make pupils’ learning experiences engaging and relevant. Pupils’ attitudes to learning are good. They are learning to be even more resilient when faced with trickier tasks and to be more reflective about what they have learned: skills that will serve them well as life-long learners. In addition to disadvantaged pupils, the progress of middle- and lower-attaining pupils in key stage 1, which was too slow last year, is also markedly quicker.  Teaching has also been enhanced by a set of frameworks in English and mathematics that make clear to staff how pupils’ skills are to develop from year to year. For example, in English, teachers know how pupils’ report writing should progress as they become more skilled at this genre. When this is coupled with

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Inspection findings

more exciting opportunities to write and a focus on getting the technical aspects of composition correct, pupils make swifter progress in their writing. This was seen, for example, in pupils’ work to craft instructions to decorate ‘the perfect Christmas tree’. Strategies to improve pupils’ performance in phonics are equally as impressive. On our learning walk, we particularly noted pupils’ accuracy in their knowledge of phonics. Teachers and other adults were technically precise with their delivery so that pupils confidently identified sounds that do not conform to traditional phonetic patterns, such the ‘a’ in want. Such approaches are ensuring that pupils’ attainment in the Year 1 phonics screening check has risen to at least the national average. Therefore, the firm foundations on which to build future successes in reading are being established. The most able readers do so with confidence, passion and enthusiasm. They demonstrate a good

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Inspection findings

understanding of more complex reading strategies such as those of inference and deduction.

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Next steps for the school

Leaders and those responsible for governance should ensure that:

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Next steps for the school

 robust systems to track and analyse the performance of groups are consolidated, and are analysed to review the success of planned actions contained in the school development plan, so that progress towards key milestones and agreed targets can be checked carefully  monitoring activities place a greater emphasis on learning and progress of pupils over time.

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Next steps for the school

I am copying this letter to the chair of the governing body, the regional schools commissioner and the director of children’s services for Cornwall. This letter will be published on the Ofsted website.

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Information about the inspection

During the inspection, meetings were held with you, leaders for English and mathematics, special educational needs and/or disabilities and the early years. Six members of the governing body, including the chair, met the inspector to discuss the actions taken since the last inspection. The school’s current plans for development were evaluated, alongside recent records of the quality of teaching. Twelve part-lessons were jointly observed with you to evaluate the impact of teaching on pupils’ learning, review the quality of pupils’ work over time and talk to pupils informally about their experiences of school. A range of documentary evidence was evaluated, including those relating to safeguarding and governance. The inspector met with a group of pupils from key stage 2 and heard some of the most able pupils read.

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Information about the inspection

The key lines of enquiry tested on this short inspection were:

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Information about the inspection

 how well leaders and managers are ensuring that pupils are making the progress they are capable of in mathematics  if leaders and managers promoted a culture of high academic expectations for all pupils, especially those eligible for the pupil premium  how well middle- and lower-ability pupils were being supported in key stage 1  whether leaders were instilling the highest expectation of pupils’ behaviour.

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