Sutton in Craven Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School

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

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Mr Tim Phillips Headteacher Sutton in Craven Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School Main Street Sutton-in-Craven Keighley West Yorkshire BD20 7JS

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Controlled Primary School

Following my visit to the school on 7 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 July 2012.

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Controlled Primary School

You and your leadership team have maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection. Your analysis of how the school is doing and what you and your team need to do to improve it further is realistic, detailed and ambitious.

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Controlled Primary School

You are successfully addressing the shortcomings in mathematics, particularly in key stage 2. Although the cohort was very small, the unconfirmed outcomes in mathematics for the end of key stage 2 tests in 2016 were very disappointing. Working with governors and your mathematics leader, you have put a clear set of priorities in place to improve the quality of teaching. This is already having a significant impact on pupils’ enjoyment and outcomes in this subject. Inspection evidence and your own detailed monitoring show that there is now much more consistently good teaching in mathematics across the school. Your mathematics leader is training, supporting and monitoring staff very effectively. She works regularly with staff to review pupils’ progress and identify where more needs to be done. As a result, pupils are experiencing a wider range of activities and greater success in mathematics. They are making good progress.

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Controlled Primary School

Your work in mathematics and in other aspects of the school’s work has been effectively supported by a range of partners. It is to your credit that you have been very clear about what needs to be done to improve the school. You have then found and embraced the support you need to ensure that sustained improvements take place. The local authority has provided detailed and effective school-wide and specific support in mathematics. A national leader of education, who is the headteacher of a local school, has helped you develop skills and insights so that you can broaden leadership to involve more colleagues. This is having a very positive impact on the capacity of your school to improve even more.

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Controlled Primary School

Your staff and the wider community are very positive about your leadership. Staff have risen to the challenges and high expectations you set for them. They have responded very positively to the opportunities that you give all staff to improve and extend their practice. The vast majority of parents who responded to the Ofsted online survey of their views were very complimentary about the school and the way you lead it. All the parents and carers with whom I spoke during the inspection were very positive about the school.

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Controlled Primary School

At the inspection in July 2012 the school was asked to improve teaching further and target the needs of all pupils more closely. Evidence from this inspection shows that you have addressed this. You monitor the quality of teaching and its impact on pupils’ learning and well-being very carefully. You and your staff use the information you gather to refine teaching so that it focuses on what pupils need to improve. You also use this monitoring to identify staff training needs. You have recently introduced ‘peer’ monitoring of lessons where staff visit each other’s classes and observe the quality and impact of teaching.

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Controlled Primary School

There is a culture of safeguarding at the school. You, your staff and the governing body take safeguarding very seriously. There is regular and effective training for all staff and governors to ensure that they are up to date in their knowledge and understanding of matters relating to the safety and welfare of children. You, as designated safeguarding lead, have strong links with outside agencies. Your records of engagement with these agencies are detailed and reflect your meticulous approach to this aspect of the school’s work.

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Controlled Primary School

You and your leadership team have ensured that all safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose. Records are detailed and of high quality.

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Inspection findings

 Children settle well into Reception and are happy. This is because staff communicate regularly and effectively with parents. Home–school relations are good. The children also settle and learn well because your staff ensure that they enjoy varied, stimulating and focused activities that encourage them to be both independent and collaborative in their play and learning. Staff carefully observe and record what children can and need to do. They use these observations to inform their planning and next steps for each child. Staff in the early years work with the children to establish clear routines. Children are safe. Outcomes in the Reception Year are strong. Most children leave the Reception Year ready for Year 1.  You have grouped children and pupils into the Blossom (Reception/Year1) class effectively. It means that those children who need more time to reach a good standard do so because they can stay with their teachers into Year 1. It also

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Inspection findings

means that the children who make accelerated progress during the Reception Year can have opportunities to engage with the more demanding tasks being undertaken by Year 1 pupils.  Staff teach phonics well. It is a strength of the school. The proportion of pupils who achieve the standard in the Year 1 screening check on phonics has been improving across the last three years and is above the national average. The school-wide focus on reading is having an impact in key stage 1. The most able pupils in this key stage said that they enjoy reading and discussing the ways the writer uses words and patterns of words to create effects for the reader. The least able pupils in key stage 1 are able to use their phonics skills to read new words.  Most pupils make good progress through key stage 1 from their starting points. Through your high-profile presence in classes and around the school you ensure that staff monitor the progress of pupils carefully and use this information to

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Inspection findings

focus their teaching precisely on what the children need to do to improve. You meet regularly with staff to discuss pupils’ progress. As a result of this close monitoring, the quality of teaching across all subjects continues to improve.  In key stage 2 pupils make generally good progress. Mathematics is increasingly well taught. Pupils’ books show that they enjoy an interesting and varied diet of mathematics that helps them develop a range of skills and an understanding of key mathematical concepts. The writing books show that pupils have opportunities to develop as confident writers who are aware of a range of genres and types of writing. I observed, however, that many of the books were untidy. The presentation of work is not as neat as it should be. This is surprising as all of the pupils I spoke with said that they enjoyed and were proud of their work.  The pupils at the school enjoy a broad curriculum. As well as focusing on the

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Inspection findings

‘core’ of English, mathematics and science, pupils have opportunities to develop other aspects of their learning and understanding of themselves and the world. In a key stage 2 religious education lesson, for example, I sat with a group of pupils who were discussing the significance of a range of images in Holman Hunt’s painting ‘The Light of the World’. Your pupils displayed high levels of insight and care as they discussed the significance of the door and who had opened it.  The number of disadvantaged pupils at the school is lower than the national average. You and your staff monitor their progress very carefully and intervene promptly and effectively if issues arise. The evidence from books and the school’s own information shows that the majority of this group of pupils are making good progress.  The majority of pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities make at least expected progress from their starting points in reading, writing and

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Inspection findings

mathematics. This is because, as the coordinator for this aspect of the school’s work, you ensure that staff are aware of the needs of these pupils and know how best to develop them in their learning. A number of parents whose children have special educational needs and/or disabilities told me that they were very satisfied with the work that you and the school do to support their children. You also work carefully and tenaciously with outside agencies, including the local authority, to ensure these pupils receive appropriate support.  Your pupils told me that they enjoy coming to school and that they like hard work, especially in mathematics. Most-able pupils in key stage 2, particularly, said that they enjoyed the more open-ended challenges they were now being given by staff. Your pupils are well behaved, respectful and courteous. They are aware of the needs of others. They said that they liked the structured approach to

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Inspection findings

discipline based on your ‘golden do’s’. They knew and avoided the consequences of the dark cloud! I saw no examples of low-level disruption during the inspection.  Pupils spoke confidentially and knowledgably about the wide range of strategies that the school uses to help them keep safe, including when online. For example, they could describe the forms that bullying can take and said that they knew how to deal with them. They said that bullying at school was ‘super rare’. They also said that if it were to occur they were confident that adults at the school would deal with it promptly and well. Pupils said that all at the school ‘look out’ for each other. They are alert and quick to support anyone who seems uncertain. They spoke with enthusiasm about being a ‘buddy’ to others.  Your governing body is active, insightful and well led. Governors regularly receive high-quality information about the school’s work from you. They do not,

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Inspection findings

however, only rely on you to inform their judgements of how well the school is doing. Individual governors are increasingly linked to subjects and phases of the school and visit regularly with a particular focus in mind. For example, your chair of governors, who is also the ‘link’ governor for mathematics, gained keen insights into improvements in mathematics through a recent ‘learning walk’ at the school. He was able to draw on the additional information he had gained from this visit when he and other governors met with you at a recent governors’ meeting. It is clear from the well-written minutes of this meeting that governors challenged you through detailed and informed questioning about progress, success and next steps in mathematics.

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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

 they continue to review and refine the impact of their initiatives to improve all pupils’ outcomes in mathematics so that the successes experienced so far are firmly embedded and outcomes continue to improve  leadership capacity continues to grow through focused opportunities for all staff to develop and extend their skills as leaders of their subject or area  the presentation of work in pupils’ books improves through the rigorous application of the school’s presentation policy.

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Next steps for the school

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

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Information about the inspection

I focused on the following lines of enquiry during the inspection:

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Information about the inspection

 Is safeguarding effective?  Does the provision in the Reception class enable children to make good progress from their starting points?  Are pupils making better progress in mathematics?  Does the curriculum meet the needs of all pupils from their starting points?  Is leaders’ evaluation of the school’s effectiveness accurate and based upon robust evidence?

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Information about the inspection

I met with groups of parents at the beginning of the day. I met with you to discuss the school’s effectiveness and what you had done to ensure the school continues to improve. I also met with the mathematics leader, the early years leader, two governors, including the chair of governors, and with a national leader of education who is the head of a local school and is supporting you in your work. I also met with you in your role as the coordinator of the school’s work to support pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities.

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Information about the inspection

I read a range of documents, including your evaluation of the school’s effectiveness. I also scrutinised the school’s safeguarding systems, records and associated documents. I checked information about pupils’ achievement along with external evaluations of aspects of the school’s work, including a number written by colleagues from the local authority and minutes of meetings of the governing body. I also took into account the findings of the statutory inspection of Anglican and Methodist Schools (SIAMS) undertaken in October 2016 by officers of the Anglican Diocese of Leeds.

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Information about the inspection

I considered 67 responses to Ofsted’s online questionnaire (Parent View) and the school’s own records of monitoring parental views. I also read 47 written comments from parents. I visited all classes, most of them accompanied by you, to observe teaching, learning and assessment. I checked pupils’ progress in their books, talked formally with a group of pupils from key stage 2 and talked informally with pupils in lessons and around the school at lunchtime and playtime.

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Information about the inspection

I enjoyed listening to and discussing reading with pupils from Years 2 and 5. I attended an act of collective worship at the start of the day.

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