Ysgol Christchurch

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Christchurch Community Primary School provides exceptional care for its pupils and their families. Their well-being and safety are the school's priority. A dedicated team of professionals ensures that pupils' emotional, social and health needs are met highly successfully.

Through carefully planned intervention programmes and skilful, tailored support, they enable nearly all pupils to engage successfully with learning. Leaders and governors monitor and evaluate the school's safeguarding procedures robustly and act decisively. As a result, pupils feel safe and valued.

Often, pupils' skills when they start school are well below what is expected for their age. Nevertheless, during their time in school, most pupils make at leas...t appropriate progress in their learning. Staff work conscientiously to develop pupils' confidence and ability to communicate through talking and writing in English and in Welsh.

They make particularly strong progress in their reading and enjoy sharing books and stories with adults. Nearly all pupils behave well. They are respectful of staff, visitors and each other.

Many work successfully at their learning tasks and a few, when given the opportunity, enjoy taking responsibility for moving their own learning forward. However, overall, pupils do not develop well enough as independent learners. At times, staff over-direct pupils' learning or pitch their activities either too high, or too low.

A particularly strong aspect of the school's practice is its work with external partners to enhance pupils' learning experiences and to support family and community engagement. Leaders and staff are proactive in securing grant funding. They use this purposefully to improve the school's resources and to open pupils' eyes to the opportunities available to them in their adult lives.

They also, with governors' support, put in place valuable initiatives to support families who are struggling financially. The headteacher and governing body provide strong and effective leadership. Leaders and governors identify most of the school's strengths and areas for improvement accurately.

They recognise the need to improve pupils' mathematical understanding, which is often weak, and pupils' ability to apply their literacy, numeracy and digital skills in their work across the curriculum. Having driven a highly effective strategic approach to the development of the school's provision for well-being, leaders are now beginning to turn their attention to improving the quality and consistency of teaching and assessment. Recommendations R1 Develop the strategic leadership of teaching and assessment to ensure improvements to the quality of teaching and learning, particularly in mathematics and writing R2 Improve provision for pupils to apply their literacy, numeracy and digital skills across the curriculum R3 Ensure that all pupils have meaningful opportunities to develop as independent learners What happens next The school will draw up an action plan to address the recommendations from the inspection.