Herbert Thompson Primary

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Herbert Thompson Primary School places high priority on pupil well-being and developing pupil aspirations for the future. The headteacher leads compassionately and is ably supported by the whole school team who provide a vast array of bespoke support to promote the success of every pupil.

Teachers and leaders across the school place high priority on identifying individual pupil needs and they use this to carefully plan and provide support for all pupils including those with barriers to learning or with additional needs. There is a continuous focus on individual pupil improvement, which is highly impressive. This is a strength of the school.

As a result, most pupils make strong progress in many areas of learning from their ...individual starting points. Nearly all pupils show great pride in their school and enjoy undertaking roles of responsibility such as when older pupils act as “Learning Friends” to younger pupils. Across the school all pupils feel safe, valued, and emotionally well supported.

They engage well with their learning and show high levels of perseverance when faced with challenges. The school welcomes learners from the local area and wider world and ensures that they develop a strong sense of belonging to the school community. When the youngest pupils join the school, they often need a lot of support to learn.

The school meets their needs successfully so that, after a relatively short time, they enjoy learning and begin to make good progress in all aspects of their development. The school provides a range of stimulating opportunities for pupils and families to learn and benefit from. The school's edible garden motivates pupils to grow their own vegetables and the school's pay as you go shop enables the whole community to benefit from fresh, reasonably priced produce.

This effectively supports the school's drive to reduce the impact of high costs of living on pupils and families. Recommendations R1 Improve the approach to teaching so that pupils can apply their numeracy skills across the curriculum / in real situations R2 Refine provision to enable pupils to exercise more independence in their learning R3 Continue to refine curriculum planning to ensure that pupils have suitably authentic opportunities to develop their learning What happens next The school will draw up an action plan to address the recommendations from the inspection. Estyn will invite the school to prepare a case study in relation to how leaders reduce the impact of poverty on pupil attainment, for dissemination on Estyn's website.