Llanilltud Faerdref Primary

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Llanilltud Faerdref is a happy, caring school at the heart of the community it serves.

Pupils enjoy coming to school. They feel safe and well cared for and have a sense of pride in their school. Pupils' well-being is central to the school's culture.

Staff are highly committed in ensuring that they meet pupils' well-being needs each day, in order to prepare them for learning. The curriculum provides a broad range of learning experiences and is well structured to ensure that most pupils make beneficial progress in their learning. Pupils benefit from a well-developed forest school area to learn bushcraft skills, such as recognising bird calls and making bird houses.

In addition, staff have made good use of the new sc...hool build to create authentic learning opportunities and to develop mathematical skills such as area and perimeter. However, pupils do not always develop their independent learning skills well enough. This is because on occasions, teachers over-direct pupils' learning activities.

In addition, in around a half of classes, teachers promote pupils' problem-solving skills well. However, this good practice is not consistent across the school. Over time, most pupils make good progress from their starting points in most areas of learning.

Nearly all pupils develop a real love of mathematics and are keen to share their work and demonstrate their mathematical skills. In the majority of classes, strong teaching supports pupils to develop their reasoning and thinking skills well. However, this is not consistent across the school.

Most pupils make strong progress in writing and reading. The development of pupils' oracy skills is a strength of the school. Pupils with additional learning needs have clear development plans with relevant targets.

However, adults do not always implement these plans as well as they could to support pupil progress. Leaders have worked well with stakeholders to create a shared vision, underpinned by the school's moto 'Care, share, believe, achieve'. This vision permeates every area of the school and is exemplified by the headteacher, staff and pupils.

Leaders have developed worthwhile systems to support strong self-evaluation of school practice, identifying strengths and areas requiring further development. As a result, the school operates smoothly on a day-to-day basis, with a clear focus on well-chosen improvement priorities. Recommendations R1 Improve pupils' independent learning skills R2 Use the best practice across the school to ensure that all teaching allows pupils to develop their reasoning, thinking and problem-solving skills R3 Ensure that the classroom provision for additional learning needs takes good account of the targets within individual development plans R4 Develop arrangements to promote healthy eating and drinking in line with the Welsh Government's requirements What happens next The school will draw up an action plan to address the recommendations from the inspection.