Beechwood Junior School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Summary of key findings for parents and pupils

This is an outstanding school.

Beechwood Junior School is a school where pupils love to learn. As one parent said, 'This is a school where every child has a chance to shine.' Alongside outstanding attitudes to learning, pupils conduct themselves extremely well.

They are respectful, courteous and cooperative. Pupils embrace the school's core values of respect, equality, honesty, achievement and teamwork. Working relationships between pupils and staff are excellent.

Pupils appreciate the efforts made by teachers and other adults to provide them with challenging and enjoyable learning activities. Most pupils achieve exceptionally well at the school as a ...result of excellent teaching. They make outstanding progress and leave at the end of Year 6 with high attainment in reading, writing and mathematics.

As a result of meticulous planning, teaching truly engages pupils and motivates them to do their best. Pupils have excellent opportunities to apply their skills across a wide range of subjects, often in interesting ways. Leaders are keen to ensure that opportunities to use numeracy across subjects match those in literacy, so that they too are outstanding.

Marking is most often extremely effective in enabling pupils to know how to improve their work. Pupils routinely reflect upon their learning in most subjects, contributing strongly to their own learning. Leaders recognise the need to extend these high quality opportunities for reflection across subjects such as religious studies, art and French.

Homework tasks provide pupils with helpful opportunities to reinforce and extend their learning, often in creative ways. Pupils confidently report that they feel very safe in school. They talk knowledgeably about how to keep safe both in and out of school.

Parents have no qualms about their children's safety. The headteacher provides excellent leadership. Alongside other senior and middle leaders, she has established a rich learning culture where academic achievement and personal development are highly valued.

As a result of well-focused professional development and excellent coaching by leaders, teaching has improved strongly over the past few years. Pupils' achievement rose greatly in mathematics in 2014, and high levels of achievement in reading, writing and mathematics have been sustained this academic year. The school is highly efficiently and effectively run.

Board members from the Edwin Jones Trust ensure that financial resources, such as pupil premium funding, are used extremely well to the great benefit of pupils. All staff are robustly held to account and underperformance is assiduously tackled. Pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is very well promoted.

Pupils are extremely well prepared for life in modern Britain. They show a clear understanding of democratic processes, have tolerant attitudes and respect the rule of law.

Information about this school

Beechwood Junior School is larger than average and has grown in pupil numbers this year.

In Year 3, pupils are taught in three classes and in Years 4, 5 and 6 they are taught in two classes. The school converted to become an academy school in October 2013. When its predecessor school of the same name was last inspected by Ofsted in November 2009, it was judged to be good.

The headteacher has been in post for two years, as has the deputy headteacher. Both they and other members of the senior leadership team are used by the Edwin Jones Trust, other academy trusts and the local authority to support local schools and a school on the Isle of Wight. They are viewed as local leaders of education.

The large majority of pupils are of White British heritage, with the remainder coming from a range of other ethnic backgrounds. There is an above average proportion of pupils who speak English as an additional language, although only a small number are at an early stage of learning English. The proportion of disadvantaged pupils entitled to pupil premium funding is above average.

This is additional government funding for those pupils known to be eligible for free school meals and those who are looked after. The proportion of disabled pupils and those who have special educational needs is broadly average. The school meets the government's current floor standards, which set the minimum expectations for pupils' attainment and progress.

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