Bryn Awel Primary School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Bryn Awel Primary is a caring school where staff work closely with pupils and their families to develop strong working relationships. Across the school, most pupils behave well and show kindness and care towards one another. Following a period of change in leadership, both with senior leaders and the governing body, there are emerging strengths developing.

Leaders are developing self-evaluation processes to evaluate and monitor the progress pupils make and these are beginning to have a positive impact, especially in reading and writing. However, overall, leaders' use of self-evaluation and monitoring to support improvement planning is broad and lengthy and does not focus well enough on the most important areas for to bring about im...provements in the quality of teaching and learning. Many pupils make good progress based on their starting points in reading and writing.

Most pupils with additional learning needs (ALN) make suitable progress. Across the school, teachers have a good understanding of how to develop pupils' reading skills and successfully promote the importance of reading. They also work well to develop pupils' writing skills.

However, teachers' subject knowledge of mathematics varies and, as a result, they do not always build on pupils' mathematical skills progressively. Opportunities for pupils to apply their numeracy skills across the curriculum are limited. Teachers' use of assessments to provide suitable learning varies.

Leaders share a vision for curriculum design and work closely with families and the local community to strengthen links that will help improve the learning opportunities for all pupils. There are beneficial links with local partners and businesses and this helps enrich the activities in which pupils participate. Leaders and staff work with cluster schools effectively to develop their subject knowledge on Curriculum for Wales (CfW) and use this information well to support their curriculum design.

There are emerging strengths in some areas of learning, for example the development of pupils' skills in expressive arts. Leaders work with families and other partners to improve the attendance of pupils. Whilst these are beginning to have a positive impact, attendance rates overall remain too low.

The headteacher is passionate and determined to strengthen standards at the school so that pupils access a broad range of learning experiences and develop a range of skills to help them in their future lives. She works closely with the governing body to manage the school's budget effectively to support the costs of school trips and visits, and to provide good quality resources. Recent changes to the indoor learning environments set high standards of expectation and create calm, safe spaces for children to learn.

Leaders and staff have a shared desire to work together to raise pupils' aspirations and to provide high levels of care and nurture their pupils. Within a short space of time, leaders and staff have worked effectively to raise standards and broaden experiences for pupils at Bryn Awel Primary. Recommendations R1 Improve self-evaluation, monitoring and improvement planning to ensure that the focus is on the most important areas in need of development R2 Improve the quality of teaching and assessment R3 Provide purposeful learning opportunities to ensure that pupils develop their mathematical skills progressively R4 Continue to improve attendance What happens next The school will draw up an action plan to address the recommendations from the inspection.