Fred Longworth High School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Summary of key findings for parents and pupils

This is a good school Pupils receive a good and improving education. Leaders have stopped the decline in standards and have driven far-reaching improvements that are helping pupils throughout the school to make faster progress. Leaders have created an inclusive school community based on a sense of belonging and togetherness.

Pupils and staff speak with affection about being part of 'Freddie's family'. Opportunities for pupils' personal development are exemplary. Pupils have an excellent understanding of how to keep themselves safe and profit from an extensive range of opportunities to prepare them for life in modern Britain.

Pupils benefit from a broad and bal...anced curriculum. The expressive and creative arts inject the curriculum with vigour and vitality. Governors have provided strong and effective challenge to leaders, which has been instrumental in securing faster pupil progress in humanities, English and mathematics.

Pupils behave exceptionally well in lessons and during the school day. They are respectful, polite and considerate, and demonstrate consistently excellent attitudes to learning. Teaching is good overall and in many areas of the curriculum it is highly effective.

Teachers use questioning skilfully and provide high- and middle-ability pupils with demanding work. The effectiveness of leaders' checks on the quality of teaching varies across the curriculum. This is contributing to the inconsistencies that remain in the quality of teaching.

The impact of assessment differs across the curriculum. Pupils are sometimes unaware of how well they are doing in different subjects and what they need to do to improve. Leaders focus relentlessly on improving the quality of teaching.

However, they do not routinely evaluate with clarity and precision the impact of different strategies they have employed. Consequently, leaders' plans for improvement are not consistently based on a clear understanding of what has worked well in the past. Outcomes for pupils require improvement because results in external examinations have shown that pupils have not made good progress in English and mathematics in the recent past.

However, inspectors discovered that pupils currently at the school are making much faster progress in these subjects. As a result, this area of the school's work is quickly improving towards being good. Leaders have prioritised strategies to accelerate the progress made by boys, and their work is clearly having a positive impact.

Despite this, teachers' expectations of what boys can achieve are not high enough. Teaching is not as effective for low-ability pupils as it is for others. Some teaching does not provide sufficient challenge for these pupils.

Where teachers set demanding work, they often do not provide the careful support required for these pupils to access the work and make rapid gains in their learning.

Information about this school

The school meets requirements on the publication of specified information on its website. The school complies with Department for Education guidance on what academies should publish.

Fred Longworth High School is larger than the average secondary school. It converted to academy status in September 2011. When its predecessor school was last inspected by Ofsted in 2010, it was judged to be outstanding.

The proportion of disadvantaged pupils is broadly similar to the national average. The proportions of pupils from minority ethnic groups and of pupils who speak English as an additional language are much lower than the national average. The proportion of pupils who have SEN and/or disabilities is similar to the national average.

The proportion of pupils who join the school with high prior attainment is above the national average. The proportion of pupils who join the school with low prior attainment is below the national average. The vast majority of pupils live within close proximity to the school.

The school uses two alternative educational providers: 'Fix it' and 'My life'. These are accessed by a very small number of Year 11 pupils for one day per week. The school meets the government's floor standards, which set the minimum expectations for pupils' attainment and progress by the end of Year 11.