Golftyn C.P. School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Leaders, staff and governors at Golftyn Primary School provide a safe and stimulating environment for pupils.

They place pupils' and staff's well-being, happiness and learning at the heart of the school's work. They pay careful attention to the development of staff to ensure that all embrace the school's vision and contribute to the strong team ethos. Subsequently, staff and pupils are happy and feel valued.

Pupils feel a firm sense of pride and belonging to their school and their locality. Generally, pupils' behaviour is exemplary. Parents are highly appreciative for the strong, supportive care their children receive.

Leaders and staff nurture pupils' personal, social and communication skills well. Pupils' intera...ctions with adults are courteous and respectful. Most pupils, including those eligible for free school meals and those with English as an additional language (EAL), make good progress in many aspects of their learning and in developing their skills, knowledge and understanding.

Pupils identified as having additional learning needs (ALN) and those in receipt of additional support make effective progress towards their learning goals. However, provision does not always ensure that pupils make the progress they could in a few important areas. For example, the teaching of mathematics is not always effective enough and this limits pupils' progress.

The school's curriculum is broad and engages pupils effectively. As a result, pupils focus on their learning well. Teachers across the school provide pupils with suitable opportunities to make decisions about their learning.

However, too often teachers over-direct learning and do not sufficiently challenge pupils, and the pace of teaching is too slow. Teachers in the younger pupils' classes provide pupils with opportunities to make choices about their activities, but these activities do not provide pupils with sufficient opportunities to learn and practise skills that are appropriate to their development. Leaders accurately identify a few aspects of the school's areas in need of improvement and have created robust systems and processes to evaluate the work of the school.

Nevertheless, the subsequent development and monitoring activities do not always focus sufficiently on improvements that will have the greatest impact on pupils' learning. Leaders have developed an effective system for the assessment of all pupils as they move through the school; they use this to track the progress of every pupil. Generally, teachers provide pupils with effective verbal feedback.

However, written feedback is mainly celebratory and does not provide pupils with enough guidance to know what to do to improve their work. Leaders have comprehensive processes to monitor pupils' attendance. However, the attendance of pupils eligible for free school meals is too low and too many pupils are persistently absent.

Recommendations R1 Ensure that self-evaluation and school improvement actions focus on pupils' learning and progress R2 Improve the aspects of teaching identified in the report as needing improvement R3 Improve staff's understanding of how to teach mathematics to ensure that pupils make better progress R4 Improve the attendance of pupils eligible for free school meals and reduce rates of persistent absence