Holy Trinity Church of England Academy (South Shields)

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Main findings

This is a good school. The outstanding drive and ambition of the headteacher and senior leaders in the school has brought about rapid improvements to pupils' attainment and progress, their behaviour and engagement in the life of the school and in teaching and learning.

Staff are committed to improving the life chances of every individual child in the school and have very high expectations, and these are communicated to pupils, parents and carers. A typical parental comment was, 'I could not be happier with the support my child and I have had over the past two years. The staff have supported all of my child's educational and emotional needs.'

Children are given a tremendous start to their edu...cation in the excellent Early Years Foundation Stage unit where they make outstanding progress and develop independence, curiosity and perseverance to enter Year 1 with skills in reading, writing and mathematics that are broadly average. This accelerated progress continues throughout Key Stage 1. The school is successfully tackling a legacy of underachievement in reading and writing in Key Stage 2.

School data and observation shows an increasing number of pupils are working nearer to, or above, age-related expectations. This is being achieved through good teaching and a very well designed creative curriculum. The curriculum has an emphasis on basic skills, while also giving pupils a broad range of real-life experiences to develop their knowledge and understanding of the world, and a wealth of educational visits and visitors.

However, writing remains a weaker subject and the school has rightly adopted a raft of individual one-to-one support, catch-up programmes and booster lessons targeted at raising attainment and accelerating progress for different identified groups of pupils. During the inspection the great majority of teaching and learning observed was of a good quality. In the few satisfactory lessons seen, teachers were not using the information from assessment and marking robustly enough to plan activities which closely matched pupils' abilities, especially in writing and for the more able pupils.

Work in pupils' books is neat, well set out and marked regularly. The school's leadership team knows the school well and its self-evaluation is detailed and accurate. The school's track record of success in accelerating pupils' progress, rapidly improving attendance, creating an ethos of high aspirations where everyone is valued and challenged to do their best, and in narrowing the gap between the attainment of boys and girls in Key Stage 1 shows that the school has an outstanding capacity for sustained improvement.

Information about the school

Holy Trinity Primary School was formed from two predecessor schools, St Mary's CE VA Primary School and All Saints CE VC Primary School. Both schools were previously in Ofsted categories of concern. The school is located on the All Saints site.

It opened as a Fresh Start school in September 2008 and there has been extensive refurbishment to the school building. This is a smaller-than-average sized primary school. The pupils are predominantly of White British heritage with a few from minority ethnic backgrounds.

The proportion of pupils who are known to be eligible for free school meals is very high, almost triple the national average. A higher-than-average proportion of pupils have identified special educational needs and/or disabilities but, although the proportion of pupils with a statement of special educational needs is low, the school caters for some pupils with significant needs. Since the school opened there has been some staff turbulence, most notably in Years 2 to 4.