Horwood and Newton Tracey Community Primary School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Main findings

This is an outstanding school.

Pupils achieve extremely well. Behaviour is excellent. Attendance is high and pupils are very keen to learn.

High quality care, support and guidance enable all pupils to make the best of the opportunities offered by the school through the outstanding curriculum. Pupils have an excellent understanding of how to stay safe and keep fit and healthy. They make an outstanding contribution to the school and wider community, reflecting the high quality strategies to promote community cohesion.

The school takes great care to ensure the pupils are safe and procedures for safeguarding, including child protection, are outstanding. Strong partnerships with external ...agencies provide valuable additional support for those pupils whose circumstances make them vulnerable. Very close links with the local learning community provide support for pupils deemed gifted and talented.

High quality links with parents and carers benefits pupils' learning and well-being. Pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is good. Children get a good start to school in the Early Years Foundation Stage.

This is improving with the nursery provision now on the main site. The school has identified that the building changes required to link the nursery provision with the provision for children in the Reception Year are not fully complete. This work is due to be completed soon.

Pupils build very securely upon this good start. They learn extremely well and make outstanding progress because of the consistently high quality of teaching. They attain very high standards at the end of Year 6 and are very well prepared for the next stage in their education.

Despite the high standards of attainment the school has correctly identified that the presentation of work in pupils' books is not always good enough. The success enjoyed by the pupils is due largely to the extremely high expectations that staff and the good quality governing body have of all aspects of pupils' development. The continual pursuit of excellence in all of the school's activities has led to exceptional improvement over time.

Leaders and managers have a very secure understanding of the school's strengths and weaknesses and use this information extremely well in the high quality school development plan. These factors indicate an outstanding capacity for sustained improvement.

Information about the school

This school is smaller than average.

There are far more boys than girls on roll. It serves mainly the small villages in the surrounding area, although a small number of pupils come from nearby towns. The proportion of pupils known to be eligible for free school meals is well below average.

The vast majority of pupils are White British. The proportion of pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities is broadly average. Pupils' needs include speech and communication difficulties, emotional, social and behavioural difficulties and difficulties within the autism spectrum.

More pupils than usual leave or join the school other than at the usual time. Since the last inspection of this school the nursery unit has been moved from the village hall and is now integrated with the school. The school has been awarded Healthy Schools Plus status, International School status and the Eco School bronze.