King’s Park Academy

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Outcome

King's Park Academy continues to be a good school.

The principal of this school is Lauren Dean. This school is part of Ambitions Academy Trust, which means other people in the trust also have responsibility for running the school.

The trust is run by the chief executive officer, Sian Thomas, and overseen by a board of trustees, chaired by Caroline Sard. There is also a director of primary education, Alexandra Prout, who is responsible for this school and five others.

What is it like to attend this school?

Pupils enjoy attending this inclusive school.

Typically, children in Reception learn routines quickly. Across the school, pupils learn how to behave well and be ...respectful to their peers. On occasion, when pupils have lapses of concentration, staff address this quickly, and pupils re-engage with learning promptly.

Pupils receive strong pastoral support. They feel confident that adults provide help when they have worries, concerns or need extra emotional support. There is a range of extra-curricular activities on offer, such as karate, choir and gardening.

Older pupils like being a 'buddy' with younger pupils.

Learning to read, write and become a confident mathematician sit centrally in the school's curriculum. Alongside this, pupils enjoy learning a broad range of subjects.

A range of school visits, such as visiting a planetarium or performing at musical events at Bournemouth Pavilion, broadens pupils' horizons well. A highlight for many pupils is overnight camp. Pupils say that this helps them learn to be resilient and persevere.

Pupils learn about right and wrong and how to make sensible decisions.

What does the school do well and what does it need to do better?

The trust knows the school's strengths and areas that need refinement well. It deploys appropriate resources to ensure that pupils receive a suitable curriculum.

Staff get the right training to ensure that they have the subject knowledge they need. The school prioritises supporting the most vulnerable pupils and families. A recent focus on improving pupils' attendance is paying off.

Pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) routinely receive strong pastoral support. Staff implement individualised targets relating to pupils' education, health and care plans well. Staff ensure that these pupils use resources such as visual timetables and learning prompts to scaffold their learning when necessary.

This ensures that these pupils can learn well.

The trust regularly reviews how well pupils are achieving. Recent enhancements to the reading curriculum are proving effective.

Consistent teaching approaches are in place to ensure that pupils gain the phonics knowledge they need to read and spell accurately. Nonetheless, a minority of pupils in key stage 1, who did not learn to read sufficiently well in the recent past, are receiving extra teaching to develop their ability to use phonics to read whole words. This is ensuring that these pupils' accuracy is increasing steadily.

Staff work in unison to ensure that the curriculum across subjects is continuously improving. For example, in mathematics, staff have designed a curriculum that enables pupils to problem-solve and reason well. Nonetheless, staff know that ensuring the quick recall of mathematical facts remains a top priorty across the school.

The wider curriculum is well sequenced. It includes the subject content pupils should learn and by when they should know it. Staff are implementing the intended curriculum increasingly well.

As a result, pupils now know and remember more over time. For example, pupils build on their prior knowledge of tints, tones and colour progressively across the curriculum for art.

Across the school, staff use a range of assessment tools to find out what pupils know and remember.

However, staff sometimes do not adapt teaching sequences sufficiently well. When this happens, teaching does not enable pupils, including some pupils with SEND, to learn the most essential knowledge that they need to know next. At these times, teaching does not support pupils to move on in their learning when they are ready.

The curriculum teaches pupils about equality and diversity well. Teaching ensures that pupils know how to keep themselves safe online. Staff implement the school's behaviour policy well.

This ensures that pupils are successful in learning how to regulate their behaviour.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.

What does the school need to do to improve?

(Information for the school and appropriate authority)

• In some sequences of work, teaching does not prioritise the most important curriculum content that pupils need to know next.

This makes it more difficult for pupils to progress through the curriculum and slows down their learning. The school must ensure that staff use all the information they have to plan and adapt curriculum sequences so that all pupils progress through the curriculum consistently well.

Background

When we have judged a school to be good, we will then normally go into the school about once every four years to confirm that the school remains good.

This is called an ungraded inspection, and it is carried out under section 8 of the Education Act 2005. We do not give graded judgements on an ungraded inspection. However, if we find evidence that a school would now receive a higher or lower grade, then the next inspection will be a graded inspection, which is carried out under section 5 of the Act.

Usually this is within one to two years of the date of the ungraded inspection. If we have serious concerns about safeguarding, behaviour or the quality of education, we will deem the ungraded inspection a graded inspection immediately.

This is the first ungraded inspection since we judged the school to be good in April 2018.

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