Robert Le Kyng Primary School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Short inspection of Robert Le Kyng Primary School

Following my visit to the school on 21 February 2017, I write on behalf of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Education, Children's Services and Skills to report the inspection findings.

The visit was the first short inspection carried out since the school was judged to be good in September 2011. This school continues to be good. The leadership team has maintained the good quality of education in the school since the last inspection.

You, your staff and governors are highly ambitious for your school community. Your tireless work, together with your deputy headteacher, ensures that pupils' 'all-round' development is promoted effectively in a stunning learning ...environment. Your school is therefore a hub of vibrant activities.

Pupils are extremely positive about the support and help they receive from teachers and other adults. Pride in their work and efforts is evident across the school and through the actions of pupils and staff. Positive relationships between adults and pupils are typical, and attitudes to learning by adults (to their own training and development) and by pupils are strong.

Your powerful and engaging leadership stimulates staff, pupils and most parents. You have successfully tackled the areas identified for improvement at the last inspection. Your chosen approach to teaching mathematics by focusing on specific groups during lessons is proving successful.

Pupils' fluency of mathematical concepts is developing well, alongside their reasoning and problem-solving skills. Teaching assistants are deployed well to meet the specific needs of groups or individual pupils. Pupils' understanding of more complex measurements and geometry is effective and therefore matches their deeper understanding of formal calculations.

Consequently, the current progress of pupils is at least good and sometimes better, such as in Year 5. Your approach to checking and tracking pupils' progress is well established across the school. However, there remains some slight inconsistency in the accuracy of information and teachers' knowledge of some pupils' starting points from which to set appropriate targets.

Your careful curriculum planning is delivering the academic rigour alongside the personal care to cater for pupils' individual needs well. It is also enabling them to work together successfully. Pupils are therefore developing the key academic skills and personal qualities to be successful in their future education and life.

Pupils' personal successes and academic achievements are celebrated through the colourful and informative displays that also showcase the exciting and rich curriculum you offer. Visits to the Houses of Parliament or studying crime and punishment in the Tudor times bring learning to life for the varied and diverse groups of pupils who attend your school. Subject leaders are playing a greater part in continually improving standards in the school than previously.

They regularly check on the quality of provision in their subjects and contribute to the overall school improvement plan well. The leadership of English, for example, is characterised by enthusiasm, detail, passion and good knowledge of the subject. This, in turn, is reflected in teachers' and pupils' extremely positive attitudes toward language, literacy, reading and writing, and is having a positive impact on pupils' current rates of progress.

Just occasionally the monitoring conducted, to establish what is working well and what needs to be further improved, is too general. Therefore, precise actions are not always suggested for teachers to improve specific aspects of their practice or pupils' learning. The majority of parents who responded to Ofsted's online questionnaire, Parent View, are highly complimentary about you, your staff and all you do to make their children feel happy, safe and well cared for.

A very small minority of parents raised concerns about the behaviour of some pupils. These concerns were not supported by the evidence gathered by talking to pupils and staff about behaviour at the school during the inspection. Parents typically commented on the benefits of support received from the school including the extra workshops and guidance offered to them to help with their children's learning.

In particular, parents appreciate the specific care offered for vulnerable pupils with the most profound physical or emotional needs. Pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is a particular strength. You promote this well through your rich and varied curriculum, which is enhanced through a wide range of extra-curricular activities including cookery, computer and origami.

You prepare pupils well for life in modern Britain, giving many pupils opportunities to take responsibility for younger ones. Carefully planned lessons in personal, social and health education help pupils' understanding of different cultures, faiths and beliefs. Safeguarding is effective.

The welcoming and caring atmosphere created over time, allied with effective training for staff, ensures that your school has a strong culture of safeguarding. Your focus on the '5 Rs' of 'Recognise, Respond, Reassure, Refer and Record' are an embedded part of daily routines. You and your deputy headteacher ensure that all safeguarding arrangements are fit for purpose and records are detailed and of high quality.

Members of staff and governors are knowledgeable about the signs of abuse, and understand more complex issues such as child sexual exploitation and radicalisation. Pupils report that they feel safe in school due to the care and attention they receive from adults. Safety also features strongly in the curriculum.

Pupils are made aware of online safety and how to keep safe when lighting fires at the forest school. They are confident that staff will help them if they have any concerns. Your commitment to pupils' welfare is evident in the prompt way you follow up matters when brought to your attention.

Constant reminders are evident across the school to adults, emphasising a culture of vigilance. Scenario-based training at staff meetings, governors' meetings and on notices ensure that all aspects of safeguarding children are kept at the forefront of everyone's agenda. As one teacher stated, 'Reminders are everywhere.'

Inspection findings ? Together we examined how the school reacted to the dip in pupils' standards and achievement in 2016 following a period of improving progress and attainment since 2013. This involved delving into how well boys and disadvantaged pupils are now progressing in reading and writing. We also investigated how well middle-ability pupils in key stage 1 are being pushed to reach the standards they are capable of in mathematics and reading.

We examined how well those pupils who underachieved in key stage 1 last year are now catching up in Year 3. Finally, we discussed the attendance of pupils who have special educational needs and/or disabilities. ? You quickly identified areas from the most recently published assessment information that required immediate attention.

In your school improvement plan you introduced new strategies to improving pupils' achievement and attitudes to reading. New guided reading materials to develop reading skills more rapidly, and the use of celebration awards in weekly assemblies, are engaging and stimulating pupils to read more. ? A strong focus on parental engagement has been aligned with the raised expectation of pupils to read at least five times a week.

Book lists of 'recommended reads' are ensuring that pupils obtain a rich 'diet' of high-quality texts that promote their reading skills and enjoyment of reading well. Training for teachers and adults, with a strong focus on pupils' development of vocabulary, has reinvigorated the teaching of phonics and early reading. The close focus by adults on gaps in pupils' reading skills is proving successful.

As a result of your collective efforts, improvements to pupils' progress are evident across the school. ? Your pupil premium champion is highly regarded by staff, pupils and parents alike. The additional clubs and specialist sports teaching provided not only enable staff to be upskilled but also provide a very rich addition to the curriculum and allow teachers to work with disadvantaged pupils at the same time.

Those pupils who wish to attend clubs and represent the school are clear that they must demonstrate their actions not only as effective role models and citizens, but also by reading five times each week as well. Such expectations are having a highly positive impact on the reading and life skills of pupils, especially boys. ? Key stage 1 pupils are making good progress and securing the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to achieve well.

Year 1 pupils confidently spot patterns in letters to make the long 'a' sound such as a/e, ai or ay. Year 2 pupils accurately create compound words such as earth/quake or air/port when studying their topic 'the world around them'. Challenging activities develop pupils' mathematical reasoning skills well, as they solve problems about time or money.

• For those pupils in Year 2 who did not progress as well as hoped last year, targeted action is ensuring that they are now firmly back on track. Year 3 teachers promote pupils' writing well. One example, typical of many, is when pupils develop character descriptions effectively.

Pupils confidently use words for impact such as 'horrified', 'muscular' or 'alarmed' to articulate how the character felt when entering a haunted house. The exciting curriculum, combined with effective teaching, is ensuring that middle-ability pupils, boys and disadvantaged pupils are making good and often better progress. ? Older pupils in key stage 2 are making equally strong progress in their writing.

A detailed evaluation of the 2016 outcomes resulted in a boys' writing project and clear focus on developing pupils' language when writing. A consistent approach to the teaching of writing is evident in all classrooms across the school. The school environment is 'language rich'.

Work in pupils' books illustrates some striking examples of writing across the curriculum, from Reception writing about the Chinese New Year to Year 6 using persuasive devices well to construct newspaper articles carefully. Occasionally, pupils' spelling mistakes are not routinely picked up quickly enough and addressed. Therefore the same mistakes persist.

• The school has a provision for 10 pupils who have physical disabilities. Many of these pupils have profound medical needs that can require significant periods of absence from school. At times, when some of these pupils fall ill, their decline can be rapid and their absence lengthy.

As a result of the specific circumstances of these pupils, their absence from school can typically be higher than normally expected. Case studies examined indicate that the level of care and attention to detail provided by the school to meeting the needs of these pupils is of a very high quality. Next steps for the school Leaders and governors should ensure that: ? monitoring provides more precise next steps for teachers to develop their practice and for specific aspects of pupils' learning that need further improvement ? the school assessment systems for checking precise steps in pupils' progress from their starting points are embedded ? teachers pick up spelling mistakes routinely and address them.

I am copying this letter to the chair of the governing body, the regional schools commissioner and the director of children's services for Swindon. This letter will be published on the Ofsted website. Yours sincerely Richard Light Her Majesty's Inspector Information about the inspection During the inspection, meetings were held with you and the leaders for English and mathematics.

Six members of the governing body, including the chair, met the inspector to discuss the actions taken since the last inspection. A meeting was held with a representative from the local authority. The views of a number of parents were gathered through their responses to Parent View.

Visits to all classrooms were conducted jointly with you to evaluate the impact of teaching on pupils' learning, review the quality of pupils' writing over time, and listen to pupils read and talk informally about their experiences of school. A range of documentary evidence was evaluated including documents relating to safeguarding and governance. The inspector met with a group of boys from key stage 2.

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