Spittal Community School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Summary of key findings for parents and pupils

This is a good school.

The resolute leadership of the acting headteacher has ensured an uninterrupted drive to continue to improve. Effective middle leadership and governance ensures strong leadership. A close-knit staff team share their high ambitions.

Teaching is good. Now and then, it is inspiring and exciting. This enables pupils, including those with special educational needs, the most able and the disadvantaged to make good progress and achieve well, at times from below average starting points.

Strong spiritual, moral, social and cultural development underpins the considerate, caring and hard-working attitudes of the pupils. It also ensures that... pupils' behaviour is good and sometimes exemplary. Children have a good start to their education in the early years.

Good teaching helps them acquire new skills quickly. Leadership is good and parents are encouraged to help their children learn. Pupils' relationships with staff are excellent.

As a result, pupils are clear about the boundaries that are set for their conduct and disruptions to learning are rare. Pupils feel safe, well cared for and protected. They are confident that staff will always be on hand to take excellent care of them.

The school works hard to ensure that pupils of all backgrounds are able to achieve success. They are particularly welcoming to those pupils who are potentially vulnerable and those who join with little or no English. The well-informed governing body keeps a close check on the school's performance.

Governors are challenging and hold staff to account for the performance of pupils. It is not yet an outstanding school because : Teaching is not always inspiring enough to ensure a pattern of rapid progress and high achievement. Teachers' questions do not always probe and check pupils' understanding well enough.

Now and then, insufficient is expected of pupils. Their work is not presented as accurately as it could be. Guidance for improvement does not always add sufficiently to the level of challenge in their learning.

Information about this school

This is a smaller-than-average sized primary school. A very large majority of the pupils are from White British backgrounds with a few who speak English as an additional language. This represents a significant increase in the proportion of those who speak English as an additional language since the previous inspection.

The proportion of disabled pupils and those who have special educational needs is above average. Currently, there is a much higher-than-average proportion of disadvantaged pupils who are eligible for support through the pupil premium funding. The pupil premium is additional funding to support those pupils who are known to be eligible for free school meals and those who are looked after by the local authority.

The early years full-time provision consists of Reception children in two mixed-aged classes with pupils from Year 1. The school provides a breakfast and after-school club each day for pupils. The acting headteacher has been in post since May 2015.