West Monmouth Comprehensive School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Staff and governors at West Monmouth School are committed to helping pupils to thrive in a supportive environment. They use a range of strategies to raise pupils' aspirations and provide them with beneficial individual support where needed.

Most pupils feel safe in school. They value the opportunities they have to participate in extra-curricular activities, develop their leadership skills and play an active role in school life. Nearly all pupils behave maturely around the school and show respect to their teachers and their peers.

In the many lessons where teachers plan suitably demanding tasks, pupils engage well in their learning and make sound progress. A minority of pupils find it hard to work independently and do not a...lways make the progress that they could. This is often because teaching does not challenge them sufficiently.

Leaders have secured a number of improvements to the school's work. They have been successful in promoting a culture of safeguarding, have improved rates of attendance well and use a range of beneficial strategies to reduce the impact of poverty on pupil outcomes. They have developed a curriculum which meets the needs of nearly all pupils effectively and are making sound progress in developing their Curriculum for Wales.

However, the school has not developed a sufficiently effective approach to the progressive development of pupils' skills across the curriculum or ensured that all teaching consistently challenges pupils to achieve as highly as possible. In general, leaders have a sound understanding of the main strengths and areas for development in their areas of responsibility. However, there is too much variation in how rigorously leaders evaluate their provision and how precisely they plan for improvement.

Recommendations R1 Ensure that all teaching consistently challenges pupils of all abilities to make progress and develop their independence in learning R2 Strengthen provision for the progressive development of pupils' skills across the curriculum R3 Ensure that self-evaluation processes are consistently robust and accurate, and that leaders plan for improvement precisely