Woodfield School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

What is it like to attend this school?

This is an aspirational school, which aims to prepare pupils for life beyond school. Staff listen to what pupils, and students in the sixth form, say they want to do in the future and personalise learning and opportunities towards these goals.

Pupils enjoy their learning.

Students in the sixth form spoke proudly about their work experience at the farm, local library and café. Students understand how their vocational studies help them to prepare for future employment.

Behaviour across the school is settled, calm and orderly.

Pupils are friendly and confident in their interactions with one another. Working relationships between pupils and staff are pos...itive and respectful. Pupils feel safe and like coming to school.

The school provides an exceptional range of experiences to nurture and develop pupils' confidence and resilience. This includes cricket competitions, overnight stays and residential outings, where pupils experience raft building, canoeing and treetop rope courses.

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

The school's curriculum is ambitious.

Pupils learn a broad range of subjects. Teachers adapt their teaching to support pupils with their learning. Staff take pupils' interests into account to inform activity choices.

The curriculum, including in the sixth form, is carefully designed to enable personalised learning goals to be taught alongside subject-specific knowledge. The sequencing of the curriculum ensures that key skills and knowledge are repeated across other subjects, to reinforce learning and to help pupils to remember it long term. However, the school's approach to checks on what pupils know and remember is not understood by all staff or carried out routinely in some subjects.

This means that, sometimes, it is not clear what each pupil knows and remembers, can do, or needs to learn next.

The school prioritises reading, and ensures that staff know the importance of reading and how it strengthens communication. Reading pathways for individual pupils have been developed in collaboration with teaching staff and therapists.

These pathways identify the steps that pupils need to take to build up the important skills they need to become fluent and functional readers.

There is a systematic approach to teaching phonics, including in the sixth form when needed. However, this approach is not implemented as rigorously as it could be.

Some staff do not know precisely the phonic sounds that pupils know or what they need to learn next. For pupils who are developing their phonic knowledge, sometimes the books they read do not closely match their phonic knowledge. As a result, sounds are not embedded into some pupils' long-term memory as securely as they could be to help them quickly become fluent readers.

The school has a clear personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education programme that includes relationships and sex education. Pupils are taught important life skills that strengthen and encourage their independence. Many aspects of the PSHE curriculum are incorporated and reinforced throughout the school day and in all pupils' learning.

Weekly outings in the community, such as to a local public lending library by bus, help pupils to practise what they have learned in real-life situations. In the sixth form, vocational lessons teach functional skills, such as interview preparation and writing job applications as well as learning employment rights. Students work towards accreditations recognised by employers.

All staff have high expectations for pupils' behaviour. They work calmly and celebrate when pupils conduct themselves appropriately. Staff, including the leadership team, work together to support pupils to manage their emotions and feelings.

Pupils trust adults in the school to help them. Pupils learn ways to communicate their needs and to ask for help. Typically, pupils attend school regularly, and leaders have robust procedures in place to improve attendance.

The school works in close partnership with other settings and organisations to evaluate and improve the school's work. Trustees' range of knowledge and skills equips them to hold leaders to account.

Staff enjoy working at the school.

They feel that leaders and the whole school community are supportive of one another. They value the training they receive, which helps them to fulfil their roles.

Safeguarding

The arrangements for safeguarding are effective.

What does the school need to do to improve?

(Information for the school and appropriate authority)

• Pupils who are developing their phonic knowledge are not routinely given books that match the sounds they are learning. This means that they are not developing fluency in their reading as quickly as they might. The school should ensure that the books pupils read match the phonic sounds they know and are learning.

• Assessment in some areas of the curriculum, including phonics, is not coherently embedded. Systems for checking pupils' recall of prior learning and understanding do not routinely inform the sequencing of next steps in learning. The school should ensure that checks on pupils' learning identify what each pupil knows and can do and what pupils need to learn next.