Ysgol Meifod

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Nearly all pupils are happy and proud to belong to Ysgol Meifod and the surrounding community. They enjoy school and the opportunities it provides. Almost without exception, standards of pupils' behaviour are excellent.

When they join the school, most pupils have good social and communication skills. From their starting points, they generally make suitable progress in most areas of learning during their time at school. In a few instances, pupils make extremely good progress.

They particularly enjoy learning experiences that relate to real life contexts that challenge them to think and apply their skills to a high level. However, across the school, pupils do not always receive the right level of challenge. Teachers' expecta...tions for their learning are not always high enough and at times this limits pupils' progress.

All staff show high levels of care for pupils. They model positive behaviours, develop nurturing relationships, and get to know pupils' personalities and interests well. Staff provide a broad range of beneficial learning experiences for pupils within and beyond the school day.

Increasingly, they take advantage of valuable opportunities to use the local area and community as a powerful stimulus for learning. However, at times and especially for younger pupils, adults tend to direct too much of the learning. Opportunities for pupils to learn through play and to make choices about their learning are limited.

The headteacher develops a team and family ethos at the school successfully. Pupils, staff and parents benefit from his caring and approachable leadership style. In partnership with staff and governors, the headteacher seeks out suitable opportunities to improve the school's work.

This includes recent work to improve standards of Welsh at the school. Partnership work with the local cluster of schools is also beneficial, for instance in supporting the school to develop its curriculum. However, the school's leadership does not currently use improvement processes and professional learning well enough to ensure standards of teaching and learning at the school are as strong as they could be.

Recommendations R1 Use evaluation, improvement processes and professional learning strategically to improve teaching and progress in learning across the school R2 Better match the level of challenge and the teaching approaches used to pupils' developmental needs