The school is continually developing and improving the curriculum that is on offer. Consequently, pupils, including those with SEND, experience a broad and ambitious curriculum that engages them and meets their needs. Pupils achieve well as a result.
As a priority, the school has heavily supported the development of leadership at a subject level. This has ensured that, across subjects, everyone is clear about the most important subject-specific knowledge that they want pupils to learn and the order in which they should learn it.
In lessons, teachers use their strong expertise to break down information into small steps and explain new content clearly to pupils. In most subjects, the school’s assessment strategies are used well to identify gaps in pupils’ knowledge effectively so that they can be addressed. However, in a small number of subjects, these assessment strategies are not used as effectively as they could be to identify and resolve gaps in learning and revisit key ideas. This hinders some pupils from building their knowledge securely over time.
The school provides strong incentives and encouragement to ensure that pupils read widely and often. Pupils relish taking part in the whole-school reading challenge and they make regular use of the school and local community library. The school engages with pupils and parents to select diverse and varied books. This emphasises for pupils the importance of reading different text types, as well as the joy of reading for pleasure...
The Gates Primary School continues to be a good school.