KIRK Balk Academy has been praised by Ofsted inspectors, with the effectiveness of leadership and the development, behaviour and welfare of students highlighted as ‘good’.
Ofsted has now told the school: “Inspectors judged the effectiveness of leadership and management of the academy as being ‘good’ and they recognised the many positives of the academy and the impact leaders are having in terms of improving outcomes and raising standards“.
High quality leadership has resulted in positive attitudes towards learning from students, inspectors found, which reflects in the personal development, behaviour and welfare of those who attend the school.
The inspection found that overall the school’s ranking is ‘requires improvement’ because there are some areas where work is needed to justify an ofsted ranking of ‘good’.
However, governors believe the report reflects the school’s course of making continued progress.
Whilst inspectors state the academy ‘requires improvement’ overall, governors believe that many positives can be taken from the report. With a judgement of ‘good’ for the effectiveness of leadership and management, as well as for personal development, behaviour and welfare, there is evidence that the direction of travel towards sustainable school improvement is now firmly established.
An academy spokesman said: “We would like to reassure all students, parents and carers that we ourselves, recognise that work is still necessary to ensure consistency in the outcomes of all students and we will not be satisfied until we are judged as being ‘outstanding’ across the board.
“Our unwavering goal is to eradicate all variability in our performance which means that our standards of teaching, learning and assessment will, without exception, be of the highest quality. Our vision and action plan will enable us to achieve this and we will not stop until we realise our ambitions for our great students.
“We were pleased that Ofsted inspectors noted that our new academy motto of ‘No Limits’, launched at the start of this academic year, has set the scene for underpinning our improvement planning and actions.
“They said that the ‘actions taken to address weaknesses are having a positive impact on improving the quality of teaching and learning across the school and raising outcomes’.”
Areas where the school was found to require more progress include reducing the variation in GCSE results in option subjects, including humanities, foreign languages and design and technology.
They also found that progress made by pupils with different starting points was not sufficiently good across all subjects and progress made by disadvantaged students was not improving as quickly their classmates.
Teaching standards were also seen as having “too much variability” and the school’s most gifted students were not being challenged sufficiently.
However, inspectors said the school’s executive principal and head of academy had “an unwavering focus on improving the school further. Their key priorities and clear plans are improving outcomes and raising standards.
