Fernwood School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Key findings

This is an outstanding school in all aspects. It is successful in living up to its motto of 'high achievement with care and discipline for all'. Much of this success is because the excellent leadership of the school at all levels supports high-quality teaching.

Although the school has worked hard to ensure that parents and carers are well informed of their children's progress, communication with a small minority does not fully engage them in the life of the school and in their children's learning. All groups of students achieve outstandingly well in all subjects, particularly in English and mathematics. Teachers interest, motivate and engage students extremely well in learning.

They have high ...expectations of what each student can achieve. Consequently, students make exceptional progress. Students' outstanding behaviour makes an exceptional contribution to the school's safe and positive learning environment.

Students are respectful of each other's differences and behave maturely around the school. They are exceptionally well-motivated to learn. Attendance is above average and is improving and students are punctual to lessons.

Leaders and managers enable the school to perform exceptionally well in all aspects. The impressive curriculum provides a broad and balanced range of rich and memorable experiences that greatly enhance students' learning. The school enthusiastically embraces the broad range of different heritages represented.

As a result, students develop an informed view of the world which strongly underpins their spiritual, moral, social and cultural understanding.

Information about the school

Fernwood is a larger than average-sized secondary school, located on the edge of Nottingham. It became an academy in May 2011.

It is an oversubscribed school that has specialist technology, mathematics, science status. The school was identified as a centre for excellence for German teaching in 2005 by the British German Association. It is recognised for excellence in languages, expressive arts and sport.

The school has a rich cultural mix of students with around 40% coming from a wide range of different ethnic heritages. The proportion of students whose first language is not English is more than twice the national average. The proportion of disabled students and those who have special educational needs – requiring additional support from external services or with a statement of their special educational needs – is below average.

The proportion of students known to be eligible for free school meals is broadly average. The school meets the government's current floor standards, which set minimum requirements for students' attainment and progress. The school has Leading Edge status.