Pen-Y-Dre High School

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Pen y Dre High School is an inclusive, caring and supportive environment that sits at the heart of its community. In this nurturing environment leaders and staff create a safe space where all are valued and encouraged to 'aspire, achieve, believe' despite the challenges they may face. Leaders are relentless in their vision to remove any barriers to learning, including those related to the impact of poverty and ensuring that all pupils have the best life chances.

Pupils benefit from the outstanding opportunities to develop their Welsh language skills and to become immersed in the local and national culture and heritage of Wales. The wealth of opportunities provided ensure that pupils at the school develop an empathy and lifelong app...reciation of Wales. The headteacher provides thoughtful and sensitive leadership.

He creates a strong sense of belonging amongst staff and pupils, and a learning environment that encourages and supports pupils to make progress from their starting points in the school. The unique working relationships between staff and pupils creates a culture where pupils are confident to take risks. Staff support for pupils with a diverse range of needs is a notable strength.

During the inspection, pupils' attitudes to learning and their interactions with adults and their peers were an outstanding feature. The school provides an ambitious tailored curriculum that allows pupils the freedom to thrive in their areas of interest. However, currently, the school's provision for the progressive development of pupils' literacy and numeracy skills across the curriculum is underdeveloped.

In many lessons, teachers' high expectations and careful planning engage pupils' interest and curiosity and encourage them to achieve their best. As a result, in these lessons pupils make secure progress in their knowledge, understanding and skills. In a minority of instances, teachers do not develop pupils' understanding, knowledge and skills well enough, and this limits the progress they make.

Leaders have developed a wide range of opportunities for professional learning, and this is having a positive impact on many aspects of the school's work including understanding the diverse needs of pupils and developing leadership at all levels. There is a genuine ambition through secure self-evaluation activities to improve all aspects of the school's work, though in a few instances processes need to be sharper. Despite considerable effort by leaders, whole-school attendance remains too low, in particular persistent absenteeism and is a concern.

Despite the notable challenges faced during the refurbishment, staff have worked diligently to ensure pupils continue to learn and thrive. Recommendations R1 Improve pupils' attendance – especially of those persistently absent from school R2 Address the shortcomings in teaching identified in this report R3 Improve pupils' literacy and numeracy skills by strengthening the planning for the progressive development of these skills across the curriculum R4 Strengthen self-evaluation and improvement planning processes What happens next The school will draw up an action plan to address the recommendations from the inspection. Estyn will invite the school to prepare a case study on its work in relation to 'Creating a strong culture and appreciation of Welsh language and heritage'.