Ysgol Cae’r Nant

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Ysgol Cae'r Nant is a very caring and welcoming school. Staff know their pupils and their families well. They provide high-level support and compassion, particularly for those pupils and their families experiencing difficult circumstances.

Provision for pupils' emotional well-being is highly effective and is a strength of the school. Pupils say that they feel safe, secure, and happy in school. They know that adults in the school care for them and that they can turn to them when they face challenges or have difficulties.

This allows them to thrive in the school's inclusive environment. Most pupils have positive attitudes to school, behave well and enjoy their learning. They form strong relationships with adults and one anot...her and show respect and courtesy for all members of the school community.

Most pupils focus well in lessons and demonstrate interest in their learning. As a result, nearly all pupils make good progress as they move through the school and achieve well. Teachers and other staff adapt teaching and learning to meet the educational and wider needs and interests of pupils well.

Staff are encouraged to try new approaches to teaching and to provide a range of interesting and relevant activities and experiences that reflect the community in which they live. They listen carefully to what pupils want to learn about and weave their ideas into well-planned sequences of lessons that build systematically on pupils' knowledge and understanding. Most teaching is purposeful and enables pupils to develop their literacy and digital skills well.

Provision for developing pupils' numeracy skills across the curriculum and their Welsh language skills is less well developed. The headteacher provides strong leadership. She is motivated and determined to succeed for the benefit of pupils and the community.

Staff and governors share her clear vision. They work together cohesively to ensure that the school is a thriving learning community that provides positive opportunities for its pupils. Leaders evaluate the school's work carefully to identify the areas of its work that are most effective and those aspects that need to be improved.

This enables them to plan for improvements and provide purposeful professional learning opportunities for staff. Recommendations R1 Strengthen provision for the development of pupils' Welsh language skills R2 Improve provision to support pupils' application of their numeracy skills across the curriculum R3 Ensure that pupils in all classes have opportunities to decide for themselves how they respond to learning tasks and to make decisions about how they organise their work 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 health and well-being provision that has a highly positive effect, especially on the most vulnerable pupils, for dissemination on Estyn's website.