Ysgol John Bright

Highlights from Latest Inspection

Ysgol John Bright is a supportive community of learning where leaders and staff encourage all learners to reach both their academic potential and personal goals.

The school provides a safe, nurturing and encouraging environment alongside high levels of care that enables pupils to learn, grow and develop into mature and responsible individuals. A notable strength of the school is the extensive range of curricular choices for pupils. These include relevant vocational, practical and academic subjects, which reflect pupils' aspirations and the employment needs of the local area.

In addition, the school provides a wide variety of extra-curricular activities and sporting clubs for all its pupils including an annual musical produ...ction, which is staged in the town's theatre. Overall, many pupils seize the valuable learning and social opportunities offered to them and make considerable progress in their personal development by the time they leave school. In many lessons, teachers plan a broad range of learning activities to enable pupils to develop their subject knowledge and understanding.

In a few lessons, teachers' planning is particularly successful in securing strong, sustained pupil progress. In these cases, teachers have high expectations and ask challenging and probing questions to stimulate pupils' thinking and ideas. However, teachers do not maximise opportunities to develop pupils' literacy skills within their subject area.

In addition, in relevant subjects, teachers do not plan numeracy tasks carefully enough to ensure pupils make consistent progress. Overall, planning for the progressive development of pupils' literacy and numeracy skills is underdeveloped. The headteacher is a thoughtful and considerate leader who provides support and robust challenge to his staff.

He has high aspirations for the school as a community of learning. Together with the senior leadership team and staff, he has forged a productive partnership with other education providers, external organisations and local charities such as Ty Hapus to ensure that pupils, including those from low-income households, obtain valuable academic and social learning opportunities. Leaders at all levels use a broad range of evidence to consider the quality and effectiveness of their work.

They are developing well their ability to identify strengths and weaknesses in their practice. However, overall, evaluations are not precise enough to enable leaders to pinpoint specific areas to improve. Whole-school attendance has not improved as well as that in similar schools since the time of the pandemic.

The attendance of pupils eligible for free school meals is notably lower than the national rate. Recommendations We have made three recommendations to help the school continue to improve: R1 Strengthen the provision for the progressive development of pupils' literacy and numeracy skills so that pupils have meaningful and challenging opportunities to develop these skills and make sufficient progress across the curriculum R2 Improve attendance and strengthen processes for monitoring whole-school attendance, including that of specific groups of learners R3 Refine self-evaluation and improvement planning processes so that they focus more precisely on securing improvements in specific areas 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 the broad and purposeful curriculum which meets the needs of all learners for dissemination on Estyn's website.