Why officers will be parachuted into Powys secondary school

Estyn inspectors judged the school “to have made insufficient progress in relation to the recommendations following the most recent core inspection” in 2022.

Here is where they found wrong in their report:

Quality of teaching

Inspectors found there were “very few instances where teaching is very strong”.

The inspectors noted that there had been improvement and noted “the school has developed a whole-school approach to teaching through their ‘lesson essentials’.

“This has helped to develop a shared understanding amongst staff of the school’s expectations around teaching.

“More recently, ‘marking essentials’ have been developed and introduced with the aim of improving the quality of feedback.”

However, inspectors found this had “not had enough impact on improving the quality of teaching”.

They added that there was a “‘high expectations of pupils’ behaviour, but expectations in terms of pupils’ standards and progress are too variable.

“There is often a lack of clarity around what is meant by challenge in lessons, especially for more able pupils - in a minority of lessons, teachers’ expectations and the level of challenge are too low. This results in the pace of pupils’ learning being too slow.

“In these lessons, teachers do not plan well enough to ensure pupil progress. They tend to plan for activities that keep pupils busy rather than enabling them to make sufficient progress in their subject knowledge and skills. Shortcomings in these lessons also include providing activities that are too low level or overly scaffolded, giving too much or too little time to tasks and not exploring the work in sufficient depth.”

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Literacy, numeracy and digital skills

Since the last inspection Estyn found “there has been suitable progress in the provision to develop pupils’ English literacy skills, there has not been enough progress in developing the provision for numeracy and digital skills.”

They added “Leaders have identified a variety of suitable tasks to develop a few aspects of pupils’ numeracy skills, for example in adopting a consistent approach to how pupils draw and interpret graphs.

“However, these tasks are not always meaningful and do not always develop pupils’ subject knowledge and understanding, especially in subjects outside the relevant ‘champion subjects’ of science, geography and design technology. The quality of the opportunities for pupils to apply their numeracy skills in real life contexts is variable and they are not always suitably challenging.”

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Improvement in planning 

Inspectors were sympathetic to issues the school has faced as there has been a high turnover of staff since the main inspection in 2022.

Estyn noted a number of improvements in their planning but said there were still concerning issues.

They found: “The evaluation of the impact of teaching on pupils’ learning is limited. There is little focus on the development of pupils’ skills and their subject knowledge and understanding.

“Overall, there has not been enough progress in important areas of the school’s work noted as priorities in the post inspection action plan.

“As a result, improvement planning has not had enough impact on raising pupil outcomes, improving the quality of teaching and the provision for skills including Welsh, whole-school attendance and reducing the deficit budget.”

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Health and Safety

While several issues were raised in the inspection in 2022 around Health and Safety, Estyn found the school had addressed many but not all of them.

Inspectors said: “Fencing around both the Llandrindod and Builth sites is now complete. There are now suitable arrangements in place to identify and ensure the safety of sixth form pupils at the Llandrindod site.

“These include lanyards for all sixth form pupils, fobbed entry points and sign-in arrangements.

"However, two issues remain. The public access arrangements to the leisure centre and the public parking arrangements during the school day at the Builth campus need to be resolved.”