A SCHOOL in Taunton has been told to improve after its latest inspection.

Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School has been given a ‘requires improvement’ rating after inspectors visited the school.

The school was rated ‘requires improvement’ in four areas, including quality of education, behaviour, and leadership.

Inspectors did rate the school ‘good’ for personal development.

Despite the official rating, inspectors were positive about the school in their report.

Julie Carrington, lead inspector, said: “Pupils are safe and most enjoy school. The school values underpin everything. Pupils have a genuine sense of belonging and pride to be part of the school. Staff provide effective care. Everyone is accepted and nurtured.

“Since the school has opened, it has improved a lot. Pupils are learning more and doing better in writing, mathematics and, increasingly, in their reading.

“However, the curriculum has been too narrow in the past.

"Teachers ensure that pupils experience more subjects now. Even so, pupils do not learn enough across a range of subjects.

“The quality of education is not yet good.

“Pupils’ behaviour in class has improved. However, there is still too much misbehaviour at play times. Pupils say that when bullying happens, staff sort it out.

“Most pupils work hard. However, when pupils struggle to understand their work, they do not stick at their learning well enough.”

Leaders at the school are already making improvements based on the comments from inspectors, including widening the curriculum, but they recognise more needs to be done.

Jeremy Handscomb, head of school, said: “The inspection was a positive process and the inspectors recognised the tremendous hard work that everyone has put in over the past two years.

“We’re pleased the inspection team commented upon the strong foundations that we have laid for building a successful school.

“As of September 2019, Ofsted are now actively inspecting subjects beyond English and maths, to ensure that schools offer an excellent curriculum in subjects such as history, geography and art too.

"This is a change in emphasis that we welcome wholeheartedly, and indeed over the past few months we have already begun to develop exciting learning gateways in every year group and we have seen some high quality work completed by the children.

“There is, however, still work for us to do in this area.

“Clearly, this level of fundamental change takes time to embed and we wish to get things just right.

“Working strongly as a community, we have achieved a great deal in only two years, and the areas for development that the report highlights around wider curriculum development, fine-tuning of teacher assessment and further improving behaviour are already on our school improvement plan for this academic year.”