A school is celebrating its latest Ofsted report.

Boltons C of E School has retained its “good” grading after an inspection earlier this month.

Headteacher, Amanda Pitcher, said: “We are absolutely delighted. It’s hard work maintaining a good status, especially when Ofsted change the framework all the time so we are absolutely delighted about it.

“The fact that the teachers all work together as a team and we’re not complacent, we are always looking at how we can improve, even without Ofsted inspections, we are always looking at how we can improve and see what we can do better.

“We had our curriculum fully in place for quite a considerable amount of time so we’re constantly adapting that to the needs of the children and because we are a small school we all know all of the children.”

The report noted that children’s reading was a high priority for teaching staff and that children seemed to go from strength to strength with their reading skills.

The report reads: “The experienced headteacher, together with the strong team of teachers, has continued to deliver a good standard of education to pupils in the school.

“All teachers have high expectations of disadvantaged pupils and pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). The special educational needs coordinator (SENCo) ensures that pupils receive the help that they need during their learning. These pupils do well at school.

“Developing pupils to be fluent readers is a high priority.

“Children start learning phonics on entry to reception.

“They quickly learn the basic letter sounds and blend these into words.

“The books that children read match the phonics they have learned.

"The reading programme is ambitious.

"It is structured and sequenced to support pupils’ reading.

“All teachers are trained in early reading. They have a clear understanding of how young children and pupils learn to read. Teachers read to pupils every day.”

One of the areas for improvement includes the assessment of foundation subjects. The report notes that leaders have only recently started to assess pupils’ learning in the foundation subjects, therefore, do not routinely check what pupils remember from previous years.

Mrs Pitcher added: “The main area for improvement was the assessment of the foundation subjects which we have been doing informally but we formalised that about a-year-ago, so it;’s embedding that and making sure it’s embedded across the whole school and feeding it into end of year reports as well.

"We’ve also done a lot about British literature and activities about that to try and encourage the children to read the classics.”