OVERALL EVALUATION
Hall Mead School provides a very good standard of education with many excellent features. It supports very good achievement and personal development, and provides excellent value for money.

The school’s main strengths and weaknesses are:

• The outstanding leadership of the headteacher and the senior leadership team.
  
• Excellent behaviour, based on very high expectations and excellent relationships.
  
• Excellent inclusion of all pupils who attend the school, founded on excellent care and attention to their welfare.
  
• Excellent consultation of pupils and involvement in the way the school develops, leading to excellent levels of satisfaction amongst both pupils and parents.
  
• Excellent work to maintain the high quality of staffing in the school.
  
• Restricted opportunities for spiritual development due to the inconsistent delivery of a daily act of collective worship.
  
• Unsatisfactory information to parents about the achievement of some pupils in Years 10 and 11 in information and communication technology (lOT).
  
• Some less challenging lessons within the overall very good teaching and learning.

Improvement since the previous inspection has been very good. All of the issues raised by that inspection have been dealt with effectively. Standards have continued to improve significantly. The quality of teaching and learning has improved. The school has extended its support for other local partners. The roles of all staff have been revised to increase the scope for raising standards further.

STANDARDS ACHIEVED

Year 11 results

Key: A* - very high; A -. well above average; B — above average; C average; D — below average; E — well below average

Similar schools are those whose pupils attained similarly at the end of Year 9.

Results in the 2003 tests at the end of Year 9 were well above average, and they were sustained in 2004. Results in the 2004 GCSE examinations maintained the well above average standards which have been the pattern in recent years. Work seen during the inspection showed that standards are above average overall by the end of Year 9 and well above average by the end of Year 11. Achievement is good in Years 7 to 9 where pupils improve steadily on the average standards that they bring to the school. They make very good progress in both history and music. Pupils’ understanding of work-related learning is not as well developed as their skills in other subjects. Achievement is very good in Years 10 and 11, and progress made by both boys and girls between Year 7 and their GCSE examinations is amongst the best nationally. Pupils with special educational needs achieve very well, and in 2004 many gained good grades at GCSE.

Pupils’ personal development is very good. Attendance is good, and punctuality is very good. Behaviour is excellent, and the very small minority of pupils who occasionally break the rules do not affect the learning of others. Pupils show very good attitudes to learning, though there is scope to develop even greater independence. Social and moral development are very good. Cultural development is good even though the school population provides less ethnic diversity than is usual in most other parts of the country. Spiritual development is good, though the daily act of collective worship is not delivered consistently. This means that some pupils do not have sufficient opportunity to learn about different views on the meaning of life.