Alternative Home Tuition, Cwmbran

Alternative Home Tuition is a school in Wales. Welsh schools are inspected by Estyn rather than Ofsted, and its latest report is published on Estyn's website.

Estyn's report on its December 2024 inspection summarises Alternative Home Tuition like this:

"The headteacher provides calm, measured and purposeful leadership. The PRU provides a nurturing learning environment with strong working relationships between staff and pupils. Nearly all pupils respond positively to the care shown by staff. Overall, the quality of teaching and learning is too variable at the PRU. As a result, pupils do not always make the progress of which they are capable. Many staff have an appropriate understanding of pupils’ learning needs and use this knowledge suitably to plan activities for pupils. However, around half of teaching staff do not have high enough expectations of pupils’ engagement and progress. Further, low level disruptive behaviours are not consistently challenged and impede the progress that pupils make in lessons. Leaders have begun to create a curriculum which meets the needs of pupils."

"This is in the early stage of development. Overall, many pupils develop an appropriate range of skills that help them to make progress during their time at the PRU. However, the progressive planning of skills development across the curriculum is underdeveloped. Leaders accurately identify that opportunities for pupils to develop their leadership skills are underdeveloped at the PRU. The additional learning needs co-ordinator (ALNCo) works well with staff, pupils, carers, and parents to establish an effective system for the development of pupil individual development plans (IDPs) and one page profiles (OPP). Staff are developing a deeper understanding of the underlying additional learning needs (ALN) of their pupils and are beginning to develop a suitable range of teaching and learning strategies to meet these needs. Leaders have recognised the need for improvement in pupil attendance as a clear priority for the PRU. Monitoring of pupil attendance is improving since the change in leadership. However, overall pupil attendance currently at the PRU remains too low at 49%."

"Incidents of challenging behaviour are reducing across the PRU and there has been a significant decrease in the number of fixed term exclusions issued to pupils. This is beginning to impact positively on pupil attendance and engagement in learning. Since her appointment, the headteacher has supported senior leaders well to clarify and define their roles and responsibilities. She has identified accurate and pertinent improvement priorities which build well on self-evaluation findings. Working collaboratively, leaders are beginning to use the information gathered from monitoring activities to identify strengths and to inform areas that they need to improve. Staff support families well and foster beneficial relationships with parents and carers. However, annual reports have not been provided to parents and carers since the summer term of 2022. The management committee is committed to supporting the pupils and staff at the PRU. However, the role of the management committee in monitoring the work of the PRU towards meeting its agreed priorities is underdeveloped."

Estyn made 4 recommendations: (1) Improve pupil attendance; (2) Strengthen the quality and consistency of teaching and learning across the PRU to improve pupil progress and outcomes; (3) Working with the local authority and management committee strengthen the accountability of leaders at all levels to drive improvement; (4) Develop arrangements for pupil voice and leadership opportunities at the PRU to support pupils to become independent learners who can make informed choices.