THE head teacher of a Pontypool school has called the findings of educational report as ‘positive’ after receiving adequate ratings for current performance and prospects for improvement.

West Monmouth Comprehensive School received the results of its latest Estyn report on Friday, May 13, following the inspection in March two months earlier.

This was the first assessment carried out by the inspectorate for education training in Wales under the leadership of head teacher Gareth Whitcombe.

He said: “There are many positives in this inspection report but there is always room for improvement.

“We will continue to work with the education authority to work on the inspector’s recommendations and we draw up an action plan, which will outline how they’ll be addressed.”

Mr Whitcombe was formerly the headteacher at Llantarnam School, which closed its doors in 2015 after the announcement of the merger with Fairwater High School to create Cwmbran High School.

The report praised the school for showing performance in nearly all key stage four indicators showing an upward trend and the majority of pupils demonstrate consistently good literacy and numeracy skills.

It also found that attendance levels over the last four years have improved and have placed the school in the upper 50 per cent of similar schools based on eligibility for free school meals for three of the last four years, while the attendance of pupils eligible for free school meals has improved at a faster rate than that of other pupils in the school.

However, the inspectors found that in a minority of subject areas, leadership is not contributing effectively to improvement and senior leadership has not secured sufficient consistency in departmental self-evaluation and improvement planning.

The main recommendations from the latest Estyn report are to improve the standards in key stage four, improve the quality of teaching and assessment, improve the quality of leadership at all levels and improve the quality of self-evaluation and improvement planning.

Before the publication of the findings for the 2016 Estyn report, West Monmouth’s previous inspection was carried out six years ago in 2010.

Since the previous Estyn report, the number of students on the roll at the school has fallen from 1,029 to 666.