In Autumn 2024, Elaine sat 0.7 points below the national benchmark for pupil engagement, with more challengers than advocates and a NetAPC of –13. Five censuses later, the school is +1.3 above national and sitting in the top tier of TEP's primary dataset, with a NetAPC of +56.

Trust: Inspire Partnership | Phase: Primary | Location: Medway

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Alongside the engagement data, the school has seen:

• SEND population: 28%, with 8% EHCPs
• Pupil Premium eligibility: 50%
• Attendance: improved from 92.79% to 94.33%, with persistent absence reducing
• Employee sickness: reduced by 17%; no employee resignations in the most recent full academic year

The starting point

Elaine Primary School's improvement journey has been built steadily since joining the partnership in 2018. Over that period, the school made significant progress, moving from the bottom 20% nationally at Key Stage 2 to outcomes above national averages by 2019. That trajectory reflected sustained investment in leadership, school improvement and teaching.

Leadership stability has been central to that story. The school benefited from consistent leadership over a sustained period, culminating in securing a Good judgement in September 2022 following previous judgements of double RI.

By autumn 2024, pupil engagement data highlighted several areas requiring focus. While all drivers of engagement sat slightly below the national benchmark, effort (–0.8) and behaviour (–0.7) emerged as key priorities for development. Year 4 was identified as an important focus cohort, particularly boys, enabling leaders to target support where it could have the greatest impact. The response focused on strengthening consistency for pupils and families, while building on the foundations already established through the school's longer-term improvement journey.

Stability, past, present and future

Elaine has benefited from several years of stable leadership and staffing since joining the partnership. That continuity has supported the development of deep-rooted relationships across the school community, relationships that underpin pupils' sense of belonging, trust and inclusion.

"By pairing deep-rooted continuity with high-level trust, we have provided our children and families with the stability they deserve. With a consistent team, our focus is firmly on the future, building a legacy of sustained achievement and unwavering support for every child at Elaine."— Rupinder Bansil, Headteacher

Reshaping classroom engagement

The school strengthened its approach to active learning, reducing reliance on worksheets and whole-class presentations. PowerPoint as a default delivery vehicle was stripped out. In its place: live modelling visible on learning walls, manipulatives in every classroom, knowledge organisers anchoring sticky knowledge, and AI used to generate scaffolded, hands-on tasks, particularly for pupils with high SEND needs.

The shift was reinforced by changes to professional development. PDMs are now run as group rehearsals, with teachers practising their delivery before stepping into the classroom.

The data signal is clear: enjoyment and drive (once below benchmark) are now the school's strongest performing drivers, sitting at +2.5 and +2.1 above national in Spring 2026. The single question "I look forward to going to school on Monday" moved from 5.9 (–0.3 vs national) in Autumn 2024 to 8.3 (+3.1 vs national) in Spring 2026, the largest swing across the entire item set.

"Retention is deeply rooted in active participation; neither children nor adults truly absorb information when they are passive recipients for six hours a day. By ensuring our learning is purposeful, engaging, and memorable, we move beyond simple listening to genuine attention and long-term recall."— Emma Baldwin, Head of School

Enrichment and aspiration

Termly enrichment is now embedded: STEM days, orienteering, specialist musicians delivering weekly lessons (with bursary places funded for vulnerable pupils), and a cooking week linked directly to the school's reading-for-pleasure target. A "raising aspirations" display features books about careers alongside photographs of staff, pupils' family members and community contacts in their workplaces.

This matters most for the pupils who will not thrive on academic measures alone. Several of Elaine's most complex SEND pupils, children who cannot consistently access mainstream classroom learning, now attend weekly music lessons. The school's Thrive practitioner is training colleagues; a young carers' pilot has been established under a designated lead.

A separate inclusion survey, run as part of the school's wider improvement work with ImpactEd and Challenge Partners, surfaced a pattern leadership took seriously. Where the typical school shows employees scoring inclusion lower than leaders, Elaine's results were inverted: leaders scored themselves lower than employees did.

"The survey revealed a fascinating inversion of the typical trend: while we as leaders held ourselves to a more critical standard, our staff felt a much stronger sense of confidence and success in their inclusive practice. It is incredibly heartening to realise that our team feels more empowered and positive about their impact on the children than we even dared to hope, validating the strength of the culture we've built together."— Emma Baldwin, Head of School

That reflection fed directly into the SENCO's drop-in support for teachers and the timetable reviews now used for the school's most complex SEND pupils.

Parental partnership and the school as a community space

The relationship with families has been deliberately rebuilt. The school day was restructured: a soft start with toast in Key Stage 1, adults visible at every gate, parents handing children over rather than gathering inside. The parent code of conduct was reissued and enforced. Communication shifted from a 72-hour automated response to a same-day phone call.

Parents are invited in for family reading afternoons, craft afternoons and PTA-led events. The result is a community that increasingly sees Elaine as their school, and a marked reduction in parental complaints across the same period.

How TEP fits

Two specific uses of TEP came up across the case study conversation.

For pupils, TEP is the diagnostic that tells leaders where to look next. The granularity (by year group, by gender, by SEND status, by intersectional combinations) has allowed leaders to target interventions precisely rather than broadly. The Year 4 cohort that scored 5.6/10 in Autumn 2024 finished Spring 2026 at 9.1/10, +1.2 above national. Pupils on SEN Support are now at 8.9/10 (+1.4 above national contextual benchmark); pupils eligible for Free School Meals are at 9.0/10 (+1.5 above national). Response rates have moved from 89% to 96% across the same period.

"The TEP survey just allows you to drill down into that data and really think about particular year groups … It's been a fantastic tool to be able to give us some focus around key year groups, key questions, key contextual factors for key pupils … the same questions are repeated over time so you can start to see where there are patterns."— Rupinder Bansil

For employees, TEP has become a culture mechanism. Leaders feed back termly using a "quick wins / slower burners / needs more thought" structure, sharing the slides openly with the whole school community. The shift from anonymous concern to confident voice was striking: in the most recent census, several employees printed out their comments and brought them to leadership in person.

"What we've seen is [the survey] become a gateway for our staff to be able to voice their concerns, but also it's given them courage to see that when they put something in that space, it's going to be heard. So now we're seeing a lot more verbal feedback as well … that culture shift, of 'I can talk about this and it's okay'."— Rupinder Bansil

The school also uses TEP's resources directly with pupils. The downloadable feedback decks are adapted for a primary audience and shared in assemblies, so pupils, like employees, can see what they said, what is being acted on, and what is being held for longer-term thinking.

Takeaways for school and trust leaders

Three things stand out from Elaine's experience.

Trust capacity at the right moment matters more than any single intervention. The catalyst was not a programme. The catalyst was the ability to draw on trust capacity at the right moment, building on years of sustained improvement and strong relationships.

Engagement is built through routines and rituals, not slogans. The Elaine Way behaviour expectations work because they are modelled in corridors, displayed in classrooms, lived in assemblies and reinforced in daily briefings, not because they are written on posters.

Listening is a discipline, not a survey. TEP's value at Elaine has been amplified by what leaders consistently do with the data: feed back termly, act on the quick wins, name what is taking longer, and bring pupils and employees into the same conversation.

What's next

Elaine's leaders are now focused on continuing to refine pupil engagement in the classroom, deepening parental partnership, and embedding a life-skills curriculum that sits alongside academic outcomes, from tying shoelaces in Year 1 to making a fruit salad by the end of Key Stage 1. The school is also taking part in TEP's Families Pilot this summer, extending the same termly engagement rhythm to parents and carers.

Elaine Primary School is part of Inspire Partnership Multi-Academy Trust and has been a TEP partner since Autumn 2024. The school joined Inspire Partnership in May 2018, and was most recently inspected by Ofsted in September 2022, graded Good. This case study draws on five termly TEP pupil engagement censuses (Autumn 2024/25 to Spring 2025/26) and a conversation with Rupinder Bansil (Headteacher and Inspire Partnership Trust Leader) and Emma Baldwin (Head of School) on 28 April 2026.