STAFF and pupils at a Bury primary school are celebrated after coming out of special measures.

Elton Primary School, which is part of a multi-academy trust sponsored by Bury College, was placed into special measures after receiving an ‘inadequate’ rating from Ofsted last year.

However, inspectors revisited the school last month and rated it ‘good’ after finding that ‘substantial improvements’ had been made.

They noted that the quality of teaching had improved and is now rated ‘good’, while there had also been ‘significant improvement in the performance of pupils at the end of key stage 1 and key stage 2 in reading, writing and mathematics’.

The school’s leadership also came in for praise, with inspectors reporting that they had been ‘unswerving in their determination to bring about rapid improvement to the quality of education in this school since the previous inspection’ and had done so ‘with considerable success’.

Inspectors also found that pupils at the school were making ‘strong progress in their learning’ as well as ‘making good progress from their starting points’. They added that teachers had high expectations of pupils’ work and behaviour.

Meanwhile, disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs, disabilities were found to be making good progress.

The school’s headteacher Rachel Pars, who took over in January 2017, said: “We are absolutely delighted about the recognition given by Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI) in this Ofsted report.

“The drive, determination and dedication of the entire staff team at Elton Primary School to improve standards for all of the children in the school community has been exemplary.”

In order to improve further, the school was told it must ensure leaders further embed strategies to improve pupils’ progress in reading, writing and mathematics; teachers provide more challenging work for the most able, especially in writing; and to continue developing a range of strategies to reduce pupils’ rates of absence.

Elton Primary was previously placed in special measures in 2013 when the Department for Education (DfE) said the school “was failing its pupils”.

The school then became an academy in September 2014 amid a storm of controversy, which included governors being sacked and replaced with an interim board, and parents who were angered by the move setting up a protest group named Save Elton Primary.