Holy Family RC Primary School celebrates significant Ofsted improvement
Holy Family RC Primary School in Oldham has been recognised by Ofsted for significant improvement in its latest inspection. The report, published in March 2026, marks the strongest outcome the school has had for nearly a decade.
It reflects three and a half years of close partnership with Emmaus Catholic Academy Trust, which Holy Family joined on 1 December 2022.
The school was found to be meeting the expected standard in every one of the six areas inspected: achievement, attendance and behaviour, curriculum and teaching, early years, inclusion, leadership and governance, and personal development and wellbeing. Safeguarding was judged to be met in full.
Inspectors found pupils achieving well, behaving well, and feeling a genuine sense of belonging at the school. One line in the report has stayed with staff and governors: pupils describe Holy Family as feeling like being part of a family.
Holy Family sits in Limeside, an Oldham community where more than half of pupils are eligible for free school meals at some point and more than a quarter receive SEND support. This is exactly the kind of community Emmaus exists to serve. The school joined the trust with funding from the Department for Education and a clear job ahead of it: to put genuinely good Catholic education at the centre of a community that needed it.
Emmaus’s response from day one was both sustained and specific. Simon Hunter, now an Emmaus executive leader and at that point brought in as an experienced external consultant, spent the best part of 18 months working alongside Holy Family staff to co-construct an entirely new curriculum: one rooted in the school’s own community and character, but properly sequenced and resourced from nursery onwards. That piece of work has since gone on to inform Emmaus’s wider curriculum offer.
Alongside the curriculum work, the central team supported the school across SEND, early years, governance and safeguarding. Subject leaders received intensive development and joined trust-wide professional learning networks in English, science, music and early years. When the school needed additional leadership capacity in the months before the inspection, a second executive leader, Anne Clinton, was in school two days a week from September right through to inspection day.
None of that would have worked without the work of Holy Family’s own staff. Headteacher Alison Tunnicliffe, who led the school through the bulk of the improvement journey, established the trauma-informed approach to behaviour that inspectors singled out as a strength; three members of staff now hold a diploma in trauma-informed practice, and a wellbeing group runs Lego therapy, ELSA and Forest School provision.
Acting headteacher Samantha Needle, who stepped up to lead the school for the final stretch, and her colleagues introduced a renewed approach to attendance that includes a minibus service for families facing real transport barriers, attendance ambassadors in every class, and pupil-led campaigns.
A Year 6 teacher’s “bucket filling” mathematics intervention programme, designed around individual gaps and run flexibly across Key Stage 2, has helped lift outcomes; inspectors described the school’s Key Stage 2 mathematics work as “a relative success story.”
Emmaus did not arrive with a curriculum and ask Holy Family to deliver it. The central team worked alongside the school until the school owned the work. As John Donald, director of education at Emmaus, puts it: “We very much have a ‘do with’ model rather than a ‘do to’ one. Sometimes our schools fall down, and we pick them up and we walk with them.”
Faith at Holy Family shows up as inclusion. It is a one-form-entry Catholic school serving families of many backgrounds and beliefs. Its mission statement, “we live, learn and love in His way,” is visible in everything from how children are greeted at the breakfast club to how the school’s pupil parliament, sports leaders, mini-police and reading ambassadors actively look out for their classmates.
Trips and residentials are kept within reach of every family through quiet fundraising, payment plans and direct support, so that disadvantage does not narrow the experience pupils are offered. As Samantha Needle reflects: “We’re a whole family, and everybody is part of it, whether you’re a child in the school, a parent, or part of the community.”
The inspection has flagged further next steps for the school on consistency of feedback to pupils, embedding new handwriting and spelling approaches, and quality of interactions in the early years. Plans are already in place, and Emmaus will continue to walk alongside Sam, the wider leadership team and the staff at Holy Family.
For school leaders weighing up what it means to join a Catholic Academy Trust, Holy Family’s story tells the more honest version: not a takeover and not a loss of identity, but a partnership that stayed in place for three and a half years, rooted in the school’s own faith and community.