Lime Tree Primary Academy

About Lime Tree Primary Academy

Lime Tree Primary Academy in Trafford holds a Good rating from its most recent Ofsted inspection in 2024, but the detail beneath that headline tells a more nuanced story. The school was not judged on overall effectiveness in that inspection, though inspectors awarded Outstanding grades for early years provision, personal development, and behaviour and attitudes. Leadership and management, along with quality of education, were rated Good. This is a school that has seen a shift since its previous inspection in 2013, when it was rated Outstanding across the board. On the key academic metric of KS2 reading, writing and maths at the expected standard, 70% of pupils achieved that benchmark in the 2023/24 academic year. That is almost exactly in line with the Trafford local authority average of 71%, placing Lime Tree 33rd out of 55 primary schools in the borough. Nationally, it sits in the 30th percentile among all state primaries.

Looking more closely at the 2023/24 KS2 results, the school's strongest individual subject performance was in maths, where 89% of pupils reached the expected standard and 33% achieved the higher standard. Reading followed with 81% at expected and 42% at the higher level, while writing saw 77% at expected and just 14% at the higher standard. The combined higher standard across all three subjects was 9%, which is a modest figure. Average scaled scores were 107 in both reading and maths, slightly above the national benchmark of 100. The school does not publish progress scores for any of the three core subjects, so it is not possible to see how much value it adds relative to pupils' starting points. In the Trafford context, the school sits just below the top-performing third of primaries, with the top three in the borough — St Vincent's Catholic Primary, Park Road Academy and Brooklands Primary — all achieving ranking scores above 90.

Lime Tree is a larger-than-average primary with 481 pupils against a capacity of 472, and it is clearly popular: for the 2025/26 intake, there were 136 applications for 58 places, an oversubscription ratio of 2.34 to one. 55 of those 136 applicants listed it as their first preference, and all 55 were offered a place. The school has nursery provision for children from age two, and its facilities include a library, dining hall, outdoor playground, playing fields and a chapel. Sports on offer include athletics, swimming, netball, cross country, rounders and cricket, while clubs range from coding and chess to drama and eco club. The school supports a wide range of SEND needs, including dyslexia, speech and language difficulties, and social, emotional and mental health needs. Parent feedback is overwhelmingly positive: 96% of respondents would recommend the school, and 100% agreed or strongly agreed that their child is happy there.

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