Margaretting Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School

About Margaretting Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School

Margaretting Church of England Voluntary Controlled Primary School has held a Good rating from Ofsted across both its most recent inspections, with the latest ungraded visit in January 2023 confirming the school remains Good. But the real story here is in the academic outcomes. In the 2023/24 Key Stage 2 assessments, 91% of pupils met the expected standard in reading, writing and maths combined — a figure that towers above the Essex local authority average of 62%. That performance places the school second out of 41 primary schools in Chelmsford and in the top 5% nationally. The school’s ranking score of 91 puts it just behind the top-performing peers in the county, such as Stambridge Primary School and St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary in Colchester, both of which scored 100. For a small village school with only 69 pupils, these results are striking and suggest a focused, effective approach to core learning.

Digging into the detail, the school’s reading results are particularly strong: every single pupil reached the expected standard, and 55% achieved the higher standard. Writing and maths both saw 91% at expected, with 55% and 36% hitting the higher threshold respectively. Average scaled scores of 110 in reading and 108 in maths are well above the national average of 100. Progress scores are not available in the data, so it’s hard to say how much value the school adds relative to starting points, but the raw attainment is clearly high. The Ofsted breakdown shows leadership and management have been consistently Good since at least 2014, and the school has no graded inspection data for behaviour or early years provision, but the overall effectiveness rating has remained steady. With no sixth form and no nursery, the school focuses entirely on its primary-age cohort.

The school is heavily oversubscribed: for the 2025/26 intake, there were 33 applications for just 4 places, giving an oversubscription ratio of 8.25 to one. Only 3 first-preference offers were made, so securing a place is extremely competitive. Facilities include a sports hall, playing fields, music rooms, art studios, a library and an ICT suite, plus clubs like coding, book club and film club. Sports on offer include gymnastics, swimming, cricket and rounders. The school has SEND provisions covering dyslexia, moderate learning difficulties, social and emotional mental health, speech and language needs, and autistic spectrum disorder. With 27.5% of pupils eligible for free school meals, the school serves a mixed catchment. This is a small, Church of England primary that delivers exceptional academic results in a village setting, but parents need to be realistic about the odds of getting a place.

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