St Mary's Roman Catholic Primary School, a Voluntary Academy
URN 147592 · Primary · Academy sponsor led · Lancashire
Tong Lane, Bacup, OL13 9LJ
How many families applied
Preferences expressed and offers made at Reception, as published by the Department for Education. These describe demand. They do not indicate whether any particular child would be offered a place.
In the 2025 intake, 9 families named St Mary's Roman Catholic Primary School, a Voluntary Academy as their first preference, and the school made 9 offers.
No per-place figure is published for this year: the school offered 9 places, too few for a ratio to mean anything.
| Intake | 1st preferences | All preferences | Offers made | 1st prefs per place |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 9 | 20 | 9 | - |
| 2024 | 12 | 30 | 12 | 1.00 |
| 2023 | 18 | 33 | 21 | 0.86 |
| 2022 | 14 | 23 | 14 | 1.00 |
| 2021 | 19 | 35 | 20 | 0.95 |
| 2020 | 16 | 27 | 17 | 0.94 |
“Offers made” counts the offers the school made. It is not the number of places the school had, so please do not read it as one.
Ofsted
Ofsted changed its inspection framework: the current one publishes several graded areas and no single overall grade, while the previous one published an overall effectiveness grade. Each inspection below states which framework produced it.
Ofsted report card (current framework), 14 April 2026
Safeguarding: Met
Inclusion: Needs attention
Curriculum and teaching: Needs attention
Achievement: Needs attention
Attendance and behaviour: Needs attention
Personal development and wellbeing: Expected standard
Early years: Expected standard
Leadership and governance: Needs attention
The current framework does not award an overall grade.
Ofsted's report for this school
Ofsted graded inspection (previous framework), 16 April 2024
Category of concern: Serious weaknesses
Overall effectiveness: Inadequate
Quality of education: Requires improvement
Behaviour and attitudes: Inadequate
Personal development: Requires improvement
Leadership and management: Inadequate
Early years: Requires improvement
Sixth form / post-16: 9
Ofsted's report for this school
Exam results
Published by the Department for Education for the whole year group. Figures for smaller cohorts are withheld by DfE to protect pupil privacy and appear here as a dash, not a zero.
| Year | Expected standard in reading, writing & maths | Higher standard | Average reading score | Average maths score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | 15.0% | 0.0% | 99.0 | 96.0 |
| 2023/24 | 37.0% | 0.0% | 100.0 | 97.0 |
| 2022/23 | 32.0% | 0.0% | 100.0 | 96.0 |
Teachers staying and leaving
These come from the School Workforce Census, which follows each teacher into the next year. The numbers count full-time jobs, so a teacher who works half the week counts as half. They are not a count of people.
| Census year | Teachers (FTE) | Still there a year later | Moved to another state school | Left state schools | Left in total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024/25 | 11.7 | 3.9 | 2.2 | 5.6 | 66.7% |
| 2023/24 | 9.7 | 7.7 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 20.6% |
| 2022/23 | 10.1 | 6.6 | 2.0 | 1.5 | 34.7% |
| 2021/22 | 11.1 | 7.5 | 1.6 | 2.0 | 32.4% |
| 2020/21 | 11.8 | 9.8 | 2.0 | 0.0 | 16.9% |
| 2019/20 | 10.0 | 8.0 | 1.0 | 1.0 | 20.0% |
This is turnover among teachers. It says nothing about the headteacher or the senior leadership team: DfE publishes leadership retention separately and we do not hold it by school.
Catchment area
Nobody publishes a catchment area map for this school that we can read. That does not mean an address is outside its area. It means we hold no map, so we cannot tell you either way.
Where it is
The 6 nearest primary schools we hold figures for, by straight-line distance from St Mary's Roman Catholic Primary School, a Voluntary Academy.
- Bacup Thorn Primary School: 0.8 km (0.5 miles) north-west, Bacup
- Bacup St Saviour's Community Primary School: 1.1 km (0.7 miles) south-west, Bacup
- Britannia Community Primary School: 1.2 km (0.8 miles) south-east, Bacup
- Sharneyford Primary School: 1.5 km (0.9 miles) north-east, Bacup
- Northern Primary School: 1.9 km (1.2 miles) north, Bacup
- St Joseph's Roman Catholic Primary School, Stacksteads, Bacup: 2.1 km (1.3 miles) south-west, Bacup
Nearby and related
- Other schools near St Mary's Roman Catholic Primary School, a Voluntary Academy
- All schools in Lancashire
- Schools in the OL13 postcode district
- What data we hold
- This page as JSON: the same figures, for software that would rather not read a web page
Where these figures come from
- Department for Education: Get Information about Schools. School identity, type, phase and address
Retrieved 2 September 2026 - Ofsted: state-funded school inspections management information. Inspection outcomes, published monthly
Retrieved 4 September 2026 - Department for Education: school-level applications and offers. Preferences and offers, 2020 to 2025 intakes
Retrieved 4 September 2026 - Department for Education: key stage 2 attainment. Reading, writing and maths outcomes, by school
Retrieved 4 September 2026 - Department for Education: school workforce in England. Teacher turnover, by school, from the School Workforce Census
Retrieved 4 September 2026
This page was made on 9 September 2026. "Retrieved" means the day we downloaded the data. It is not the day the data was written, so the figures can be about an earlier year. How we compare schools.