School Development Priorities
We are continuously striving to improve the school, and our school development priorities help us to do this in a strategic and planned way each year, linked to the school’s vision, mission and aims.
Vision Statement: Preparing the children of today to thrive and meet the challenges of tomorrow, by developing independence and resilience through a forward thinking and evolving curriculum, proudly reflecting our diverse community, inspiring and celebrating all achievements.
Mission Statement: We are a vibrant, diverse and inclusive community, fostering a culture of learning and resilience, through a creative and pupil centred curriculum where children are encouraged to take risks and learn from their mistakes, all within a supportive environment.
The school development priorities from 2023-2024 are shared below, along with a short summary of the impact of our work against the priorities last year:
| SDP FOCUS 1 2023-2024: Parent Partnership- ensuring all adults in a child's life work together to model a consistent attitude to school. |
- Internal workshops have been planned to support parents with how they can access their child's learning. These were remodelled so that parents were able to come and see their child's work and join in their child's lessons, before attending a workshop. As a result, attendance at these workshops increased immensely with almost 100 parents attending our Mental Health workshop, and almost 200 parents attending our Maths workshops.
- Staff training has improved staff understanding around cultural differences within our diverse school community to improve the way we work with our families.
- Workshops and sessions have been planned for parents from external agencies such as the Primary Behaviour Service workshop on anxiety, and the Simon Says sessions on bereavement, to support parents with specific concerns. These have been well attended and the school has had positive feedback on the support they have provided.
- A regular drop in slot for the school nurse has been made available across the year, and utilised by many parents to support them with aspects of their child's development.
- The Sunflower Cafe has been established, with twice weekly sessions available to parents and our Home School Link Worker providing support to parents and carers where needed.
- A new communication policy has been written and shared with the whole school community to improve communication across the school. This has included a move to a more streamlined weekly round up email to parents, instead of many daily updates, and there has been positive feedback on this change for parents who felt there were too many emails being sent and communication was hard to follow.
- Following some key work with families who needed support, attendance in the school has improved since the spring term, into summer.
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Next Steps
- Continue to monitor attendance in the school and work with families to support good attendance.
- Look at the way parents evenings are designed to ensure they are effective for all stakeholders.
- Plan out termly whole school parent/partnership events linked to school improvement, using the new model trialled this year.
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| SDP FOCUS 2 2023-2024: To improve outcomes in mathematics. |
- All staff haven been involved in maths training to ensure a consistent approach across the school, and this has been monitored internally and externally with good results.
- Additional practical resources have been purchased for use across the whole school to improve access to resources and to ensure that children have opportunities at all levels for concrete, pictoral and abstract learning.
- Maths homework has been reviewed and shared with parents through the succcessful maths workshop, where almost 200 parents attended to join in with their child's maths lessons, and then meet with staff to learn about the strategies used in school.
- End of KS2 maths results have improved this year compared to 2022 and 2023 for both children achieving the expected level, and children achieving greater depth. In addition, the number of children this year achieving the greater depth standard is above local authority levels.
- The year 4 multiplication check results this year improved from 2023, and are higher than the local authority average.
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Next Steps
- To monitor outcomes to ensure good progress in maths across the whole school.
- To roll out the new maths interventions which have been trialled this year across the whole school in order to support children who are not making expected progress.
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| SDP FOCUS 3 2023 -2024: To precisely identify the barriers to learning for all pupils in order to improve outcomes in reading and phonics. |
- Meetings with teachers to regularly review pupil progress have been redesigned to focus on the barriers and address these, with parental support.
- Reading sessions for parents to come and use our school library with their chidlren was introduced in the school, with a high number of attendees.
- Two book swap events were arranged, in the spring and summer term. These enabled all children to have the opportunity to take some new books home to keep, supporting a love of reading and also making books accessible to all.
- Induction procedures have been reviewed for new pupils starting the school to ensure that their transition is smooth. This includes good commuication with parents.
- Phonics results at the end of year 1 this year have improved compared to 2023, and our results are higher than the local authority average.
- The number of children who did not pass the phonics screening in year 1 last year, but have now passed in year 2 as a result of additional catch up interventions, is higher than in 2023, and above the local authority average.
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Next Steps
- To review the Read, Write, Inc. phonics scheme and look at refining this to continue our phonics work, but adapt our provision for writing.
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| SDP FOCUS 4 2023- 2024: To ensure that all staff have a career pathway which maintains a highly effective workforce with consistent practice. |
- All teachers and LSAs in the school have been given pathways in terms of their professional development. They have chosen aspects of their roles which they want to develop to improve their own profesional development, and training, coaching and support has been provided, and is ongoing, to develop the staff individually in the areas they have identified.
- The staff survey results from 2024 have been very positive and have shown a positive increase in staff wellbeing.
- Staff have become experts in areas of the school and have been able to support other colleagues to improve whole school understanding in key areas as a result of their continuous professional development.
- All teaching staff are remaining at the school as we move into the new academic year 2024-25, supporting consistency across the workforce.
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Next Steps
- Teaching staff to be supported moving forward in their own personal subject/ aspect leadership and management, especially as some staff have taken on new responsibilities with the change in leadership.
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In 2024-2025, we will focus on the following:
SDP 1: To build capacity and expertise across the school to support the increasing SEND need.
Our SEND provision is good, but with increasing numbers of SEND pupils and limited external resources to support our children, staff and parents, we want to upskill our own team to be able to provide the best possible provision for all our children. We want to develop an expertise within the staff so that we can manage more effectively on a daily basis when external support is not always readily available, and therefore ensuring good outcomes for our SEND children.
SDP 2: To improve the combined reading, writing and maths outcomes by identifying and addressing the barriers to learning.
The school has worked hard to increase the number of children who, at the end of KS2, achieve the expected standard in all three subjects: reading, writing and maths, and this year these outcomes have improved. However, we are striving to improve these results further. The high mobility in our school impacts this data, as well as the high number of EAL pupils and SEND but we want to be able to identify the barriers to learning quickly to improve outcomes for all our children.
SDP 3: To improve writing outcomes across the school.
Our end of KS2 writing this year has improved compared to 2022 and 2023, however we are striving to improve this further. We have identified that our writing is an area of the curriculum across the whole school where children struggle more. Our high mobility and high number of EAL learners impacts this. Our Read, Write, Inc. provision in KS1 and Foundation Stage has had a huge improvement on our phonics results, but to ensure first quality teaching, we want to redesign the writing curriculum in FS and KS1 to streamline it with the KS2 curriculum, and improve writing outcomes for children coming out of KS1 as a result. Therefore, we will be using Read, Write, Inc. to continue to support our phonics, but not our writing.
SDP 4: To develop effective leadership across the school, including that of middle leaders, in order to raise standards.
With a recent change in leadership in the school, we want to ensure that the school continues to move forwards in terms of school development and standards. All teachers are responsible for subject areas or aspects which we want them to champion and lead. To do this well they need the time and expertise to be able to really understand their subject or areas of responsibility across the school, so that the standards in this area are high and outcomes are good.
