Shining Together, We Reach for the Stars
As a good school, we reflect carefully on our successes and areas that we need to improve upon and conduct an in-depth self-evaluation exercise. We then look at moving forward and what we need to do to achieve this in practice, taking into account and balancing school needs and finances. Our School Development Plan has been added to and adapt to reflect the needs of our school and children/ staff within.
These are our main priorities for this year:
Quality of Education:
We are working hard in English to support children to improve on the basics of sentence writing, knowing how to form a sentence so that it 'makes sense' to the reader and how to accurately punctuate. Staff have received training on the Place Value of Punctuation and Grammar to support them in using this approach, to enable children to make even better progress.
In maths we are focusing on improving children's maths fluency, so that they are able to solve mathematical calculations and problems with increased accuracy, speed and efficiency. We are working as part of Primary Quest Trust to put together a collaborative approach to support this.
Across the curriculum, we are continuing to embed and enhance our curriculum offer, so that children develop as musicians, historians, geographers, scientists etc, enabling them to know more and remember more over time, ensuring they are ready for their next stage of education.
Improve our teaching of RE, through investing in the CPD of Understanding Christianity as a resource for teachers and exploring the assessment we use to ensure the children are making good progress. Throughout, focusing on developing our children's skill in exploring belief, spirituality, morality, difference and diversity with a well thought about curriculum for our school, in a hope that this enables our children to have a better sense of self and others to be successful and respectful members of the wider community as they grow up. We will be working with the Diocese of Gloucester on this and are open and keen to learn from others and share the successes we enjoy.
Development of Early Years curriculum to make strong progress:
Our main challenges in the early years are ensuring that our children make strong progress developmentally from their starting points (which depending on experience can be very varied). To ensure we are supporting all learners, using a play based approach we invest in Continuous Provision. This involves the teacher setting out activities or 'provocations' that the children can access to learn e.g. water play and a variety of containers. The role of the teacher and teaching assistant is to support in the setting, talking with children and challenging them in their learning at play. Continuous Provision is a strong feature at Primary Quest and we will be working with others to ensure that we continue to improve children's learning experience so they make strong progress.
Leadership and Management
Local Advisory Board: As we move to this model from being governors, the board will be working hard to evolve their new role. They will be able to focus heavily on the curriculum and teaching and learning environment, which is wonderful news. Their focus will be on ensuring that standards of education remain high and that leadership is providing a safe and happy place for children to flourish and thrive in learning.
Middle leadership: We have invested strongly in coaching and mentoring of staff over the last couple of years and know that staff are confident to lead and take further responsibility. Miss Robyn Oakes is our new SENCO and is also coordinating specific subjects e.g. geography, art and music, and Miss Davies is coordinating science and computing.
Pastoral and behaviour
As a school we first and fore most have the aims for children to:
* Be and feel safe
* Feel a sense of belonging
* Connect with others (friends and adults)
Then we feel our children will be in a better position to learn successfully. To support this we have invested in ELSA this year, with a trained Emotional Literacy Support Assistant who can support children to achieve the above. We will continue to use Lego Therapy and Young Minds Matter resources.
Alongside this, our Mental Health Lead (Miss Leonie Mison) has introduced a new programme (MyHappyMind) to support the children and families in better understanding positive wellbeing by; exploring the science behind the brain and how we manage our emotions, understanding our unique character, understanding why gratitude matters and how this can be developed, understand why positive relationships matter and how to build them and understanding how to set meaningful goals and be resilient in times of challenge.