Posted on: February 8th 2019
Proofreading the children’s reports in preparation to share them with parents next week is a stark reminder that we are already halfway through the academic year. As we enter the final half of the year it is a good time to reflect on the pertinent points of our School Development Plan that was created three years ago by staff in partnership with parents.
The desired outcomes of our School Development Plan fall into three main aims: Core Values, Parent Partnership and Providing the Best.
Creating and embedding our school’s Core Values has been crucial to helping children understand and engage with our school vision. The Core Values are part of our everyday language at Norfolk House, permeating discussion in lessons, guiding positive learning behaviours and supporting personal development. Parents regularly feedback that their children refer to these important values in their life outside of school and how they shape their decisions and actions. Now they are embedded in all of school life, we are planning new and creative ways to provide opportunities for children to engage with them, such as the initiative introduced by Mrs Gormley which enables pupils to spend time at one of our local residential care homes as part of their community involvement. The development of our pastoral provision will continue to be a major part of the next School Development Plan.
At Norfolk House, we are fortunate to have close ties between our staff and parent community on many levels and this has been a springboard for the initiatives to work together to help our children achieve success both academically and socially. Restructuring our formal reporting cycle to give parents more regular updates has been an important development and this has been combined with a new reporting format to ensure clarity. This year we released the standardised test data ahead of our October parent meetings, this was preceded by a session on assessment at our academic parent workshops at the start of the term. Sharing this data was well received and has helped parents understand how their child is performing against national norms.
As a school we have also introduced a number of pastoral workshops and presentations with the aim of developing consistency in how we manage behaviour, support mental health issues and equip children to be successful in a constantly changing world. With the increase in the number of sports clubs, fixtures and competitions it has been great to see more parents in attendance and some helping out with coaching and developing our players. It has also been wonderful to see an increased number of parents sharing their creativity and experience in our productions, assemblies, events and other initiatives over the past two and a half years.
Finally, “Providing the Best” is a combination of all of the above, in addition to a range of internal systems that ensure we continue to help every child experience success in their learning and personal development. Termly pupil progress meetings between leadership and teaching staff ensure that each individual child is challenged at an appropriate level. Regular pastoral meetings help teachers identify children that need support with friendships and building resilience.
As a group, Bellevue Education invests heavily in professional development for teaching staff and provide annual feedback on our provision through developmental learning reviews. From inter-school events to staff sharing expertise across almost twenty schools, this is crucial to ensuring we are providing the very best for our pupils.
Over the next few months, we look forward to working with parents to identify the priorities for our next School Development Plan. The first stage in this is our parent survey which you will be receiving soon. Please do take part and tell us where we are doing well and what we can do to improve further.
