Report of Activity

More documents

Recommendations

Info

CONFIDENTIAL also took place with the recently appointed deputy headteacher to consider the overview and strategic development thinking around supporting disadvantaged students. The chair of governors attended the meeting with the headteacher for the feedback. COMMENTARY The school’s self-evaluation and progress Evaluation against Ofsted criteria Overall Effectiveness Achievement Quality of Teaching Behaviour and Safety Leadership and Management Last Ofsted (07/13) School’s current view 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 The school currently judges itself to be good across all areas, although its self-evaluation indicates that most of the areas are now stronger than when judged by Ofsted and are striving towards being judged as outstanding. The school has very robust and ongoing processes to ensure that whole evaluation takes place regularly and that all staff are clear about the ongoing priorities and areas of focus. The school’s culture of seeking to self-improve and in being committed to regular cycles of review means that there is a clear sense of direction from the most senior leaders, which is underpinned by a clear articulation of the school’s vision. Acknowledging that ‘outstanding progress’, ‘high aspirations’, and ‘resilient learners’ as part of the Harrow Way DNA is the school’s aim, the school evaluates its progress against these ambitions regularly. The headteacher is clear that processes for evaluating progress across the school and determining its effectiveness must involve all middle and senior leaders, must be simple, clear and be dialogic requiring discussion and explanation across all groups of staff and departments, to ensure areas for improvement are known and understood. A recent example of this is the identification that assessment practices needed to improve since there was too much variation and that effective marking and feedback were not well enough embedded. Following whole school development, this has now been improved; regular ‘marketplace showcases’ take place in the library to share samples of quality marking to ensure greater consistency. Middle leaders also undertake work sampling, and the outcomes of this fed back to the senior leadership team. The headteacher rightly recognises the need to ensure that middle leader Head of Departments’ self-evaluation is as strong and accurate as that at senior leader level. The school therefore has in place a middle leader secondment programme whereby staff join the senior leadership team (SLT), enabling them to have greater awareness of the core Page 2 of 6 LLP Report of visit Harrow Way Community School March 2015
CONFIDENTIAL decision making process at school but also to replicate the level of improvementthoroughness within their department. At least seven staff have benefitted from this programme. The rigour of line management is strong and supports consistent expectation of all staff. The headteacher is visible and views his involvement in the dayto-day life of the school as being critical to supporting and challenging staff and students. He acknowledges that the leadership of the school will be further enhanced by some greater delegation, particularly within governance, and that this will further raise levels of accountability. Improving and focusing on high quality teaching and learning is seen by all as being fundamental to the school’s continued success; teaching is judged to be at least good through the school with much of it outstanding. Discussion about teaching and learning is frequent and acknowledged to be the school’s core business. Regular teaching and Learning Summary Reports following systematic evaluation are shared with staff and the governing body and highlight areas of strength but also areas for development. This feeds in to bespoke and whole school continued professional development (CPD). Developments to the school’s approach to CPD now include both whole school and staff specific workshops, combined with regular feedback. The lead for CPD also line manages the school’s lead practitioners which ensures a balanced approach to both subject specific elements as well as excellence in teaching. Behaviour and safety is good; attendance has improved over the past three years as have exclusion rates and in-school behaviour. The school’s work on sharing the development of its ethos, together with the focus on the rights respecting work has contributed to staff and students drafting the school’s core values. Appointing two assistant Year Leaders is reported to have assisted in improving day-to-day student behaviour, preventing escalation of incidents and ensuring that the focus on learning is regained quickly. Attendance currently stands at 94.6% and persistent absenteeism has been reduced to under 4.8% (2013/14) and below the national figure of 5.8%. Fixed term exclusions have also improved markedly from 19% in 2013/14 to 7.9% to date during 2014/15. The school is committed to maintaining this low level of exclusion. Pupil progress and attainment Outcomes for 2014 were strong and considerably improved over 2013; 5A*-C EM was 61%, 6% above national attainment, and similarly above for most student groups. Attainment in English was particularly high, and also strong in humanities, art and performing arts, as well as some areas of science. Attainment was weaker in design and technology (D&T). This group of students’ prior attainment was below that nationally and therefore the students’ progress is strong. Overall value-added score of 1004.7 places the school’s progress above expectations and significantly so for English, languages and humanities. Expected and exceeding expected progress measures for English are very strong at 85% and 47% respectively, 15% above that nationally for each indicator. In mathematics the measure is also above that nationally by approximately 5% at 70% and 33%. The school has identified that although in all subjects pupils make progress in line with that nationally, there remains some underperformance in science (core), D&T resistant materials/graphics, PE and English Literature. Page 3 of 6 LLP Report of visit Harrow Way Community School March 2015
Page 1: CONFIDENTIAL Report of Activity Est
Page 5 and 6: CONFIDENTIAL The use of an internal

Report of Activity

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?