Future Plans
We all know how much our school has changed in the last few years. We've developed a positive and rigorous culture of looking honestly at what we do and considering carefully how we can improve it. The following items represent our main plans for the coming year.
Major Capital Investment
Many of you will be aware of the fantastic news that our school has been fortunate to be selected by Education Leeds for a major capital investment project. Currently we are waiting to hear from the Department of Children, Schools and Families as to exactly how much money will be available to us. As soon as we have any further information we will let you know. These are extremely exciting times as it means that over the next few years we can look forward to providing our pupils with an even more state-of-the-art learning environment.
Creative Curriculum
Where we can we like to work as a team. We invest as much energy as possible in making sure that our pupils, their parents, our governors and our staff all have sufficient input into the process of deciding what our priorities for improvement should be. Throughout our consultations last year the recurrent theme of curricular enhancement kept appearing. Ofsted were highly complementary of our approach towards extra-curricular activities, community projects and out-of-class learning opportunities. They agreed that over the next cycle we were right in our collective decision to further develop our curriculum. In simple terms this means that we will be re-designing our curriculum to provide our pupils with an even more stimulating and challenging variety of opportunities in-which to learn.
Maintaining High Academic Standards
Over the past three years we have achieved a steady year on year improvement in academic standards. In 2008 the percentage of pupils achieving the highest levels of attainment (Level 5) by the end of Key Stage 2 was above both the Leeds and National averages. We expect our pupils to work hard in school and maintaining and improving on last years results will continue to be a pivotal driving force within the school. In practice this means that we plan to continue setting all of our pupils challenging targets and carefully tracking their progress towards these. Should any pupil appear to be falling short of their targets we will intervene as quickly as possible to ensure that they are soon back on track to achieve the results which they truly deserve.
Continued Teamwork
One of the many features of the school which impressed Ofsted was the outstanding support which we receive from our parents. Through maintaining a close, positive working relationship we have been able to quickly identify and deal with problems as they arise.
One specific area that parents asked us to focus upon was in the providing a more consistent approach to homework throughout school. Staff and governors have carefully developed a new homework policy and we'll continue to monitor the implementation of it throughout the coming year. Another example of the close partnership is the response of parents to the governors request that the school's uniform policy be more carefully followed. Currently everyone seems to be in agreement that in comparison with many other schools our pupils are extremely well turned-out!