School Improvement Priorities Academic Year 2016-2017   CONTEXT: The staff and governors have been fully involved in the development of the school improvement plan and we have also taken in to consideration views of parents form our annual parent questionnaire and of course most importantly incorporated ideas from the children themselves in terms of what they think we could do to make our school even better! Stakeholders are fully committed to improving the quality of teaching and learning and the following School Improvement Targets will ensure that we are working towards agreed goals. The children are at the centre of the priorities identified. There are 5 improvement priorities which are clearly written under the 5 OFSTED headings. There are of course many other aspects to out school improvement plan e.g. individual subject leader action plans, actions from parental questionnaire feedback, leadership plans but the purpose of tonight is to share the BIG 5 with you!

School Improvement Priority 1 – Outcomes for pupils To close the attainment and progress gap particularly in English and maths between boys and girls by the end of KS1    Why have we chosen this as a priority? Our data trends over the last 10 years show that Boys and girls at our school achieve very highly – in the top 5% of surrey schools. However there is an attainment gap in English and Maths. This means that the trend at our school (as in many schools across the country) is that boys achieve more highly in maths and girls achieve more highly in reading/writing. When we have talked to our children about this and asked them why they think this might be, a broad summary of our children’s views is that girls can lack confidence in themselves as mathematicians and boys can be reluctant to read and write! Studies that show this is a national trend. However, always being a school that enjoys a challenge we want to work on closing that gap. We have set ourselves objective such as: To have a clear vision and action plan for boys writing and girls maths within the school To model writing and maths through a rich variety of high quality texts and problem solving approaches To provide writing and maths experiences that provide choice, inventiveness, interest and challenge for children To ensure that computing is used as a visual stimuli and a method of recording in maths and English To ensure staff training on ‘raising standards in boys writing and girl’s maths’. We would love your views and your children’s views as to how we can make maths more fun for girls and writing more fun for boys – a questionnaire will be coming home for you to complete with your child and return to us before the October half term. We will collate all your views and ideas and incorporate them in our plans as your views are always important to us.

SIP 2 – Outcomes for pupils To ensure good and outstanding progress and attainment for all children

SIP 3 – Quality of Teaching, Learning & Assessment To adhere to all school policies and ‘non-negotiables’ to ensure the highest quality of teaching and learning   Why have we chosen this as a priority? As a school staff we have all worked together on writing what we believe are the “non-negotiables” in learning for all our children. This is what we expect high quality teaching and learning to look like in every lesson for every child. With all staff signed up to and “singing from the same hymn sheet” the educational experiences we are offering the children is of the same high standard throughout the school. An example of a couple of our non-negotiables are as follows: Learning expectations for the children are time bonded. For example, I expect you to write your name/write the sounds you know/include 3 adjectives/ write half a page/ solve 2 problems or 10 sums in 5 minutes. Class teacher and teaching assistants refer to the school values in carpet and group learning and reward these learning behaviours. E.g. you have tried really hard, shown great resilience in …… today, here is a token. This provides an incentive for the children to try their very best and achieve the high expectations set.

SIP- 4 Personal Development, Behaviour & Welfare To ensure high levels of pupil engagement and excellent learning behaviours for maximum impact on children’s progress   Why have we chosen this as a priority? We are always complimented on the very high standards of behaviour all the children at WFIS & Nursery display and the feedback for children from our nursery starting at other reception classes in other schools is that the children’s readiness for school and number and phonic knowledge is second to none! We receive the same feedback from the junior school/s that they will also know if a child was at WFIS because of the high standard of learning behaviours they display. Of course this makes us very proud but following on from the Growth Mind-set work we started with children a couple of years ago that has been such a great success we are continuing to develop how effective our children are in their learning and developing their learning behaviours. For example we have introduced Go for Gold and Strive for Silver which promotes highly effective learning behaviours and children are rewarded for displaying these. After half term there will be a meeting for parents to come and hear all about Growth Mind-set and what it means for all our children at WFIS & Nursery.

Thank you for Coming SIP 5 – Effective Leadership & Management To make judgements based on the triangulation of data, teaching and learning observations and book scrutiny to ensure monitoring of pupil progress is robust   Why have we chosen this as a priority? This is all about ensuring all our children are making excellent progress in their learning – not by just observing what goes on in classrooms on a day to day basis but also looking at what our assessment data tells us about groups or individual children and what progress they are making towards achieving their end of year targets. We also want to ensure that work in children’s books shows excellent progress. This helps ensure that all our children meet the end of year expectations for their age group. Thank you for Coming