Governors and the School Leadership Team (SLT) met at the end of March for the school’s annual strategy day. The day provides a valuable opportunity to review progress towards current priorities and discuss the priorities for the foreseeable future. It is also an important opportunity to strengthen the relationships between governors and staff.

In recent years, we have agreed a set of annual priorities (based upon school data and evaluation of all aspects of the work of the school) and planned strategically to make progress in each area. This approach has been very successful, but carries the drawback of restricting focus to a twelve-month period when in effect, progress can sometimes be achieved much sooner, or requires on-going attention over a much longer period.

Moving forward, we have agreed to bring the strategy day forward to September so that it is nearer to the start of the academic year – and to pursue a more flexible approach to priorities with a specific agenda and timetable for multiple projects.

Key focus areas in the immediate future include:

• Completion of the work to look at:
                Reading – Inference and Comprehension and
                Maths – those pupils for whom English is an additional language and Problem Solving
• Improvements to the way the school communicates with parents, prospective parents and others in the wider community.
• The induction of new staff to ensure that our school culture and vision is sustained and consistent.
• The introduction of a new Assessment Recording system called Target Tracker which has been planned for in this term and will be implemented in September 2017. It’s a significant improvement that will help the staff and the pupils on their journey through the school.
• A focus on the more able pupils to assess what we do for them, how we do it and what is required to make things even better.
• A focus on those pupils who are falling behind and with Special Educational Needs to assess what we do, how effective this is and what improvements do we need to make.
• Continuing our work towards becoming a Primary School – monitoring the expansion of the school with the new build and seeing this through to its completion. Also ensuring that we are ready for our very first group of Year 5 pupils and making that move from Year 4 to Year 5 as smooth as possible as we endeavour to do, with these changes for each year group every year.

Governors themselves will be trialling a new Self-Evaluation process to look at how effective we are in our work and what we feel we need to do to improve. This is being done in conjunction with members of the Bedford Leaders of Governance Panel.

We will also be looking at Succession Planning for our key roles.

Currently we are doing the development work for a different way of working which will help us understand more about the school and should also make us more visible around the school for the staff and the children.