Every year, staff and governors take some time out to reflect on the school’s strengths, continual improvement and priorities for the year.

In the last couple of years, the conversion to primary has been a major focus for the school. In the most recent strategy day in September 2017, we were able to celebrate the successful launch of Year 5 thanks to all the hard work in getting the buildings, teachers, and curriculum in place. There is still ongoing work to recruit and support excellent teachers as the school extends to Year 6 in September but much of this work is led by the senior leadership team, reporting back to governors.

As governors, we decided to focus on these three areas for 2017 – 2018:

1. Improving Governing Body Capacity – this includes recruiting new governors (if you are interested, get in touch to find out more!), improving governor induction, and ensuring we are building leaders to take on key positions in the governing body in future like the Chair of Governors.
2. Strengthening internal and external communication and raising the profile of the school and governors in general. We want to be more engaged in hearing staff, parents and pupils’ views about how the school can keep improving and play our role in supporting the amazing school community by attending school events. We will also look at ways to improve the way the school communicates with parents.
3. Effective transition to Target tracker - to support regular monitoring of pupil progress, which is a key development for the school this year.

So how are we doing so far?

• We are delighted to have recruited two excellent new governors already and would love to recruit two additional people. Please get in touch if you are interested in finding out more. We’ve tidied up the induction process to ensure that new governors are briefed and getting fully involved as quickly as possible. One of the new governors will play a special role regarding school mental health and wellbeing.
• We have created a new role ‘Year Group Governors’ which we are trialing with three governors initially - Nicci Henson is attached to Year 5, Stacie Bourne to Year 2, and Naomi Rouse to Reception. Year Group governors will follow their group of pupils through the school in order to get to know pupils, parents, and teachers more closely, and as a way of getting more engaged in the day to day life of the school.
• Governors talked to many parents at the parent consultations in October and November and heard valuable insights about what you love about the school and suggestions for improvement. We were keen to know whether you felt the school communication was clear, and you have given us suggestions for improving this, but overall it was great to know that many parents are happy and feel that communication is very good. We will be feeding back the findings in a separate article for the website.
• Governors have been involved in lots of school events for the academic year 2017-18 so far, from the Christmas Fair and the opening of the new classrooms to Christmas productions, classroom visits, and pupil progress meetings.
• Target Tracker is working really well for staff so far (read more – link) and the next step is producing reports for governors from the system. These reports are anonymised and do not reveal information about individual children. Progress reports help governors understand the quality of teaching in the school and the progress of different groups of learners, including more vulnerable pupils, children who speak an additional language and more able pupils.

We will keep you updated throughout the year - and always welcome any of your ideas on how we can further support the school.