Inspection of MEIKLEMILL SCHOOL
ABERDEENSHIRE Council
SEED No. 5232724
Headteacher: JONATHAN CORDINER
Insert Date: March 2017
Self-evaluation Summary:
Please use this document to highlight key aspects of the school’s work as a starting point for discussion with the inspection team. You are asked to focus on the three key self-evaluation questions from How good is our school? (2015) p.9 and to consider how you triangulate your evidence to ensure your evaluative judgements are robust. Please keep the information as clear and concise as possible using bullet points to indicate high level evaluative messages which can then be teased out during discussion at the start of the inspection. Your staff will know the school’s strengths and areas for development. However, you may wish to share the self-evaluation summary paper with staff so that they are aware of what the school has submitted.
Introduction
Meiklemill School is a medium sized Primary / Nursery School situated in Ellon in the north east of Scotland. We have approximately 250 pupils and 30 members of staff working together to ensure that everyone has excellent opportunities to learn, develop and achieve their very best.
At Meiklemill School, we pride ourselves on our warm, friendly and nurturing environment where pupils are safe and able to develop the core life skills they will need for the future. Our forward thinking staff constantly strive to evaluate what we are doing and lead development work to raise standards and improve outcomes for our young people. We have 8 classes across P1-P7 and a nursery class in both the morning and the afternoon providing pre-school provision for 60 three and four year olds. The leadership team is comprised of the Headteacher and a Depute Headteacher who is class committed for 0.5 of the week.
Vision and Values
Throughout 2016, the school and the wider community worked together to gather views to establish our vision and the core values we stand for:
Meiklemill School is a friendly place where all are welcome. We meet challenges through perseverance and commitment with the encouragement of a supportive team.Our strong community is built on teamwork, trust and respect and everyone in our wider community, at school and at home, is valued.
All of our young people are given the opportunity for personal growth to fulfil their potential and to build core life skills to prepare them for their journey ahead.
We learn, work and achieve together. / /
Key themes we wish to portray throughout our narrative of all improvement work over the past two years:
1. Engaging the school community in the cycle of improvement – everyone is a leader and we all have roles to play in creating the best place to learn.
2. Collegiality – our entire school community is a strong team with shared vision and we build strong partnerships in order to get the best for our young people.
3. A wide range of learning and teaching approaches continues to develop andenable creative, exciting, relevant opportunities for all, allowing everyone to achieve of their best and develop core life skills for the future.
4. Our school is unique. The way that our school community works together in a manner consistent with providing the very best for our learners, whilst maintaining a passion and commitment to our local heritage is what makes our school community unique.
5. We have tangible attainment data and evidence, moderated nationally, showing trends of improvements in attainment over the past 3 years. We are able to demonstrate how our improvement work is impacting positively on learners and ultimately, how we are raising attainment at Meiklemill School.
6. As well as raising standards in literacy and numeracy, equity and wellbeing for all is at the top of our agenda and we continue to lead development work resulting in positive outcomes for learners in this regard e.g. allocation of PEF, research and action planning on learning difficulties to break down barriers, increased opportunities for sport, skipping, healthy eating and wider achievement.
7. “The best thing about Meiklemill is the fact that everyone in the school works together and we are all there for each other – no problem is faced alone.” (P7 pupil 2016)
Quality Indicators from How good is our school? (4th edition) / How well are you doing?What’s working well for your learners? / How do you know?
What evidence do you have of positive impact on learners? / What are you going to do now?
What are your improvement priorities in this area? / How would you evaluate this QI?
1.3 Leadership of Change
· Developing a shared vision, values and aims relevant to the school and its community
· Strategic planning for continuous improvement
· Implementing improvement and change / · Whole school approach to establishing core values, our vision and curricular aims.
· Development of clear leadership roles, harvesting leaders of learning for all stakeholders at all levels.
· Planning for improvement in a sustainable way – taking everyone with us. / · Learners, staff and parents aware of and established what we stand for and what is important to us.
· Learners created whole school curriculum map developing awareness and creating their own statements for the aims of Meiklemill’s curriculum.
· Staff facilitating RRSA / Eco School resulting in pupils leading whole school developments. Staff leading 1+2 agenda – all children in P1-P7 now learning French. Parents now leading developments e.g. Bikeability. Increased Pupil Roles / Responsibilities e.g. digital leaders. P1 staff also provide excellent example of leadership, working with other schools to develop early level curriculum and P1 induction.
· Improvement priorities over past 2 years are now embedded and have resulted in positive impact on learners e.g. Epips evidence showing high level improvement in P1, ending P1 significantly above local and national averages for literacy and numeracy. Or another example related to our focus on learning through technologies as an approach to enabling relevant and exciting opportunities for learners whilst developing core life skills. Our learners now using tablets and technologies independently and flexibly to support and enrich learning process. / · Continue to build on distributive leadership approaches. There is clear impact on learners with the distributed leadership now in place e.g. PSAs working with local Hospital OT department to begin motor skills group in school. We want to continue to build leadership at all levels to impact learners and school community as a whole.
· Be mindful of pace of change. We believe part of embedding change is being realistic with timescales. We have developed a great deal over the last 2 years with regards curriculum development, assessment approaches, attainment analysis, planning for learning, learning through technologies, 1+2 languages, outdoor learning, active literacy and reporting to parents. These areas are continuing to evolve and develop and this needs time.
· Continue to ensure that planning for change does not only take into consideration local context, but national guidance. For example, how we plan to impact positive change for our vulnerable children through equity funding received in spring / summer 2017. / 4
Quality Indicators from How good is our school? (4th edition) / How well are you doing?
What’s working well for your learners? / How do you know?
What evidence do you have of positive impact on learners? / What are you going to do now?
What are your improvement priorities in this area? / How would you evaluate this QI?
2.3 Learning, Teaching and Assessment
· Learning and engagement
· Quality of teaching
· Effective use of assessment
· Planning, tracking and monitoring / · Whole school approach to building of curriculum rationale.
· Building partnerships to meet learning needs.
· Wide range of learning and teaching approaches.
· Wide range of assessment approaches recognising and celebrating achievement.
· Improved, effective tracking and monitoring of pupil attainment detailing learner’s journey. / · Learners aware of structure of curriculum and able to make links across learning.
· Staff increased awareness of curriculum architecture and now learners experience much more breadth across 4 contexts.
· Recent research with Ed Psych Services resulting in increased learning conversations for pupils. Work with local Hospital to begin Motor Skills groups in school.
· Invitation to all 10 cluster schools to join us at Meiklemill for planning moderation event impacted on improved planning within literacy for learners.
· Work with local academy on Dyslexia Friendly Classrooms. Curricular evening for parents on this theme. This ensured consistency with regards meeting literacy needs across the school.
· Development of active literacy, outdoor learning, use of technologies all impacting significantly on learners’ experiences.
· To evaluate and improve classroom practice, a shift from “monitoring” to collaborative visits.
· Nursery staff developed planning and moved from extensive termly plans, to short-term, floorbook planning enabling pupil led planning.
· Developing balance between use of paper evidence portfolios and eportfolios resulting in learners all now accessing and contributing to eportfolio thus able to evidence wider achievement.
· Developing approaches to ongoing reporting to parents.
· Nursery developed use of online profiling for sharing learning with parents.
· Continuing to develop wide range of assessment evidence and pupil assessment portfolios resulting in more robust evidence showing where a child is in their learning journey, what next steps are etc.
· Newly developed whole school individual attainment tracking system.
· Rigorous analysis of standardised assessments and whole school attainment data informing next steps for individual pupils, classes and whole school improvement agenda.
· ASL trackers introduced to track input and impact of ASL.
· Developed procedures for “flagging” need for intervention / support.
· Improved transition arrangements including development of Overview of Needs. This means for learners, support strategies and interventions can continue seamlessly.
· As part of improving and furthering opportunities for learners, and in response to the National 1+2 agenda, P1-P4 staff have been undertaking PRD for French and all learners in P1-P4 now access opportunities for learning French through the daily life of the class / school.
· Meiklemill School takes pride in its heritage, and Doric / Scots Culture is a key theme. Every child regularly participates in learning opportunities and challenges which allow them to learn Doric and appreciate our heritage e.g. scots country dancing (champions of the north east 2016), child / parent Doric language challenges, Scots poetry, Scots cooking etc. / · Look to extend on curriculum rationale to explain clearly aspects of the staff map to form part of overarching Learning and Teaching Policy.
· Allow time to embed and continue to develop / refine active literacy approaches.
· Turn our focus to maths and develop approaches within numeracy in order to build a range of skills and enable exciting and relevant learning opportunities for learners.
· Although development work has begun with regards to outdoor learning, this is not yet integral to our planning, or making the most of outdoor learning opportunities for our learners. Next we will focus on making use of the potential our local community has as exciting contexts for learning.
· Continue to build on our collegiate approach to quality assure and improve learning and teaching through lesson visits, peer lesson visits and most importantly, professional discussion. The sharing of skills and expertise is what will impact positively on learners.
· Continue to provide staff, pupils and parents with opportunities to use eportfolio so that we can better triangulate evidence of achievement and evaluations / assessments.
· Continue to increase IT application through supporting learning and teaching with use of tablets and other tools to create exciting and relevant learning opportunities.
· Transition from the annual report and establish new reporting procedures which will give parents ongoing regular information on where a child is with their learning and what the next steps will be.
· Currently planning for transition and continuity as we move from class teachers in nursery to Early Years Lead Practitioner. (May 2017)
· Continue to build wide and varied pieces of assessment information to ensure we have rich evidence to support attainment and achievement evaluations. Furthermore, in order to impact positively on learners, ensure that the evaluations of this evidence directly inform next steps.
· Continue to build on new attainment tracking system ensuring that analysing data provides trends over longer periods of time, the results of which can be used to inform and steer, improvement priorities, ultimately resulting in positive outcomes for learners.
· We continue to develop and employ a wide range of learning and teaching approaches in school. From Spring 2017, a particular focus for us is to look carefully at striking the balance between experiences which are overly structured, and those which provide learners with scope for creativity, personalisation and choice.
· Next step with regards 1+2 is progressing to enable German as L3 for P5-P7. As of February 2017, our upper stage staff have been undertaking PRD to begin introducing German to ensure we are on track for the national target of 1+2 by 2020. (French well established in P5-P7). / 4
Quality Indicators from How good is our school? (4th edition) / How well are you doing?
What’s working well for your learners? / How do you know?
What evidence do you have of positive impact on learners? / What are you going to do now?
What are your improvement priorities in this area? / How would you evaluate this QI?
3.1 Ensuring wellbeing, equality and inclusion
· Wellbeing
· Fulfilment of statutory duties
· Inclusion and equality / · Our warm, nurturing, supportive ethos and team spirit – our greatest strength.
· Commitment to GIRFEC
· Equality of Opportunity
· Rights Respecting School
· Enabling pupil voice / · Through extensive view gathering exercising including parent focus groups, curricular evenings, questionnaires, our greatest strength is highlighted as our warm and positive ethos – an environment conducive to success. At bi-weekly pupil focus group meetings with Headteacher, learners regularly describe the school’s mains strength as the fact everyone work together.