Brook House Junior School

Characteristics and Relevant Contextual Information

  • Brook House Junior School is a larger than average Junior School situated in the South East of Sheffield. The school is popular within the community with many pupils coming to the school from outside the catchment area choosing Brook House Juniors over their local school
  • Pupils enter Brook House Juniors almost entirely from Beighton Nursery Infant School which is next door to Brook House Juniors. The school has strong links with the Infant School. These strong links are in evidence across a range of areas: transition arrangements, Peer buddying systems for Y2 children coming up, work scrutiny opportunities, Joint SLT meetings and Y2 and Y3 teachers having opportunities to observe practise in one another’s schools.
  • Rigorous and robust benchmarking on entry to our school in Y3 demonstrates a significant difference in what our adjacent Infant school levels the children compared to our judgements of what we consider the levels of the children to be. The school tracks progress from benchmarking in Y3 and targets the children to make 14 aps from this benchmarking.
  • Children attending from minority ethnic backgrounds are low, compared to National averages, at just below 5% consistently over the past 3 years.
  • Free school meal numbers are low compared to national at 9.7 in 2012.
  • The Chair of Governors has a strong grasp of the issues for School improvement and has led a drive in improvements by the Governing Body. Generally Staff is very stable but a recent turnover has resulted in three of our 12 classes being taught by Newly Qualified Teachers.
  • The school achieved Healthy Schools Status in 2007 and achieved the highest national Eco award of Green Flag Status, ‘Green’, in 2008. This was reassessed and renewed in February 2012.

Attainment on entry

  • Attainment on entry at KS2 is on average 1.8 points above National Average and there is a wide range of ability within classes. (Evidence: Raise Online Report November 2012, p16 Table indicating prior attainment of pupils in Key Stage 2)
  • Due to historical evidence of lack of progress indicated in Y3 the school now rigorously benchmarks children on entry from the separate Infant school to track progress from September Y3 benchmarking. (see Ofsted School Inspection Handbook 2012 page 29 ( paragraph 105).
  • Benchmarking on entry to the school indicates on average a drop of 1.5 aps from their end of KS1 scores. The school carefully benchmarks children on entry using a range of approaches. These approaches entail, as far as is possible, the use of outside independent consultants to independently verify writing assessments which include at least two pieces of writing from September to come to an overall judgment. This makes the pupil progress scores for 2012 using internal tracking as just beyond a score of 13 APS (actual was 11.8). This contrasts with the previous year’s score for overall pupil progress of 11.5 without taking into account the school’s benchmarking on entry at year 3.
  • Bench marking by the school for pupils on entry demonstrates that the majority of children who arrive as L3 (21 aps) are in fact 2a (17 aps) which presents a genuine challenge for the school. With this in mind L3 children from the Infants who arrive at the school are identified as a vulnerable group and tracked rigorously to ensure the best possible chance of maintaining good progress and achieving L5 by the end of KS2 (See pupil progress meeting tracking sheets completed).
  • The school aspires to all our children achieving outstanding progress, therefore, targets from benchmarking in Y3 are set at 14 aps progress for the cohort.

Year / Cohort Size / Combined L4+ / English / Maths
Level 4 / Level 5 / 2 levels / APS / Level 4 / Level 5 / Level 6 / 2 levels / APS
2007 / 77 / 88% / 34% / 28.2 / 86% / 34% / 28.0
2008 / 96 / 86% / 91% / 34% / 84% / 28.5 / 90% / 33% / 91% / 28.5
2009 / 87 / 82% / 90% / 29% / 85% / 28.1 / 87% / 43% / 83% / 28.7
2010 / 73 / 88% / 93% / 42% / 82% / 29.1 / 89% / 38% / 86% / 28.6
2011 / 78 / 85% / 91% / 28% / 85% / 27.9 / 88% / 31% / 79% / 28.2
2012 / 66 / 92% / 94% / 45% / 90% / 29.2 / 94% / 43% / 7% / 90% / 29.5
The school had 4 children who passed level 6 on the test date. One child was absent during this week and took the test on her return and achieved level 6. Her scores will not be part of school published data which will indicate 6%