PSA Minutes October 2013
Helena (chair) started meeting with a prayer, she then went through her final chair report (please see attached). Khursh (treasurer) announced we have made an end of year profit of £2634.41. Helena then announced that all committee members were standing down after a 4 year term and thanked everyone for their help and support over the last 4 years.
The meeting was then given over to what would the PSA look like in the future and John (Head teacher) was then asked to give his vision for the PSA.
John thanked Helena and members for all their hard work and emphasised that the PSA is very important and integral to school life. He began by saying it is time to move on and we are now a 4-19 school and we should be able to tap in to a whole new audience. It is an exciting time. The community of our school is changing with students coming from Blackbird Leys down to Cowley and now we have 85 different languages represented at our school. John emphasised how important it is that we communicate better with our community and understand the issues raised by our parents. It was also mentioned that the PSA is important not only for the school but also as support for staff and students. John announced that Marie-Therese Weston would be leading the communication strategy for the school and would have an overview of the PSA. This will include aspects of working with parents and what we do to make things better. It wasn’t made clear how this would work in the future. It could follow the learning to lead group set up for students where you have smaller groups of parents working on key issues and being an academy, we can be much more flexible with how we run the PSA in the future. Some ideas of the type of groups given were working with 6th form, curriculum changes, young shapers, successful things to be done and tapping in to different cultures via food evenings. PSA needs to be seen as not only a fund raising group. This needs to be just one aspect of what we do. We need to broaden the way we look at things.
John then asked the group to pair up and asked the question “do we need to advertise more like other schools in the city?”
Feedback:
- Advertising doesn’t cheapen the school
- St Greg’s has a lot to offer so let’s blow our own trumpet
- Spires mentioned a lot, about their aggressive advertisement and enticement of parents and students
- Parents would like more PR to show what a good school St Greg’s is
- Feeder schools should be promoting us and not putting us down
- Dropping leaflets promoting our school
John’s next question:
Come up with a script to say this is St Greg’s say 5 things to say that attracted you to St Greg’s, then down to 3. Then the group were asked asked to come up with 3 things to make it better.
(Please see separate sheet)
Final list of 4 things why St Greg’s
- Family
- Facilities
- Catholic life inclusion & tolerance
- Multicultural
Final list of 3 things to improve
- Platform, Website no curriculum, ICT infrastructure
- Homework
- Consistency with rules, students having pride and building on tradition
John thanked everyone and said that MTW within 2 weeks would email out the minutes, findings from this meeting and next date of meeting, MTW asked for support at open evening
Meeting closed.
Why St Gregory?
- Catholic
- Location
- Facilities
- Size of school
- Nurturing
- Good teaching / Strong leadership
- Inclusive multi faith catholic
- Values
- Good Ofsted
- Truly comprehensive, something for everyone
- Approachable staff
- Results improving year on year
- Community
- Family feel
- Catholic/pastoral
- Honest
- Good morals
- Great education
Things to improve?
- Tackling bullying
- News
- Photos of staff
- Consistency, rules that you stick to
- Information warnings
- Platform used better
- Website
- Sense of pride
- Transparency to the community
- Consistency
- Lack of communication
- Uniform has slipped
- Discipline
- Homework
- More fun things / functions for the community