Viewforth High School /
Standards and Quality Report 2016-17


INTRODUCTION

This Standards and Quality report is based on information drawn from the following sources

  • Staff Self-Evaluation Workshops Feb – March 2017
  • S1 Pupil questionnaires May 2017
  • Pupil ‘Daily Dozen’ Focus Groups
  • Pupil Interviews Aug 2016 – June 2017
  • Teacher Focus Groups May 2017
  • Improving Learning and Teaching Workshops Nov 2016
  • SQA performance Packs from Fife Council Sept 2016 and 2017
  • Senior Leadership Evaluation Trios
  • Exclusion Data from Fife Council Feb 2017

This report is by its very nature an extensive review of our work based on reflection and self-evaluation. We commend it to your attention and would welcome the opportunity to discuss the contents.

Adrian Watt

Rector

September 2017

SUMMARY

Viewforth is highly nurturing school with a strong commitment to improving outcomes and our young people benefit from positive relationships with staff and other learners. Almost all young people are motivated, engaged and actively involved in their learning and development. The school is highly inclusive with key staff showing a good knowledge and understanding of GIRFEC and effectively using the wellbeing indicators to assess, plan and provide appropriate support.

Our curriculum structure has evolved progressively to embed CfE as new qualifications replaced old ones and programmes such as Developing the Young Workforce are implemented. We provide flexible pathways to meet individual learning needs and more young people now have opportunities to achieve across a range of areas including those accredited through youth award schemes. However, we are aware of a continued need to focus on improving the attainment and achievement of young people from all backgrounds and make better use of evidence gathered through self-evaluation to prioritise those areas which will have the greatest impact on improving learning.

How well do young people learn and achieve?

Overall, Viewforth’s young people are well motivatedto learn, succeed and achieve and they have a positive attitude to their learning. The quality of conversations between teachers and individual young people, about their strengths and their next steps in learning is seen as an area for development and work being done through Learning Conversations is helping young people become more independent in their learning.

Viewforth staff work with partners to provide a commendably wide range of learning experiencesto support the development of skills for learning, life and work. Our curriculum provides progression pathways for young people through the broad general education and senior phase that enable learners to make the best possible progress. The Alternative Curriculum reaches out to those at risk of disengaging by providing customised, supported programmes to ensure they are motivated and engaged in learning.We have developed partnerships with employers, universities, colleges and the local community that offer work placements, college learning and career advice and add to the range of learning experiences available for our young people.

The quality of learning that young people experience varies within faculties and across the school. The Viewforth Teachers’ Toolkit initiative prioritises improving the variety of teaching approachesand seeks to increase the level of engagement of all young people in their learning.

  • Almost all pupils choose to remain for S5 with significantly more S5 and S6 leavers entering further education than in VCs. We continue to recognise the need to further improve the percentage of young people leaving school for positive destinations.
  • The percentage of leavers attaining at SCQF 4 and SCQF 5 in National Qualifications in literacy and numeracy has improved over time and now exceeds VCs for whole pupil cohorts in S4, S5 and S6 and also for almost all social contexts within these year groups.
  • The in-year attainment of most young people living across almost all SIMDdeciles is in line with virtual comparators throughout the senior phase.

Our young people are developing attributes and skills through charity fundraising, voluntary work in their local community and taking on leadership roles in the school such as prefects and buddies to their younger peers. They express their views in a range of creative ways and know that these are taken into account. They feel they are treated fairly and with respect however, the school continues to broaden the pupils’ understanding of their rights.

The school needs to continue to work on assessing, moderating and tracking progress during the broad general education to provide robust information about the progress that all young people are making in their learning. This includes being able to provide whole school data on achievement of Curriculum for Excellence levels during S1 to S3. We appreciate that effective approaches to assessment, monitoring and providing personal support are key to building on prior learning to ensure that learning progresses at the right level of difficulty.

How well do we support young people to develop and learn?

We offer a wide range of challenging and well-designed pathways which meet the needs of all learners through both the broad general education and the senior phase.When introducing CfE we paid particular attention to young people’s experience in S3, which we saw as both the culmination of the broad general education and also the launchpad for an effective transition to appropriate courses and qualifications in the senior phase. We have used the flexibility presented by CfE to design a dynamic curriculum that provides breadth, depth and choice and meets the needs and aspirations of all young people. It ensures that learners are stretched and challenged to achieve their potential by using teaching approaches that promote deep learning and understanding.

Our senior curriculum is a coherent three-year phase that allows significant flexibility in progression pathways and provides opportunities for learning beyond the school. Some young people follow programmes that involve a mix of school, college and training.In planning progression pathways, personal interests and aspirations inform the decisions about the learning journey through the final stages of the broad general education and into the senior phase.We have developed creative processes that take account of the wishes of our young people and their families.Decisions about the most appropriate National Qualifications for each learner are informed by close tracking and monitoring of learners’ prior learning. Our young people benefit from extensive opportunities for personal achievements and work experience opportunities.

Approaches to personalising learning to meet the increasingly diverse needs of learners are not always effective. As yet, opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and creativity are not always planned well enough to ensure that all young people can apply their learning and progress with sufficient pace and challenge.Work with primary schools to build on prior learning has begun in literacy, numeracy and technology but its pace and depth needs to increase. There remains room for improvement in providing young people with appropriate levels of challenge and opportunities to apply their learning in different contexts.

Since the introduction of DYW and the Careers Education Standards we have had a greater focus on developing ouryoung people’s skills. We now need to improve the pace of this work to ensure that our young people are aware of the relevance of these skills and their application beyond school. We must ensure that they can describe them to employers. Our Employability initiatives demonstrate a very clear focus on extending business links as well as linking learning and employment. Our ongoing evaluation of the effectiveness of these links should include making better use of career-planning resources such as My World of Work.Our goal is to ensure that all groups of young people, including those with additional support needs, move on to a positive destination.

Viewforth is a highly nurturing school. Its strong school ethos, the highly effective pastoral support and the quality of help for young people requiring additional support are rightly regarded as areas of strength. Staff use a wide range of approaches topromote positive relationships and behaviour and respond to negative behaviour appropriately. The number oftemporary exclusions remains below the Fife and National averages.Key school staff are acutely aware of their roles within GIRFEC and work with partners to safeguard the health and wellbeing of all young people. More work now needs to be done to ensure that Relationships, Sexual Health and Parenthood education provides young people with knowledge and skills to make informed, responsible and healthy choices about their lives, the real world and online world.

How well do we improve the quality of our work?

School leaders show skill in leading improvement with clear vision and drive and they use data and research to inform improvement. Leadership at all levels is generally effective with DHTs overseeing wide ranging remits. This includes the leadership of all staff, including faculty heads, principal teachers and newly qualified teachers, and the leadership of young people. Faculty heads have been encouraged to discuss their own role and the way this is carried out with colleagues to further strengthen the school’s middle leadership.Leaders and teachers are committed to and engaged in a wide range of high quality CLPL opportunities in school, within their local authority and nationally. This is helping them to reflect on their own practice, make changes informed by evidence and evaluate the impact of the changes made. An increasing focus on distributed leadership builds a shared capacity to work collaboratively and empowers leaders at all levels to drive changeresulting in positive outcomes. Professional relationships between the school and its extensive range of partners are strong, however more emphasis should be given to evaluating the impact of joint working on improving outcomes for young people.

The school has a range of processes for gathering evidence about the quality of its work and in some instances uses these effectively to plan for and secure improvements in outcomes for young people. Staff are committed to the principles of self-evaluation although its use and impact is still too varied. They should analyse the evidence gathered from self-evaluation more thoroughly and use research evidence and data to develop a deeper understanding of highly-effective learning and teaching and ask critical questions about their own practice. TheViewforth Teacher’s Toolkit initiative demonstrates a desire to promote improvements in pedagogy and to develop a collective understanding of high-quality provision which puts in place a wider range of more effective teaching approaches to ensure greater consistency in the quality of learning that young people experience.

School Improvement

Within the priorities identified by the National Improvement Framework we see five key aspects that we believe should be areas for improvement as we strive to focus on the key messages of embedding CfE, streamlining assessment and closing the poverty related attainment gap.

These are:

  1. exploiting fully the flexibility of Curriculum for Excellence to meet better the needs of all learners;
  2. improving arrangements for assessment and tracking to provide personalised guidance and support throughout the learner journey;
  3. maximising the contribution of partnerships with other services, parents and the wider community to enhance children’s and young people’s learning experiences;
  4. improving further the use of self-evaluation and improvement approaches to ensure consistent high quality of provision; and
  5. growing a culture of collaboration within our own school and across schools and services to drive innovation, sharing of practice and collective improvement

APPENDIX : Tabular Key Attainment Metrics

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APPENDIX : Tabular Other Metrics