Stirling Council Education Service
Port of Menteith Primary School
Standards and Quality Report
Session 2013-14
At Port of Menteith Primary School it is our aim to provide a nurturing environment where quality learning and teaching is at the heart of success for each individual. To achieve this we plan for continuous improvement and work with children, parents and the wider community whilst being supported by Stirling Council’s Education Service.
Our work at Port of Menteith Primary is grounded in a vision for a school that puts children first, that encourages creativity, leadership and ambition, and that promotes core values that impact positively on our school community.
We aim to fulfil this vision by:
Raising standards of attainment and achievement by providing an appropriate, challenging and stimulating Curriculum for Excellence.
· Planning, resourcing and evaluating effectively to ensure breadth, application and progression.
· Using a variety of teaching and assessment methods to ensure effective learning.
· Staff review and development to promote lifelong learning.
· Effective deployment of staff to support children’s learning.
· Reviewing our curriculum to ensure it is fit to equip our children with the skills and knowledge to succeed.
Creating a school ethos that is firmly based on mutual trust, respect and tolerance.
· A focus on all school community members embracing shared values of children being safe, healthy, active, nurtured, achieving, respected, responsible and included.
· Providing a welcoming atmosphere.
· Promoting self-confidence and self-esteem and encouraging responsible behaviour.
· Encouraging and motivating pupils and staff to give of their best.
· Celebrating diversity.
Promoting and developing the important partnerships between school, children, parents and the wider community.
· Communicating regularly with parents.
· Supporting parental/community organisations.
· Developing links with local schools and nurseries.
· Making greatest use of local resources.
· Encouraging parent helpers into school.
Supporting children in developing confidence, positive attitudes and lifelong learning skills that will enable them to be effective contributors and active, responsible citizens.
· Maintaining and developing the role of the Pupil and Eco Council, and Enterprise Group.
· Maintaining and developing an enterprising and sustainable culture.
· Effective use of the staged intervention process to support pupils through Getting It Right For Every Child.
· Promoting personal learning planning and Target Setting.
· Developing the international dimension of education.
Our annual Improvement Plan outlines how we will achieve not only our school aims, but also the
National Priorities for Education and Stirling Council’s Education Service Objectives.
This Standards and Quality Report summarises the progress made by our school during 2013-14. Information from ‘How Good is our School’ self-evaluation questionnaires for staff, parents and pupils, and evaluations from the school quality assurance cycle form the basis of this report. The following abbreviations indicate the evidence source: PQ – Pupil Questionnaire / SQ – Staff Questionnaire / PRQ – Parent Questionnaire / QA – Quality Assurance cycle.
1) How well do young people learn and achieve?
Target setting meetings ensure that attainment, progress and high expectations of every pupil are the primary focus. Attainment data from standardised testing and other assessments shows that pupils are making very good progress in reading and maths and good progress in writing. Next session’s improvement plan will continue to include a specific focus on improving reading skills, specifically maintaining gains in spelling skills. There will also be a continued focus next year on improving Mental Maths skills across the stages. (QA)
Pupils produced a talking and listening rubric this session to improve attainment in literacy. The project enabled pupils to gain a deeper understanding of quality listening and talking; establish their own learning targets based on self-evaluation of their talking and listening skills; and presented pupils with opportunities to work with peers out with the learning community.
The impact has been that pupils and staff have broadened their experience and confidence. Pupils made decisions and have produced a rubric which will be used as a moderation tool in literacy. Four children from Port of Menteith Primary, Cowie Primary, East Plean Primary and St Mary’s Episcopal Primary School all collaborated over three joint sessions. The children all shared their rubrics that they had previously created and reflected on their own experiences of the day, what they felt they had enjoyed and learned. All children thoroughly enjoyed the experience and were able to comment on the skills they had used throughout the morning. The general feedback from staff was that the children were outstanding and mixed well within each of the groups. All children contributed and displayed an air of confidence and capability. Staff felt proud of the children’s achievements and expressed an increased confidence in their teaching and learning to help support the children to become such effective contributors and truly confident individuals. This environment really was testament to the fact that the children were able to apply the skills they had.
Pupils used their own rubrics to assess their performance with regards to talking and listening to develop a picture for what good talking and listening could look like, feel like and sound like. This provided the children with a real opportunity to road test their rubric. The children were delighted with how it performed and felt that it allowed them to accurately assess each other’s performance as well as provide next steps for the children’s talking, listening and learning skill development.
The staff were provided with much reassurance when they discovered that the rubric that the children had generated and created themselves, dove tailed beautifully with the list of Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy criteria which had been developed by a working group made up of representatives from Scottish Government, SQA, Local Authorities and Education Scotland. The criteria formulated by this group matched perfectly with that created by our children. (QA)
In order to engage pupils fully in all areas of Health and Wellbeing; ensure effective depth, breadth and progression; and make real and lasting connections in learning; staff revised, planned and implemented an improved programme of study. This involved staff training, responsibility for new contexts, new resources and increased planning time. Pupils are now more aware of and more able to identify dangers or risks to their safety, whether physical, emotional, or social. They are also more confident identifying who can help and how to get help. (QA)
Next Steps
• Literacy - Reading skills – Improve attainment in spelling.
• Literacy – Writing – more specific pupil dialogue and tracking of specific next steps to improve writing through Write To The Top assessments.
• Literacy – Talking and Listening - Following this session the children will go out on the “road” as the talking and listening “experts,” using their skills and rubric to assess their peers in each other’s schools. This should provide a valuable opportunity build on the collaborative work that has already taken place and ensure even more robust and valid moderation. The children have aptly named themselves, The Touring Talking Team, “The Talking Listening Specialists,” and are planning to make visits to East Plean, Port of Menteith or St Mary’s between October and December 2014.
• Numeracy- Improve attainment in mental maths.
• Modern Languages – French P.1-7.
• Health and Wellbeing – evaluate programme for 7 principles.
2) How well do staff work with others to support children’s learning?
Feedback from Parent Questionnaires through the Parent Council indicated the need to improve the school’s website. The agreed aims were to update the website to ensure accurate information, gather views on what should be displayed and encourage pupil voice, with the outcome of the website being more widely used by pupils, staff, parents and the wider community. After staff had developed knowledge and skills through links and meetings with parents and visits to other schools, the improved website is now updated with current information and new tabs to ease navigation. There has been more regular use of the website with positive comments received from parents, through for example access to school dinner menus. Pupils have been motivated by uploading some of their work onto the site. (PRQ)
Click here to see our progress and make a suggestion for further improvement - http://portofmenteithprimaryschool.btck.co.uk/Home
Improved working relationships with Catering Services have been evident in joint thematic planning for meals which link to learning contexts. Pupils have helped design the menus and uptake of meals on the themed days has been almost 100%. “After our open morning we had a WW2 lunch and it was delicious. For the blue tray there was a bomb potato with baked beans, the red tray was mince and potato pie and for the green tray frankfurter sausages. The soup was vegetable soup to represent growing your own veg in wartime. The carrot cake was amazing! We were all full up. Nearly everyone had the lunch. Thank you Tracey for helping us with the idea and letting us do it.” (QA)
Pupils from our school worked with the McLaren Learning Community to design a special Commonwealth games Baton, which toured all of the schools prior to the Games. The Baton visited our school for the day and pupils used the visit to explore the Commonwealth, a vision for our community and their visions and aspirations for each school member’s life and learning. Pupils uploaded their wishes for the future onto the Baton’s USB stick. The Baton wishes will then be displayed in Stirling city centre and The Smith Museum. One of our pupils involved in the design was also selected to be the Baton Bearer at the McLaren High School Commonwealth transition Event. (QA)
A very effective learning partnership has evolved with a parent supporting ICT in the upper years. He worked with pupils to enable them to learn the basics of programming and then modelled open ended learning tasks using Scratch to develop pupils’ skills in understanding how a computer works, the language of computers (introduction to binary), how to create music, how to create a game, how to draw (vector and bitmap), and then how to use these skills in an appropriate context to consolidate, apply and extend learning. He successfully applied for 18 Raspberry Pis for the school by demonstrating that pupils had undertaken an hour of coding. These have been used to extend pupils skills in programming. Pupils have shown tremendous enthusiasm and have extended learning at home. Parents have commented very positively also. (PQ/PRQ)
Interdisciplinary Learning benefited from staff development of the Storyline approach to planning. Used to improve our Bannockburn studies, this gave pupils more input to planning learning, with a story line designed to promote interest and curiosity. Pupils then contributed key questions, which then became the focus of the learning through activities which identified skills and assessment focus. Pupils rated their Bannockburn learning experiences as extremely positive. (PQ)
Next Steps
• Website – improve website template to allow for pupils’ audio files to be uploaded. Pupils will be reflecting on their previous learning and highlighting learning targets for the week to come.
• Food Education – Grant received to develop cooking in school, and education of food awareness in the local community.
• Technology – continue to embed and develop pupils’ programming skills to enable pupils to use technology to create and apply learning.
• Continue to improve Learning Community and authority moderation of literacy and numeracy to demonstrate improved standards of attainment for all children and improved learning and teaching.
• Enable improved pupil use of evaluative language to identify next steps in learning.
3) Are staff and young people actively involved improving their school community?
Pupils use their voices in contexts throughout the school, from group roles to leading assemblies in front of parents and peers. Every pupil worked as part of a Whole School Responsibility Group over the year in Eco, Pupil Council or Enterprise. The Enterprise Group developed their enterprise skills through organising, advertising, and running fund raising events to support the Philippines Typhoon Appeal, CHAS and Sport Relief. The Pupil Council ran a fortnightly Tuck Shop and the Eco Committee organised the painting of our outdoor shed on the theme of John Muir. (QA)
Parents continue to be very supportive of the school. Our active Parent Council works with pupils and staff to fund raise for skiing and a community inclusive outing annually. Parents kindly supported the school by helping to repair and maintain our chalet and garden spaces. These outdoor spaces are an important aspect of our commitment to outdoor learning. Our school was nominated to present at an event entitled ‘Self-evaluation, Inspection and Outdoor Learning’ run by Education Scotland. This drew together our learning journey and highlighted our commitment to making the most out of our outdoor opportunities to enhance learning and teaching. (QA)
Port of Menteith Primary School has a strong commitment to Physical Education and sports involvement of our pupils. From an active and trophy winning football team to developing an after school gymnastics club, our pupils and parents appreciate the importance of the totality of each child’s experiences. Against a Learning Community average of 74%, 81% of our pupils have participated in extra-curricular sports this year. (QA)
Next Steps
• Outdoor Learning – apply for a grant to work with TCV to improve outdoor areas including skills equipment, pond area and wildlife garden.
4) Does the school have high expectations of all young people?
Feedback from parent and pupil questionnaires showed the need for a more comprehensive house system in the school to recognise effort, progress, positive behaviour and achievement. The House System was developed this session with pupils and has made a positive impact. Each team chose their name and colours and rewards. Pupils are engaged and want to earn points. Pupils have demonstrated an improvement in their uniform, manners, effort, behaviour and relationships with others. (PQ/PRQ)
Learning and teaching has improved through association with the Scottish Network for Able Pupils. Training for staff has been implemented, and as well as improved identification of areas of ability, and strategies for support, pupils have benefited from events such as The Art of Debate, run by the Additional Support Needs team in association with the Smith. The ASN report said, “It was a very successful night. The children were all enthusiastic and the debate was very lively, showcasing new skills learned. Above all, the debate was fun.” (QA)