Keeping on Track
On Friday 6th November we held our first Teacher Action Day of the school year. This is a day when we look at the progress of every student in every subject in order to see if they are making progress towards their potential grade. For each subject students get a Red, Amber or Green . Green is when students are making progress in line with or better than their target; Amber where progress is less than expected; and Red where it is significantly lower than expected.
We have spent a considerable amount of time this year reviewing this process to try to understand fully the reasons why students are doing better or worse than their target. If we can identify this, then we can do something about it. It is not always easy to identify exactly what the issues are and some are difficult to deal with even when we do identify them, but we are working very hard to improve progress and attainment.
Linked with this review of progress is the way we report to parents about students’ achievement. We are coming up to the time of year when we hold our parents’ evenings. We have three before Christmas and three soon after. We have changed some of the dates from those previously published in the calendar to avoid too many Tuesdays. On a parents’ evening, school finishes at 1.30 to enable staff to meet and then for parents to come into school between 4.00 and 6.00pm. This model was very successful last year with over 80% attendance overall. The new dates are published in this issue on Page 3. We will remind you of these by letter.
If we work together and if we get good attendance we can make a real difference to students’ progress and achievement.
John Dowd—Headteacher