Healthy Schools school story Improved Provision of PSHE Project

Date: 10th January 2014

School name: Saint Michael’s Catholic Primary School, Ashford, Surrey.

Saint Michael’s Catholic Primary School is a Catholic Voluntary Aided Primary School in the Diocese of Westminster. It is situated in the parish of Saint Michael’s in Ashford, Middlesex. Our school aims are:  To affirm for every member of the school community that they are special, that their work and contribution to the life of the school is unique.  To foster within each child an open and enquiring mind that will lead them to achieve individual excellence.  To provide equal opportunity for all in such a way as to promote dignity, respect, tolerance and understanding thus enhancing the value of each individual’s contribution to school.  To welcome and sustain those in our community who are broken in some way and in need of God’s healing power.  To foster and maintain the partnership between home, school and parish which is central to the development of the working environment.  To support and promote the skills and qualities of self-discipline, self reliance, confidence, striving for excellence and co-operation among all members of the school community.

We believe that by being a Healthy School we are meeting many of our aims. We give the children a voice in the school through the use of an elected School Council, our Pupil Voice board and surveys.

What needs did we identify? As a school, we use the SEAL PSHE scheme of work and the National Curriculum statements to help deliver our PSHE lessons, as well as being able to include many elements of good PSHE in our RE lessons and vice versa. We are an ‘Outstanding’ school and deliver a varied PSHE curriculum that engages our children and equips them with the skills and understanding necessary to become useful and happy citizens. Despite this excellent practice we wanted to improve our provision of PSHE even further. As a wider curriculum point, we wanted to ensure that our assessment of our Foundation subjects was as a rigorous as that of our Core subjects: Maths, English, Science and RE. This was to ensure that we were offering a needs based and adaptable PSHE curriculum to the children.

What outcomes did we focus on? We focussed on one main outcome in this project: We wanted to improve the provision of PSHE in St. Michael's by ensuring that there was an effective needs based PSHE curriculum in place. To do this we knew we needed to

02b00c2a3879bf1e598cba3ea0578c90.doc 1 ensure that children's progress was being monitored so that the effectiveness could be quantified by class teachers, subject leaders and SLT.

What activities/ interventions did we put in place? 1. To implement a comprehensive assessment scheme in PSHE at Saint Michael’s: As a school we had identified assessment and tracking of children’s progress as a key driver in raising standards and improving provision across the curriculum. We had previously used DAR’s (Daily Assessment Records) in the core subjects and TAR’s (Termly Assessment Records) in the foundation subjects. These were paper tick sheets with objectives and class lists. We found these to be cumbersome and an inefficient use of time. The school investigated how to ensure accurate and useful assessment data and trialled the use of an online assessment tool (Classroommonitor.com). This was originally used in the core subjects before being rolled out across the curriculum as we found it to be very useful in assessing the children’s attainment and progress, enabling us to identify needs and trends in our data. A question that we identified with regards to PSHE was that because of the lack of levels (and therefore level descriptors) how could we assess the children? The PSHE subject leaders spoke to Classroom Monitor and worked to unpick the learning objectives from the National Curriculum and the SEAL scheme of work. These were added to the assessment tool and teachers were instructed to begin using it in order to get an idea of what their children’s strengths were and where areas for development were. These statements were also to be used to create accurate end of year reports for the children in PSHE.

2. To be able to track children’s attainment and progress in PSHE: Subject leaders are now able to track the progress of children across the school and have improved ownership of their subject. Classroom Monitor was used in conjunction with other strategies we had in place to create a comprehensive framework for the attainment and outcomes of the children in PSHE. All teachers know that every PSHE lesson must have a learning objective and success criteria which the children use to self-assess their learning throughout lessons. Each half term the subject leaders collect in the PSHE books in all year groups to ensure progress, parity between year groups, differentiation etc. SLT also collect the teacher’s planning folders each month to check planning, use of ICT, use of Learning Objectives and success criteria etc.

What did we achieve, and how did we know? The use of a Classroom Monitor is firmly entrenched across the curriculum in our school. Teachers who teach PSHE use it as a tool to assess their children weekly. The PSHE Subject Leaders monitor each year group’s assessment data termly and use this as a basis for professional dialogue with colleagues. It allows us to identify needs in particular classes, and specifically with individual children so that planning can be adapted to meet these needs. Further Interventions can also be put in place based on this information.

02b00c2a3879bf1e598cba3ea0578c90.doc 2 Half-Termly book audits are used as one means of monitoring the quality and effectiveness of PSHE provision. The outcomes of these book audits have shown the quality of PSHE provision to have improved over the course of this project. These form part of our teacher appraisal process.

What will we do next? We will continue to ensure that PSHE remains an important part of our curriculum, not as a stand-alone subject but as a means of adding to our school ethos of “Working, Learning and Achieving together in an explicitly Christ-centred environment”. Children will continue to self assess their own achievement in PSHE and teachers will continue to monitor their class’s attainment in PSHE so that we can continue to add to their Social, Moral, Cultural and Spiritual development.

Senior leader quote: Acting Head John Lane: 'The improved assessment of PSHE, and all other subjects taught in our school, has allowed teachers to have a clearer understanding of their pupils’ existing knowledge, skills and understanding. More importantly, our committed teachers have been able to use assessment to inform their planning and share 'next steps in learning' with pupils and parents, so that our pupils are able to make rapid and sustained progress in PSHE.”

Quotes from children:

Year 6 child: “Using our success criteria works as they help me express making my own thoughts”.

Year 1 child: “I like the tick, smiley and star in PSHE because they make you really think about the lesson”.

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