School Development Plan
The School Development Plan is the document that drives the strategic work to develop and improve the school. The plan gives everyone in the school community a clear vision and sense of purpose for improvement.
Our approach to school development planning aims to ensure that our development work is robust, thorough and leads to changes in practice that improve outcomes for children. We aim to make sure those changes are properly researched, implemented and securely embedded before moving on to new objectives.
We want our development work to focus on the most important priorities facing the school at any one time. We have an ongoing “live” list of strategic priorities from which we draw some “Big Moves”. These are initiatives designed to tackle one or more of our priorities. Not every initiative we do is a “Big Move”. There are plenty of other activities, events and projects taking place in school. The Big Moves are those larger, more complex initiatives that are of longer term, strategic significance.
Each “Big Move” has its own timescale – some may take just a few months, others may take over a year. This means we do not have an annual school development plan – we recognise that our development work does not fit neatly into twelve month cycles. It means we can be flexible and responsive to the most important challenges and priorities the school is facing, and realistic in our planning and implementatioon. We also draw from research from the Education Endowment Fund on best practice for implementing developments and new initiatives in schools, working through the stages of “explore, prepare, deliver and sustain” as we carry out our work.
St Matthew’s Current “Big Moves”
Below are three “Big Moves” that the school is working on.
1) A Reorganisation and Restructuring of the Leadership Team of the School
With the retirement of Mrs Lewis as Assistant Head Teacher, we are taking the opportunity to look at the leadership structure of the school. This Big Move will see us reallocating a range of responsibilities between our Assistant Heads and the wider senior leadership team of the school. We will also be creating new “Unit Leader” roles. There will be unit leaders for Early Years (Nursery and Reception); Years One and Two; Years Three and Four; Years Five and Six. They will play a key role in monitoring pupil progress and supporting teachers in their work with their classes. Our new way of school development planning also relates to this target, enabling our leaders and indeed all our staff to focus on key priorities for school development. This “Big Move” links closely to Big Move number two below.
2) Reviewing our Processes, Practice and the Leadership and Management Structure for Special Educational Needs and Vulnerable Learners
This links with the above work on leadership development as part of this process involves reallocating certain leadership responsibilities in this area. We are also looking at some of our internal processes in the light of the increasing level of need in terms of both numbers of children and complexity of need that St Matthew’s, like all schools, are seeing. We aim to maximise the efficiency of our systems to enable all staff to be focused on planning, teaching and learning for children who need additional support. A similar process will also be carried out in relation to our support for children registered for pupil premium.
3) The Introduction of Monster Phonics
With the help of our PTA, we have bought in a new phonics scheme for the school, “Monster Phonics”. Introducing this has involves a lot of work in training all staff to deliver the programme, organising timetables and integrating the practice into other areas of our curriculum. We will also be working to monitor the impact on outcomes for the children over time.
As Big Moves are completed, new initiatives are introduced. We will often start researching potential new initiatives while other Big Moves are being implemented.