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 implementation. 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 “Big Moves”
St Matthew's is currently carrying out a range of self-evaluation activities as we revise our strategic priorities with a view to planning our next "Big Moves". We plan to decide these in the summer/autumn terms. This follows the successful completion of our most recent Big Moves as listed below. Our OFSTED Inspection gave a positive evaluation of both our choice of priorities and the effectiveness of the action taken and gives us a great platform for planning our next stage of school development.
1) Developing the leadership and management structure and processes for St Matthew’s.
2) Development of SEND Provision and Practice for Children with Higher Levels of Special Educational Need
3) Reviewing our Behaviour Management Policy and Practice to best support the changing developmental needs of our children.
4) Introducing a new Management Information System to the St Matthew’s
5) Using existing systems to ensure a high focus for all staff on the outcomes for pupil premium children, improving those outcomes and identifying any additional barriers to that improvement