Curriculum Governor Blog – Jan 2015

School Improvement Priority 4:  Implement the new National Curriculum 2014, in order to establish a cohesive and well-tailored curriculum to meet the needs of The Meadows Primary School.

The new Primary School Curriculum came into force September 2014 because there were concerns there were inequalities in the curriculums being offered by schools. The national curriculum set out what children should be taught, with the aim of ensuring each pupil was given the same standard of education. The subjects are currently included in the national curriculum in England are:-

Core national curriculum subjects include English, Mathematics, Science, Physical Education while the remaining subjects incorporate Art and Design, Citizenship, Design and Technology, Geography, History, Information and Communication Technology, Modern Foreign Languages and Music.

 For governors we needed to be confident with our understanding of our pupil's progress and attainment compared to the national average as well as scrutinising  the quality of teaching by evaluating staff performance data and we have worked alongside Mrs Procter and all the staff since the changes were made known.   We now access information on our school using RAISEonline data and by visiting the Ofsted governors’ dashboard, which provides a snapshot of every school across the country.   By understanding  how other schools are performing, we can get a better understanding of where our school needs to be. This helps us to set targets for pupils and teachers based on historical data.

The governing body’s Curriculum Committee consists of four governors and Mrs Procter. The purpose of the committee is to discuss and monitor all aspects of the school’s work around pupil attainment and progress, which means how well the children do in tests at the end of key stages and how much improvement they make between key stages. Our role is to look at this for the pupil body as a whole, but also for groups of pupils, such as boys and girls, pupils with a special educational needs.  We use national comparison data to assess how well pupils at The Meadows are doing, compared with similar pupils nationally.

We meet several times every term to discuss issues such as how much progress children are making in their learning throughout the year, how the needs of children who need a little extra support in their learning are being met, and how the school is making good use of its pupil premium funding. (Pupil premium is a government initiative to provide additional funding for pupils whose families have a lower income; the eligibility for pupil premium is whether a child is or has been entitled to free school meals – even if they have a packed lunch instead.)

We also ask a member of staff to give us a presentation on current issues.  At the meeting in November we concentrated on e-safety and this presentation was led by Miss Parry. Not only have all staff  had to work extremely hard to make sure that they have the necessary resources to teach the new curriculum but also there is a more complex way of recording data.  When we are assessing progress we don’t  look at the data for individual children; we use the school’s own tracking processes to look at progress for each class as a whole, and for some groups of pupils within a class.  At regular intervals we come into school and monitor the children's work class by class so that we can see a practical example of progress made.

It has been a challenging start but we have already been able to see huge improvements which is reassuring for everyone.