´No school can meet the needs of all its pupils alone. Delivering the Pupil and Parent Guarantees will require schools to work in partnership with other schools and with wider children´s services in order to offer more by working together than any one partner could alone. At the same time federation and other partnership solutions will become central to tackling underperformance and extending the reach of the best leaders.´ - DCFS White Paper, Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future: building a 21st century schools system 2009.
Our Commitment:
We strive to work with all young people within the Clifton learning community to provide them with the best and most effective personalised opportunities within our diverse social context. We strive to work collectively to provide a system that commits to do whatever it takes to raise aspiration, achievement, attainment and attendance.
The above was developed to reflect the original principles of the Action Zone and referenced to the Local Authority´s shared principles which state that:
We are all responsible for all Rotherham´s children and young people
All Rotherham learners will achieve; no one will be left behind
Learning is the core business: investment, policy and strategy must be driven by opportunities for learners
Learning communities will be rooted in and responsive to the needs of local people
The Clifton Partnership (Education) Federation Learning Community consists of: Clifton: A Community Arts School, St Ann´s Junior and Infant School, East Dene Primary School, Badsley Moor Infant School, Badsley Moor Junior School, Herringthorpe Infant School, Herringthorpe Junior School, Coleridge Primary School, The Arnold Centre and the Clifton Partnership Education Action Zone.
The Clifton Partnership (Education) Federation Learning Community works closely with the following partners: DCSF, Local Authority (Executive Director Children and Young Peoples Services, Strategic Leader, School Effectiveness Service, Literacy/Numeracy Consultants, Finance Section, ICT teams, Pupil Referral Units, BSS, Family Learning, Education EPS, EWS, Extended Services Team, Social Services), PCT, Youth Service, South Yorkshire Police, the Locality Team and Manager. Other local statutory and non-statutory bodies ie UMCC, GROW.
Together we aim:
To establish a climate, culture and ethos that puts learning and the learner at its heart. We believe that through an effective partnership we can achieve improved attainment, achievement, attendance and aspiration for every learner.
In order to achieve this we aim to have schools and leadership that delivers:
Dynamic leadership which demands a ´can do culture´ with a focus on driving ambition for Quality First Learning and Teaching.
Raised aspirations of all members of our Learning Community. A climate where key features of learning and expectations are shared with pupils, parents and carers. A culture where all schools see themselves as a learning institution with opportunities for the whole community to learn.
A culture of high expectations for all members of our Learning Community; a culture where avoidance and disengagement are not tolerated and where children fully engaged in learning and confident that they can achieve.
An assurance that we monitor the progress of every pupil to ensure everything that can be done is done to allow everyone to achieve their full potential, fully supported by all internal and external partners.
High quality CPD for recruiting, developing and retaining staff which promotes distributed leadership within the schools. An expectation that middle leaders are empowered to take responsibility, use their initiative and meet expectations. All staff will take responsibility for leading the learning.
Socio-economic characteristics:
The Clifton Learning Community serves an area of severe social and economic deprivation, with all schools within the Learning Community falling within the bottom 30% most deprived super output areas. In recent years the community has benefited from specific area regeneration (Objective 1 funding) and until recently a particular area of the community has been part of a Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder Project.
The community which we serve is becoming increasingly more diverse with a demographic which is predominately White British but with an increasing BME population. Currently, 27% of our pupil learning community has English as an additional language. The EAL needs of pupils within this group now exceed over 20 different first languages. Mobility within sections of the community, particularly the Roma community is proving to be a major factor. Within some primary cohorts over 25% of the whole school community are transient (see mobility table).
Free school meal eligibility within the learning community is currently 31% which is significantly above both the local and national averages. However, this figure does not take into account sections of the community that are unable or unwilling to take up their FSM entitlement.
A further significant feature of the Learning community´s profile is that 31% of pupils are on the special needs register, which again is significantly higher than the local and national average.
Currently 88% of students continue into education, employment or training beyond the age. However, progression to higher education is comparatively low and there may be correlations between this and the fact that relatively few parents have experience of higher education (less than 10%).
Other aspects of deprivation, such as, high unemployment, higher than average under age pregnancy, and drug misuse, exist within the learning community and all contribute to the difficulties faced by too many of our learners and their families.
CLIFTON CLUSTER CENSUS DATA
Autumn 2009
Schools within the Clifton Cluster
NoR
WBri
BME
%EAL
Statemented Pupils
Other SEN Status A&P
FSM Eligible
*LAC % in care
SOA 30% most deprived
Badsley Moor Infant
229
172
55
16.2%
0
88
74
0.0%
88.6%
Badsley Moor Junior
321
226
95
16.8%
3
108
110
0.6%
91.6%
Coleridge Primary
189
99
90
29.1%
0
48
72
2.5%
96.3%
East Dene Primary
331
202
125
23.6%
2
130
130
1.2%
94.3%
Herringthorpe Infant
209
143
59
13.9%
1
29
34
0.0%
57.4%
Herringthorpe Junior
249
201
48
13.3%
0
55
49
0.0%
59.4%
St Ann´s J&I
380
43
332
79.7%
6
68
83
0.0%
98.2%
Clifton: A Community Arts School
1207
849
351
22.0%
11
406
410
0.6%
88.6%
Cluster Total
3115
1835
1255
27.4%
23
932
962
0.5%
86.7%
LA Total
42313
36550
5104
7.5%
1039
7083
7083
0.5%
52.8%
National Average**
* LAC% in care is taken from the spring 2009 Census as this data isn't collected within the October Census.
** There are no National figures released as yet.
Performance profile
Foundation Stage
Levels of attainment, on entry to Foundation Stage 2, as determined by the Foundation Stage Profile in 2008 were lower than at any time in the history of the Zone. The 2009 data continues to show an overall decline and is significantly below the national average.
Key Stage 1
Attainment in 2009 in Maths, Reading and Writing showed improvement in some cohorts across the Learning Community. In the majority of schools attainment in these subjects is below the national average.
Key Stage 2
Attainment shows a similar profile to KS1 by school and subject.
In English the majority of schools are below 65% at level 4+.
In Maths the majority of schools have an improving profile with attainment being above 65% at level 4+.
The combined attainment profile in English and Maths shows the majority of schools below the national floor targets.
There are four schools within the Learning Community which receive additional funding from the Improving Schools Programme.
Key Stage 4
Attainment in 2009 is below the national average with 50% at 5A*-C.
Attainment at 5A*-C including English and Maths has improved in 2009 but is below threshold. This is largely due to well below average standards in English. However this igure is above the FFTD estimates.
Standards at 1A*-G are above national average and at 5A*-G in line with national average.
Girls´ standards are higher than boys by more than the national average. British Asian Girls´ standards are significantly higher than boys. White boys' standards have improved but not at the same rate as girls and standards amongst British Asian boys have plateaued.
Standards across the majority of schools within the Learning Community remain belownational average but internal data tracking indicates that the rising trend noted above will continue.
OFSTED
Recent reports indicate that progress is good in our schools despite the low entry levels
Challenges to Learning:
Within our Learning Community many of our pupils face considerable disadvantage that, in many cases, become a barrier to learning. We see this as a challenge to be overcome. In describing our community we are mindful of the danger of making assumptions about all learners. There are, however, many issues that apply to the majority of pupils.
A very large majority of pupils from all groups have low skill and attainment levels on entry to school. The majority of pupils have particularly low skills in CLLD and PSE which are key predictors of future attainment. Many pupils have impoverished language and a low degree of independence which impacts on progress throughout their schooling.
High levels of economic and social deprivation often lead to low parental and community aspirations. Lack of understanding of the opportunities that education brings and the importance of the parental role in supporting their child´s learning is a common feature. Ongoing parental support for learning is also variable which impacts negatively on students' attendance, preparedness for school and ambition.
For a large proportion the lack of engagement and participation in pre-school activities is a major factor in the low levels on entry.
There is an increasing and significant number of students whose behaviour requires additional support and puts them at risk of underachievement.
The diverse range of ethnicity and the mobility of children and families impacts on the range of support required. Increasing numbers of economic migrants with little or no English are moving into the area, the language and cultural barriers require additional resources and support. Increased pressures on EAL support teams are significant.
Significant safeguarding issues arise from children living with a range of issues such as poverty, poor housing, substance abuse, domestic violence, mental health problems, unemployment.
All of these issues have an impact on individual children´s learning but also have a significant impact on school resources, deployment of staff and leadership and management.
Strengths and areas for improvement:
The current strength of The Clifton Learning Community, is built upon the result of nine years work of the very successful Action Zone. It has recently been further strengthened by the adoption of soft Federation Status.
The Clifton Learning Community develops an agreed annual plan to ensure the strategic and operational work of schools and the Learning Community core team. We have created a consistent approach in areas such as basic skills, continuity and progression, widening opportunities and CPD.
Through the Behaviour Improvement Programme we have developed very effective practice and have jointly addressed and agreed strategies for attendance, behaviour management, multi-agency work and parenting.
Creative and vibrant cross curricular approaches to teaching in EYFS, KS1 and KS2 allow pupils to make connections across their learning. The development of the Learning Skills Curriculum and Thematic Studies in key stage 3 continues this approach and helps to maintain and improve pupil engagement and instils and understanding of the key skills they require for effective learning.
The development of the Electronic Mapping Attainment Grid has provided us with a wealth of useful and manageable data to identify and target vulnerable groups and cohorts for the most appropriate interventions. Assessment to support learning is a strength in each of our schools, as is the way we promote the personal and well being aspects of learning for all groups of pupils.
The development of our own succession strategy has led to a strong commitment to and focus upon Continuous Professional Development (CPD). High quality CPD is now available at all levels to increase the leadership capacity and impact in all our schools. Recently introduced structures to support both newly qualified colleagues and middle leaders are also increasing in their effectiveness.
Links to family and community learning are recognised as essential and are continually being developed. This includes specific work in targeting vulnerable families with pre-school children, demonstrating our commitment to support learning from birth to five.
Our principle challenges are well understood and reflect those identified within the wider community of Rotherham schools:
Poor pre-school engagement
Poor early language acquisition
Underdeveloped literacy skills
Provision for our most vulnerable learners
Low levels of engagement in Family and Community learning
A lack of aspiration and ambition within the wider community
These will be addressed through our four priorities for learning:
Leadership - Developing the partnership as a professional learning community
Improving the quality of teaching and learning
Raising standards and accelerating progress
Improving the conditions for learning
Transforming the co-ordination of the resources available across our Learning Community:
The majority of our Strategy for Change addresses the context, issues, priorities and actions at school and cluster level. The socio-economic characteristics within our community require a higher level of proactive work. We face a highly complex set of barriers to learning. To remove many of them requires an equally robust infrastructure of support from all the many partners working in the area. There is an ever increasing raft of additional support attached to schools but managed centrally, this is not necessarily being most effectively deployed to address the local needs of any individual Learning Community.
Within the Rotherham Guarantee the desire to provide extensive support for children, parents and carers is a high priority. We have already developed our ‘entitlement for all children´. Given our successful participation in the Clifton Project, which piloted Locality working, we recognise the need to have a co-ordinated approach to the work of all additional partners working within our schools and community. The current Locality model is unable to meet the aspirations for a truly multi-agency approach as originally articulated.
To deliver our entitlement we need to be able to realign and co-ordinate the additional services/resources to address our specific needs. This would give us the opportunity to provide local solutions for local problems. This demonstrates an early intervention strategy that delivers an holistic approach to common issues. Please see the attached matrix showing which services sit within the Learning Community at an operational level and those who provide support across Learning Communities. This co-ordinated approach will avoid some duplication of roles/activities and provide a more efficient and effective service for our community
We have through the co-ordination of the BIP initiative, shown that the benefits of sharing access to the resource in all schools, not just limiting it to the designated recipient schools, improves the provision for everyone. The reintroduction of ‘extended team´ meetings, where all statutory and non-statutory agencies supporting our schools and community come together, to discuss issues, share concerns and develop common practice would be a forum for establishing a coherent plan for supporting all our Learning Community. With a tighter structure the work of the wider external operational partners is more overtly identifiable. This will lead to more proactive co-ordination of work and resources to address local needs and ultimately reduce the reactive workload; an example being the Clifton Early Starters pilot.
Developing the Partnership as a professional learning community.
Aims:
To ensure that the leadership capacity, at all levels, is of the highest standard. We will develop the collective leadership and management of the Learning Community. Through our shared aims we aspire to further deliver more collaborative opportunities to enrich, sustain and challenge our current practice. We will use the variety of external initiatives and opportunities currently impacting on all our schools to our advantage and we will collectively take responsibility to deliver and enhance them within individual institutions but increasingly across institutions to ensure maximum collective impact.
Current position:
There are numerous examples of how collectively agreed and managed initiatives have delivered improved performance within individual schools and across the Zone. The Behaviour Improvement Programme (BIP), holistic delivery of Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and the development of the Learning Skills Curriculum (LSC) all have demonstrated our commitment and capacity to provide a consistent and high level of delivery across the partnership.
Proposed developments:
To help us close the gap between our current levels of attainment and national averages we recognise that there are other critical areas which need to be effectively co-ordinated and managed to give improved outcomes. The further development of the Mapping Attainment Grid (MAG) to provide data in a more standardised format will allow us to better focus upon vulnerable groups, target cohorts and to agree the most appropriate and effective interventions to close the attainment gap and accelerate the progress of all pupils. The collective quality assurance of teaching, learning, curriculum and progress is an area for substantial improvement. The shared development of the monitoring of the classroom experience, linked to the appropriate CPD can only help improve the teaching profile to good or better in all schools and classrooms.
The change from Action Zone to Learning Community will provide stronger shared leadership across the schools through a more coherent plan to address the key areas that impact on learning. The engagement of governors from all the schools and the acceptance of external partners should give clarity of purpose as well as providing the collective support, rigor and challenge necessary to deliver our agreed actions.
We have identified collective leadership as the key area for development, this will allow us to focus on and deliver the three key priority areas set out below. These will be serviced, developed and delivered through:
The refined leadership at Executive and Strategic Partnership level.
The focused use of meeting time to address the key issues.
The current Action Zone team continuing to lead, model, support, broker and build the capacity of all schools to make a more active and effective contribution to deliver our agreed plans.
Priority 1: Improving the quality of teaching and learning
As a learning community we will use a range of strategies to improve the quality of teaching and learning. We will have a focus on specific teaching and learning strategies that are linked to teachers´ professional development. Teachers will be supported as they refine their use of teaching and learning strategies through coaching, mentoring and sharing good practice within their own schools and across the wider learning community. We will improve quality first teaching across all schools and in all phases and subject areas.
All of the schools in our Learning Community employ a wide range of strategies and interventions to improve pupil progress. We will use a structured approach to the monitoring and evaluation of the impact on pupil performance and will share results across the community.
All staff will use good quality pupil tracking to provide a basis for professional dialogue about the learning of each child. Assessment to support learning, including the use of APP will be a central feature of practice and will be used to inform planning and differentiated teaching as well as to show ongoing progress. Opportunities for cross school moderation of teacher assessed levels will be built into the Professional Learning Team structure to ensure consistent understanding of what each level looks like and to build teachers´ understanding of what pupils need to learn in order to move on.
There will be a clear focus on developing personalised learning for pupils, with a particular emphasis on developing pupils´ learning skills and therefore developing their ability to learn.
Staff from Clifton, A Performing Arts School, will work with staff across the learning community to maximise the impact of performing arts on teaching, learning and standards.
All schools will identify vulnerable groups of pupils and set up specific teaching strategies to ensure that they make progress.
Schools will be involved in a range of initiatives designed to raise attainment. Senior Leaders will be working on the National College´s Leadership for Closing the Gap rogramme. The Deputy and Assistant Heads across the learning community will be working on the Extra Mile project and several of our schools are being supported through ISP. All of these initiatives will be focussed on raising attainment and improving the quality of teaching and learning across our learning community.
Priority 2: Raising standards and accelerating progress
As a learning community we are singularly determined to continue to raise standards and accelerate progress and in so doing narrow the gap between individual schools performance and the national average with a particular focus on English (literacy) and Maths (numeracy). Together we will continue to improve the quality of learning and teaching through developing assessment to support learning and planning for the progress of all students.
Our innovative curriculum design will act as the vehicle through which pupils´ capacity to learn will be developed through the learning skills curriculum. Greater use will be made of personalised and where appropriate, bespoke curriculum provision which begins in the Foundation Stage and is built upon through all key stages. To support the delivery of the curriculum and to help identify development needs, a rigorous and robust quality assurance system will inform individual schools and the wider learning community of the appropriateness and effectiveness of curriculum delivery, learning and teaching and pupil progress.
Challenging but realistic targets will be set based on individual pupils´ prior attainment and the use of national conversions. Pupil progress towards these targets will be tracked and monitored at individual pupil level as well as vulnerable group level. Progress of at least two levels across a key stage will form the minimum expectation. Any pupil underachievement will be identified early with appropriate interventions being put in place which will utilise the expertise across the learning community in addition to individual school based interventions.
A key demographic feature of the Clifton Learning Community is the year-on-year under performance of white boys. Furthermore, an increasingly significant feature is the addition of EU migrant families into our learning community. These two factors combine to add significant challenge to the raising standards agenda and consequently will be a key focus of our intervention strategy to ensure that the attainment of these key vulnerable groups continue to improve.
The effective leadership of learning is an important factor in ensuring that standards and progress continue to rise. As such, a comprehensive and systematic programme of continuous professional development is in place to promote and develop leadership and management of learning at all levels.
The performing arts specialism held by Clifton: A Community Arts School and reflected across the learning community remains a major factor in supporting learning and raising attainment across the entire curriculum. In addition the use of new technologies will be utilised to raise motivation and increase levels of engagement particularly amongst boys.
Priority 3: Improving the conditions for learning
In ‘Improving the conditions for learning´ we will provide a secure rich learning environment for all users of the school settings, where all are valued, accepted and encouraged to achieve. This includes pupils, their families, all members of staff within the schools and the wider school community.
This means that we will work to address the outcomes of ‘Every Child Matters´ for all pupils within our care. We will identify and make provision to reduce barriers that pupils face. This will include support to encourage positive learning behaviours, all areas of social and emotional aspects of learning and support at points of transition. This will require us to further develop our links with other agencies, both education and non-education, statutory and voluntary, building upon the work of the two Children´s Centres. In addition, it requires the targeting of resources available to the identified need. This may mean deployment of staff to target cohorts/year groups etc.
In order to raise aspirations and develop active engagement by our pupils we will provide rich, stimulating, well organised environments which reflect the expectations of high quality learning and teaching outcomes. In addition, we will provide ‘wider opportunities´ through sport and the arts. We will develop the curriculum to ensure that learning experiences are directly related to the context in which pupils live, and with the additional use of visits and visitors to broaden horizons.
We will invest in all our staff, both teaching and non-teaching, through a variety of strategies, both formal and informal. This will include personal support and well-being in addition to professional support through on-going CPD at all levels, well structured line management and performance management. A key feature of this work will be the recognition that all adults who work within our settings need to have an understanding of the barriers that pupils may face. In addition they must actively empathise with pupils and their backgrounds. We will ensure that this understanding is encouraged and developed at every stage of staff´s careers, from recruitment onwards.
We recognise and value the role that families play in supporting the learning of their children. We will actively promote, welcome and value that which parents and carers bring to the education of their children. We will support them in developing this further, through their own learning, their contribution to the school as a whole and to their child´s learning. Again, building upon the work of the Children´s Centres, part of this work will focus on working preventatively with families with children from birth onwards. We will support them to engage in family learning and pre-school learning opportunities.
Clifton Partnership EiCAZ, St Anns J&I School, St Leonards Road, Rotherham, South Yorkshire, S65 1PD
