Ifton Heath county primary, Shropshire. Until three years ago, around 55 per cent of the children in every year group at Ifton Heath county primary school were judged to be at risk of struggling in their education. That figure has now come down to an average of 27.5 per cent on the six-plus test used by Shropshire local education authority to identify pupils with language difficulties.
The school’s own observations have also identified rising standards in language, improvements in mathematical and conceptual understanding and a stronger work ethos.
The process of change began in 1990 when John Jones, previously an advisory teacher with Shropshire, became head of this small primary school in the former mining village of St Martin’s, near Oswestry. Ifton Heath at that stage was poorly equipped and lacked coherent whole-school policies or ways of identifying children with special needs. Expectations of pupils were generally low and contact with parents minimal. The staff, though by their own admission quite insular in those days, were well aware of the problems and soon after Mr Jones’ arrival identified almost half their pupils as giving cause for concern.
In setting out to raise pupils’ achievement, the school had to take account of its unusual catchment area. St Martin’s, the largest village in Shropshire, has been in serious decline since the nearby coal-pit closed 25 years ago. With few newcomers moving into the community and an industrial past setting it apart from the surrounding rural areas, there seemed little point in using comparisons with neighbouring schools to measure achievement. Comparative data would in any case have been hard to come by as the boycott of national testing has been especially strong in Shropshire.
One of John Jones’ first decisions as head therefore was that the school would measure achievement against its own criteria, including children’s past performance. He and the school’s governors also agreed that development work on teaching and learning styles would be their first priority in spite of the pressures of implementing the national curriculum.
Initially this development work focused on key stage 1.“It was part of the ethos in this sort of area that children learn when they are ready to,” says Mr Jones. “I don’t believe that.“If children come out of key stage 1 without the basic skills in place, then we can do remedial work in key stage 2, but it becomes ever harder. Our view now is that children have to be challenged as soon as they come into key stage 1.”
As part of this new emphasis on younger pupils, the school appointed a key stage 1 co-ordinator. Cess Whalen, a long-serving member of staff who already had a “B” allowance for other responsibilities, was retrained and moved from Years 5-6 to take up this new job.
Ifton Heath has had a delegated budget for around four years and by monitoring spending patterns over that period has managed to divert quite large sums into areas related to pupils’ achievement. The budget had, for example, originally allocated more than twice the amount of money for heating that was actually needed, and the savings achieved by identifying the true cost of fuel together with funds released from other budget headings went towards providing extra equipment for the school’s reception class and key stage 1.
The opening of a 60-place nursery serving both St Martin’s and the rest of the local secondary school’s catchment area has also helped turn the school’s fortunes around. Money diverted from other budget headings was used to supplement the LEA’s start-up funding for the nursery, which Mr Jones sees as having a key role in developing independence and preparing them for learning.
After getting the nursery off the ground and providing extra equipment for the reception class, the school set up an early years department to provide a coherent curriculum for the whole three to five-year age group. The governors also agreed to divide the remaining six primary years into three departments, each with its own curriculum objectives. This departmental structure has had an impact on teaching styles, with staff beginning to specialise in age groups rather than their own subjects.
“We have some subject expertise but we made a conscious decision that detailed curriculum work would involve the whole staff,” explains Mr Jones. This meant that in science, where the school had no subject specialist, the whole staff agreed to take part in training designed to give them the confidence to teach the subject up to the end of key stage 2.
Alongside these developments, home visits from the nursery team and pre-nursery sessions for younger children have helped break down some of the barriers between parents and the school.
But the main vehicle for involving parents has been the introduction of detailed pupil profiles which also serve as reports to parents. Though few parents take up the invitation to comment in writing on these reports, many want to discuss their children’s progress and turnout at parents’ meetings is high.
Each class teacher prepares profiles of around 12 children every fortnight under a rolling assessment programme that enables the head to keep a close track of the progress of all 216 pupils. With the school secretary now responsible for financial monitoring and some of the other administrative tasks he used to carry out, John Jones also manages to spend four or five hours a week in class observing the results of the school’s efforts.
