Author: Mr Roundtree

It’s important that you check that any sports club or activity that your child attends has your child’s safety as its priority. Even if the club seems professional, there are four key questions that you should ask to make sure that they have all the necessary safeguarding measures in place:

1. Can I see your safeguarding policy?
A good organisation or club should have up-to-date safeguarding procedures in place and be happy to show you copies.

2. Who is your Welfare Officer?
The club should have a designated Welfare Officer who is responsible for dealing with any safeguarding concerns that may arise.

3. Do you follow safer recruitment procedures?
Every organisation providing sporting activities to young people must ensure they have the correct recruitment processes in place which includes interviews, references and have undertaken the appropriate police checks for their volunteers and staff.

4. How do you promote the welfare of children and young people?
The club should be able to demonstrate how they actively promote safeguarding. This includes listening and  responding to the views of children and young people.

 

Don’t be afraid to question. A good and professional organisation will already have procedures in place and will welcome the chance to demonstrate that they are providing a safe environment for your child. Download this leaflet for further guidance on safeguarding in sports.

From Leeds Safeguarding Children’s Board website.

The Department for Education recently released measures showing how children have progressed from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2. Expected progress is zero, with anything above that being better than expected and negative numbers showing less than expected progress. Overall, we’re happy that Moortown’s progress remains better than many schools. In Writing and in Maths, the progress measure is 1.4 and 2.0 – this is really quite secure progress.

In Reading this year, progress was also positive, but by less than Writing and Maths: 0.3 – a little above the expected level. We’d like it to be higher. We think the Reading test was extremely hard this year – something widely reported and commented on in the media and social media. It also raises the importance of reading and discussing what is being read at home. Some of our children struggled for three main reasons:

Some children struggled to read the whole text. This flags up how important regular reading at home is to build up fluency.

Others struggled with how difficult the texts were to read. One was an extract from a newspaper, whose intended audience is adults, not 11 year olds! This flags up the importance of encouraging your child to read often, and to read a variety of texts, from fiction to non-fiction, comics to newspapers (but always prioritise reading for pleasure – far more important than a snapshot of reading skills that is the SATs test).

Third, the actual test questions were tough. They testing children’s knowledge of quite tricky words and ability to infer ‘impressions’, a word used more than once in the test. Teachers always encourage parents and carers to be listening to their child read and talking about what is being read, even when a child is quite a fluent reader.

For your awareness, here are a couple of questions from the test, about warthogs and dodos:

“…milled around in bewilderment” (page 8) Explain what this description suggests about the baby warthogs.
What does “rehabilitate the image of the dodo” mean? Tick one. a) restore a painting of the dodo b) rebuild the reputation of the dodo c) repair a model of the dodo d) review accounts of the dodo

Some of the words and phrases used in the texts included ancestors, impressions, inscription, ‘parted company’, ‘offered themselves up’, oasis and parched – not impossibly hard to work out, but perhaps a step up from what your child might be reading at home.

(It’s not all about a Year 6 test, though! Previous news posts have noted that research shows children who read lots develop into adults with greater social and emotional skills.)