Author: Mr Roundtree

To celebrate Recycling Week and Le Grand Depart, Leeds City Council is giving away a fantastic prize to one of Leeds’ recycling, reducing and reusing heroes.

Sharing a recycling ‘selfie’ could win tickets for two of the best seats in Leeds to watch Le Grand Depart, and inspire the rest of the city to recycle for Leeds, too. Just take a quick picture of any way you reduce, reuse and recycle to save waste from landfill and cash for our city’s services, then post it on facebook.com/leedswastedocs or tweet them to us at @LeedsWasteDocs.

It could be a photograph of your child recycling waste electrical equipment through our WEEE Bank or using the schools recycling bins… anything that keeps waste from going to landfill sites. Whether you’re doing this for the first time, or you’re a committed recycler – we want to see and share your efforts.

Closing date is early next week so get snapping and sharing.

Important dates for the rest of this term:

• Fri 13 June: school photographer takes end-of-year class photos
• Wed 18 – Fri 20 June: 24 of the 30 Y6 children go on their residential
• Wed 25 June: Y1 and Y2 are off to the seaside!
• Thurs 26 June, 3.15pm: presentation to Y5 parents about next year’s residential
• From Mon 30 June to Fri 11 July: new Reception children visit school
• Fri 04 July: non-uniform day…PTA ask that you make a donation for the Summer Fair
• From Mon 07 July: themed week about taking safe risks
• Tues 08 July: end-of-year reports are sent home
• Wed 09 July, 2.00pm, and Thurs 10 July, 6.00pm: Y5 and Y6 summer production of Oliver Twist
• Fri 11 July, 2.30pm: PTA Summer Fair
• Mon 14 July: transition afternoon, when children visit their new teacher (this year, we invite new Reception children into school for a third visit)
• Wed 16 July: Sports Day (location to be confirmed – I’m trying to sort this out with the Leeds Children’s Services)
• Thurs 17 July: Y6 Bowling evening
• Fri 18 July, 2.40pm: Y6 Leavers’ Assembly
• Mon 21 July: Reserve Sports Day
• Tues 22 July: Attendance Assembly, when certificates and prizes for good attendance will be awarded

The last day of term is Tuesday 22 July.

…and for next year:

We start the school year on Tuesday 02 September following a training day on the Monday.

The other training days are:

• Friday 24 October
• Thursday 07 May
• Monday 20 and Tuesday 21 July (meaning you’ve an extra-long holiday in 2015!)

New Reception children start school in the week commencing Monday 15 September.

Mrs Janice Rush, our Chair of Governors, writes this review of the school year and the activities of the governing body…

At the start of this academic year, the governing body decided to reconstitute under new government guidelines. We kept the same number of governors overall but made some changes to how we select governors. There are still five elected parent governor positions but the majority of governors are now appointed on the basis of the skills they can bring to the school, the most important of these being the ability to ask questions to make sure they challenge and support – this ensures the school is providing the best it can for all our children.

In January of this year, as Chair of the Governing Body, I was designated as a National Leader for Governance which means I will spend some time working with other governing bodies in the area and can bring back ideas to ensure Moortown Governing Body keeps working at a high standard

Parent governor elections were also held in January. Mrs Deyes was re-elected and Mr Millar elected, both for a term of four years. Our local authority governor (Councillor Charlwood) stepped down in February prior to the birth of her second child and the position has yet to be filled.

As most of you will already know, the Governing Body has spent much of this year working with various groups to try to secure some playing field space for the school. At the time of writing nothing has yet been finalised.

Teaching, learning and curriculum sub-committee

The Teaching, Learning and Curriculum committee is made up of six governors, Mr Roundtree and members of the school’s Senior Leadership Team as required. The main purpose of the committee is to discuss and monitor all aspects of the school’s work around pupil attainment and progress, but this year it has also been ensuring that a new curriculum has been designed and is ready to be fully implemented in September in line with new government regulations.

The committee has met every term and link governors for Curriculum Enrichment, Standards and Achievement (Maths and English), and Early Years have held regular meetings with relevant staff to monitor how all areas of the school are performing.

Pupil support sub-committee

The Pupil Support committee is made up of four governors, Mr Roundtree and members of the Senior Leadership Team as required. The main purpose of the committee is to discuss and monitor all aspects of the school’s pastoral work which includes areas such as attendance, behaviour, safeguarding, SMSC (spiritual, moral, social and cultural provision) and health.

The committee has met every term and link governors for Child Protection, Heath and Inclusion, have held regular meetings with relevant staff. These meeting are to cover such areas as ensuring all Child Protection policies are fully understood and are correctly implemented by all staff, and to monitor how the government PE grant is being spent to improve provision.

Resources sub-committee

The Resources committee is made up of six governors, Mr Roundtree and Mrs O’Malley. The main purpose of the committee is to ensure that the school spending remains within budget and that all funds are spent wisely to best meet the needs of the pupils. From September, this committee will also have to ensure that the performance management process for staff is being correctly implemented and any pay decisions made are in line with our policy.

The committee has met every term but quarterly reviews have also been held with the local authority finance officer and a governor attends the monthly budget meetings.

A governor has also accompanied Mrs O’Malley on regular premises inspections.

Teachers are busy finalising their end-of-year assessment data for reading, writing and maths. They do this at the end of every term, but the end-of-year data is especially important. This is definitely true for Mrs Burke, Miss Rushbrooke and Mr Owen because this data is sent to the local authority, the Department for Education (DfE) and Ofsted.

The attainment levels teachers give your child are based on lots of on-going assessment (marking, asking questions in class etc) and occasional tests. A few weeks ago, children from Y2 to Y6 all did some tests. The end of Key Stage 2 SAT tests done by Y6 are most well-known – these must be sent away to be marked. End of Key Stage 1 tests are done by Y2 pupils. Miss Rushbrooke marks these and uses the test scores and her own teacher assessment to come up with a final level (the test score ‘informs’ the final teacher assessment).

‘Moderation’ is a way to check and compare assessments with other schools. This year, a representative from the local authority visited to oversee the assessment process carried out in Reception. This helps to identify strengths and areas where we can improve (we only received minor suggestions to improve already strong practice). It’s really helpful in that it allows Mrs Burke to discuss her own assessments of Reception children with another Early Years expert. Because we’re a single form entry school so teachers don’t have a ‘partner teacher’ in the same year group, this is useful as a way to ‘check’.

This year, we’ve bought in the services of someone to do this each term for Reception, so we knew Mrs Burke’s judgements were accurate.  We’ve also bought in the services of someone to do something similar for Y2 and Y6 writing, to make sure levels given for writing are accurate – they are!

Also to check or ‘moderate’, this year, governors have decided to use an external organisation to mark the reading, writing and maths of Y3, Y4 and Y5 pupils following their tests and writing tasks.  This will mean we can analyse how our children are doing compared with others nationally (which we already do with the Y2 and Y6 data), and we’ll even get reports on which questions our children did well and less well in – this might help us to work out areas where we can make our teaching even better.

The chart below indicates the minimum level range which is expected for a typical child by the end of the year.  However, please note that over half of our Year 6 pupils attain Level 5 or even Level 6 – much higher than these minimum expectations.

Children in Reception have their development described differently: their attainment will be indicated as ‘emerging’, ‘expected’ and ‘exceeding’ – ‘exceeding’ means they may be working at 1c or higher in the chart above.

Teachers are busily writing the end-of-year report for your child, and the 29 other children in the class. It takes quite a while (hence no Class Newsletter this half-term). Once they write the reports, I read them (another task which takes a while!).

We’ll send final reports home for you on Tuesday 08 July this year – this is a little earlier than other schools so that you have the chance to meet with teachers to discuss the report.

For parents / carers of children in Reception, there is a third parents’ evening (Monday 14 July); for others, we encourage you to make an appointment with your child’s teacher (or someone else in school who can help) – especially important if you see that your child is working below expectations or has made only a little progress this year.