News

Staffing update

Here’s a short update with regard staffing at Moortown Primary.

Miss Hewson, who is taking up a leadership role in a York school after almost five very successful years at Moortown, will leave at the end of this half-term.  We haven’t yet confirmed who will take Year 2 for the last few weeks of the year, but we will let you know as soon as we can.  In the meantime, we’ve had over a hundred applications for the teaching vacancy for which we are interviewing on Wednesday 01 May.

Miss Maver also leaves us, this time at the end of the school year to take on the role of Deputy Headteacher in another Leeds school. Mrs Maver’s role will not be directly replaced.  As you know, Mrs Weekes will move up to Acting Deputy Headteacher.  In addition, we have added to the leadership team.  Following successful internal recruitment, I’m delighted to announce that Mr Owen and Mr Wilks are now part of the senior leadership team at Moortown:

• Mr Owen will lead on achievement (looking at assessment data, monitoring marking, etc)
• Mr Wilks will lead on enrichment (ensuring our curriculum and planning remains the best it can be by monitoring and supporting planning, themed weeks and other events).

Their appointments were made last Friday.  To ensure a fair, robust process, a headteacher from a local school was present at the interviews and made a recommendation to two governors who also attended the interviews; the headteacher was most impressed by the quality of the applicants.

I’m sure you’ll join me in congratulating Mr Owen and Mr Wilks.

New SEAL theme - Good to be me

Our new SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) theme for this half-term, Good to be me, focuses on three main areas of learning:

• Self-awareness – feeling good about yourself, taking risks.
• Managing Feelings – understanding feelings, and why and how they lead us to behave the way we do – particularly the feelings of being excited, proud, surprised, hopeful, disappointed, worried and anxious and standing up for yourself –assertiveness skills, standing up for your views.
• Empathy

This theme explores feelings in the context of the child as an individual, developing self-awareness and helping the child to realise that it really is ‘Good to be me’. The theme is about understanding our feelings as well as considering our strengths and weaknesses as learners.

The key ideas and concepts behind this theme are:

Building emotional resilience

Children need to become resilient if they are to be healthy and effective life-long learners.

Coping with anxiety and worrying

Worry and anxiety are major features in many children’s lives. Many children have good reasons to be anxious. Exploring worries is important.

Calming down

Although getting stressed, anxious or angry are important and useful emotions, sometimes these feelings can be overwhelming.

Assertiveness

The theme encourages children to become assertive – that is, able to recognise and stand up for their rights while recognising and respecting the rights of others.

Understanding feelings and how they influence behaviour

The theme explores the relationship between ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ and the way each impacts on our behaviour. It looks at Flight or Fight rapid response to situations of threat and our responses to feeling threatened /under stress.

‘I can do something that makes me feel proud‘ is the first SEAL statement for the theme of Good to be me.

Teaching turn around

I hope you had a relaxing and enjoyable Easter holiday break. Today at school, I told the children of some staffing changes at Moortown: sadly, the time has come for two of our teachers to move on to new challenges.

Miss Hewson has been successful in her application for a new teaching job in York, which is where she lives. As well as a more convenient location, her new post is part of the leadership team. This is great news: another teacher who joined us as a newly qualified teacher (NQT) now moves on to a leadership role. Miss Hewson is always a very cheerful, friendly person and most importantly is an outstanding teacher. After almost five very successful years at Moortown Primary, she will be very much missed. She will leave at the end of this half-term; one of our existing teachers in school (to be confirmed) will take over the class for the last half-term of the year whilst we recruit a new member of the teaching team.

Miss Maver also leaves us, this time at the end of the school year. Mrs Maver is one of the two Assistant Headteachers at Moortown Primary. She leaves us to take on the role of Deputy Headteacher in another Leeds school. Mrs Maver is great at keeping us all organised, as well as making sure the Y1 children learn so much! With four years of great work at Moortown Primary, she feels ready and able to take on new leadership challenges – I’m sure she’ll be most successful. Mrs Maver’s role will not be directly replaced; instead, Mrs Weekes, our other Assistant Headteacher, will move up to Acting Deputy Headteacher.

I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing them both every continued success.

School Council 2013

The results are in and the following pupils have been elected to represent their classes:

• Reception – Theo and Ripley
• Year 1 – Grace and Oliver
• Year 2 – Grace and Addam
• Year 3 – Isabella and Lennox
• Year 4 – Isra and Abigail
• Year 5 – Amit and Maeve
• Year 6 – Ebony and Mehak

Congratulations to all our new school councillors.

The votes have been counted

Today, all children have visited the Moortown Primary ‘polling station’ to vote for their chosen candidate in our school council elections.  The children experienced what it is like to vote with voting booths, ballot papers and a ballot box.

The votes have now been counted and our new school councillors will be announced in the assembly tomorrow.

Well done to all children who prepared and delivered a speech to their class and congratulations to our winning councillors.

Ofsted data

This week, Ofsted published short data reports based on end of Key Stage assessments for 2012. The data for any school in England can be accessed on the Ofsted website – this includes the Moortown Primary data.

I’m delighted to draw your attention to our excellent Key Stage 2 results. For Reading, Writing and Maths, we are in the top 20% of similar schools. Progress is a little lower – this is due to being in a relatively small school where just one pupil can make a difference. What the tables don’t show is the stories behind the data. We’re proud of our results, but they are a little lower than 2010 and 2011. One child missed out on a Level 4 by a couple of marks in Maths but achieved Level 4 in English this is shame, especially since Ms Hazell reports that the pupil was working quite securely at Level 4 for much of the year (perhaps SAT nerves or test technique let this pupil down on the day ?). Another much-loved child has very specific special needs meaning he could not do the tests at all, but is included in our school results parents and carers are often surprised to hear even pupils with quite extreme special needs are included in Ofsted data.

Our results for Key Stage 1 are nearly always above national levels in 2010, 2011 and 2012. This is good, but we want it to be better. I’m happy to report that our forecasts for the current Year 2 and Year 1 classes are looking very promising. We’re confident that our continuing aim for excellence is having a good effect on learning in Reception, Year 1 and 2, and this will show in the 2013 data.

Finally, it’s great to see that attendance is in the top 20% of all schools in the country.

As always, please contact me if you have any questions, comments or concerns.

School Council elections 2013

Today, during our whole class assembly, we launched our annual school council elections.

Our current school council feel these qualities are very important in a school councillor:

• Good listener
• Confident speaker who is prepared to contribute in school council meetings and feedback to their class
• Has lots of realistic ideas and suggestions to improve the school
• Good decision-maker
• Works co-operatively with others

Other key points about the election include:

• Two members of each class, including Reception, make up the school council.
• Current and previous school councillors are welcome to stand again in the elections.
• Children can vote once for one person.
• Children can vote for themselves – just like in a UK election.
• Vote for the candidate with the best qualities to make a good councillor – don’t just vote for a friend.
• Good school councillors represent the class well – always!

If your child is interested in representing their class on the school council, they need to prepare a speech to present to their class.  This will be the homework for this week.

Here are the key dates for the election process:

Friday 01 March

Homework to prepare a speech for those children interested in becoming a school councillor.

Wednesday 06 March / Thursday 07 March

Speeches from all the candidates to their class.

Thursday 07 March

Children vote for their chosen candidate.  Results counted.

Friday 08 March

New school councillors announced.

Good luck to all children who choose to stand as candidates and thank you to the current school council for their valuable contributions and decision-making over the last year.

New SEAL theme - Relationships

Our new SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) theme for this half-term explores feelings within the context of our important relationships including family and friends. The key areas of learning are self-awareness, managing feelings and empathy.

There is a focus throughout the theme on helping children understand the feelings associated with an experience that we all need to cope with at some time: that of loss – whether of a favourite possession, a friend, a family home, or a loved one. Although relatively few children are bereaved, most will experience losses of other kinds during their childhood; losing a home, losing friends because of moving house or changing schools, or losing a pet are examples.

We would therefore ask for parents /carers to alert us to any experiences your child has had that might make this area particularly difficult for them – for example, a bereavement.

‘I know how I feel and how others make me feel‘ is the first SEAL statement to launch the theme of Relationships.

WEEE!

Earlier this year, we had a recycling unit installed at the front of our school to collect waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE).  So far, we’ve collected 38kg of WEEE – not bad going for a school our size when you compare this to the average, but we can do better, please!

For the autumn term, a total of 2.25 tonnes of WEEE was collected across the 30 schools that host a WEEE bank.  That’s an average of 75 kg per school.  Without WEEE banks, it’s likely that the items would have been disposed of to landfill and all the various metals, plastic etc from which they are made would have been lost and not recycled. So it’s excellent news for the environment. Thank you all for your support with this.

Seven schools did particularly well and managed to collect over 100kg of WEEE. The three schools that collected the most WEEE will be receiving rewards of £500, £300 and £200 to spend on environmental projects of their choice as directed by School Council and/or the Green team.

In this period after Christmas, it’s likely that you will have extra bits of WEEE to dispose of as games consoles, phones, computers etc are upgraded, and broken toys and electrical items are uncovered as spring cleaning starts. The £500, £300 and £200 cash rewards are available again this term for schools that collect the most WEEE!

Incidentally, I’ve suggested the rewards actor in the size of school in future, so fingers crossed and start WEEEing wisely!

Reception class

About a year and a half ago, Ofsted inspectors visited school.  We were very happy with the school’s overall judgement of ‘outstanding’ but we were disappointed that our Reception class was singled out as an area to improve.  Parents tell us (and told the inspectors) that they are happy with their child’s progress in the first year at Moortown Primary, but inspectors were less enthusiastic.

Since the inspection, we have been working on a year-long project with a private, Early Years specialist, Early Excellence.

Part of the project involves visits from an Early Years specialist.  We’re delighted with the feedback so far; here are a couple of extracts from her second report:

The indoor space has undergone significant development since my last visit. There are now well organized wet sand and dough areas and a miniature water area – this makes provision for materials exploration much wider-ranging.  I observed the children using these three key areas of provision very well and in the case of the wet sand, two boys spent extended time on a project of their choosing, really concentrating and negotiating each step of their investigations. There was a high level of involvement, language use and reasoning.

I was impressed with the amount of writing that children freely engage in and the ways they confidently use writing as part of their play. Within the areas, they are offered opportunities for writing for real purposes as well as a range of literate materials which stimulate this.

As well as this project, we’ve invested a lot in new furniture and resources and on staff professional development.  We’ll continue to invest to ensure the best provision and the best outcomes.  We already have plans in place for another long-term project in 2013-14.