St John’s RC Academy

Standards and Quality Report 2017-18

School Aims and Values

Mission Statement

In St John’s RC Academy, we seek to grow together as a community of faith and learning in which every member feels welcomed, valued and safe. Guided by the gospel values of Jesus Christ, our staff will work to provide the highest quality of education for the young people in our care. In doing so, we will help them to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors to our school and to society.

Aims

The work of everyone associated with our school is directed by the following aims: we will help each other to grow in faith and to develop our values and spiritual lives we will inspire in each other a lifelong love of learning with a positive culture of

achievement we will encourage our pupils to take responsibility for their learning and lifestyle

we will support our families and the life of the wider community we will promote self respect and show consideration for others we will develop our gifts in the service of others promoting a spirit of peace and

forgiveness Values

Fairness, Achievement, Respect, Love

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Context

2017-18 was another successful year for our nursery and school. Building on our recently agreed shared values of fairness, achievement, respect and love the children and young people of St John’s RC Academy have actively engaged in our community of faith and learning, contributed positively to building up our school community, and have overcome obstacles and challenges to achieve success.

Our school roll has risen a little to just over 1100 pupils. As always, 2017-18 has included a number of staffing changes at class teacher and management levels. Mr David Bald (DHT) left us to take up a primary headship and Mr McAninch (DHT) left at the start of 2018-19 to become a secondary headteacher. Mrs Philp (DHT) also began her maternity leave. This resulted in Mrs Christine Robertson acting as DHT in the primary, with Mrs McCabe acting as DHT until June 2018 in the secondary. Mrs Lora Burgess replaces Mr McAninch on a temporary basis. In 2017-18 we received Pupil Equity Funding (PEF) for the first time. This enabled us to extend or begin a number of initiatives focused on raising attainment, increasing participation and engagement, reducing exclusion and increasing inclusion, and promoting attendance. At the end of March 2018, Perth and Kinross’ Education Department made an Extended Learning and Achievement Visit (ELAV) to our nursery and school. We asked them to help us self-evaluate our progress and agree next steps. They confirmed that our own self-evaluation was robust and identified strengths and agreed next steps with us. You can read this very positive ELAV report on our website.

Review of Progress

School Priority 1: Our staff, children and young people are leaders of learning and change.

NIF Priority Improvement in attainment, particularly in literacy and numeracy; closing the attainment gap between the most and least disadvantaged children; improvement in children’s and young people’s health and wellbeing; improvement in employability and sustained positive leaver destinations for all young people

NIF Driver School improvement; school leadership; parental engagement

HGIOS?4 QI(s) 1.2, 1.3

Progress and Impact Our children and young people are increasingly leading their own learning, engaging with assessment feedback and self-assessment, and setting short and long-term targets/goals. Our children and young people lead learning experiences in lessons across the school and through peer mentoring programmes in literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing. In 2017-18 we introduced our ‘Teacher-Leader’ initiative, increasing leadership opportunities at all levels of the school. There is a significant increase in teachers reporting that they value these opportunities, as well as high numbers recognising that they are engaged in self-evaluation. Teachers are active and engaged mentors, they are leading in-house CLPL events and a number are engaging in Masters-level learning. There is an ethos of professional learning. ERD and professional update are used to identify areas of strength and development of teachers, and more opportunities to work collaboratively have been created and supported, including through PEF. This approach to promoting leadership in staff is innovative and has replaced most of our school improvement groups this session. Teacher-leaders in the primary and secondary are taking forward priorities such as improving opportunities for professional engagement, peer observations, improving the quality of learning conversations, enhancing pupil voice, promoting restorative approaches, digital learning, mentoring, anti-bullying, etc. The Modern Languages strategy 1+2 continues to be developed across the school, with Language 2 (French) well established across the whole school.

Next Steps We will continue to ensure that self-evaluation for self-improvement is integral to our work. We will improve opportunities for professional engagement and collegiate learning. We will ensure that staff development opportunities positively impact on our learners. We will increase and improve opportunities for children and young people to lead learning experiences. We will ensure that as we implement improvement and change we will do this in a transparent manner.

School Priority 2: Learning, teaching and assessment meet the needs of all learners.

NIF Priority Improvement in attainment, particularly in literacy and numeracy; closing the attainment gap between the most and least disadvantaged children; improvement in children’s and young people’s health and wellbeing; improvement in employability and sustained positive leaver destinations for all young people

NIF Driver Assessment of children’s progress; performance information; teacher professionalism

HGIOS?4 QI(s) 2.3

Progress and Impact We have been developing the quality of learning experiences through a wide range of activities. These range from reviewing our curriculum architecture in the secondary to improving pupil voice in the classroom/department, from continuing to promote our relationships policy which has restorative practices embedded within it, to engaging with businesses and developing DYW strategies which provide opportunities for learners to understand their learning within the context of the world of work. We have greatly increased our learning excursions in response to parental and pupil feedback. We work in partnership with Active Schools and participation rates are increasing. Through PEF, we employed a play leader in the primary to develop knowledge and skills in staff and pupils around play, and targeting pupils who require additional support. Our outdoor learning offer across the nursery and school, and through PEF, has created targeted interventions for those we have identified as not engaging in learning and needing support to develop resilience and metacognitive approaches. We have developed a number of opportunities for greater parental engagement and family learning, particularly in the early years. In partnership with our Community Link Workers, Save the Children, Community Learning, Youth Services, Parent to Parent and others we have ensured that families requiring additional support have been engaged with us. This session we have been focusing on improving differentiation, the quality of feedback and the leadership of learning in response to our self-evaluation evidence from last session. Development opportunities on these have been undertaken, including a whole school inservice input from Dundee University staff on differentiation. We have been further developing our use of digital technologies, including a pilot in P5/6 with Seesaw, and the use of iPads in the primary and the learning support and modern languages department in the secondary.

Next Steps We will continue to ensure that learning experiences are engaging and that high quality teaching is a feature across the totality of the curriculum. We will ensure that assessment is integral to learning and teaching, and we will use planning, tracking and monitoring to enable us to meet the needs of all our learners.

School Priority 3: Attainment and achievement is raised for all and the poverty related gap is closing

NIF Priority Improvement in attainment, particularly in literacy and numeracy; closing the attainment gap between the most and least disadvantaged children

NIF Driver All

HGIOS?4 QI(s) 3.2

Progress and Impact The school has a clear focus on raising the bar and closing the poverty related attainment and achievement gap across the school and is making very good progress in this. In nursery, more children are achieving the expected milestones before entering P1 than last year, up to 93%. In early years there has been a focus on improving expressive vocabulary and in reading comprehension from P2-S3. There is evidence emerging (including from Scottish National Standardised Assessments) that this focus is having a positive impact on attainment. Across P1, P4 and P7 there is an improvement in literacy compared to the baseline. In S3 there is a 16% increase in reading and 2% drop in listening and talking against the 2015/16 baseline, with writing increasing by 3%. School leavers have achieved similar or better than their virtual comparators (VC) in all but the last year over the past 5 years. Going against the recent trend, the gap between SIMD 1&2 and 9&10 in 2016/17 is greater than the VC in literacy at N4 and N5 – this will be closely monitored as the examination arrangements change. Paired reading mentors is one strategy which we are continuing to improve upon in the primary and secondary and this is having a positive impact on literacy and health and wellbeing. Progress has been made in raising attainment in numeracy across the school. In P1, P4 and P7 there are improvements in performance in numeracy. In S3 there is a 4% drop from the baseline set in 2015/16. School leavers have consistently achieved similar or better than their VC in numeracy at N4 and N5 over the past 5 years. Going against the recent trend, the gap between pupils in households in SIMD 1&2 and 9&10 in 2016/17 is greater than the VC in numeracy at N4 and N5. Again, this will be closely monitored. Peer mentoring has been extended to include P7 this session and feedback has been positive. Leavers in the Lowest 20%, Middle 60% and Highest 20% of achievement have greater complementary tariff points than the VC in 2016-17. Using the total tariff point measure, the Highest 20% perform less well than the VC. In the 2017-18 diet of exams, initial analysis indicates very good performances from the S4 and S6 cohorts, with S5 performing similarly to their VC. S4 pupils achieving 3 National 5 awards was up 6% against our 2015-16 benchmark, and 5 National 5 exams was at its highest ever, with 48% achieving awards (8% higher than their VC). S5 pupil achievements at 1, 3 and 5 Higher(s) was similar to their VC, but were down against our very strong benchmark year. In S6, there were improvements in almost all key performance indicators against the benchmark year. Against their VC, 4% more achieved 1 Higher, 6% more achieved 3 Highers, 5% more achieved 5 Highers, and 6% more achieved at least 1 Advanced Higher.

Next Steps We will ensure that there are improvements in literacy and numeracy and that these are evident across all stages. We will raise attainment and achievement more widely for all, and the gap arising from poverty and inequality is narrowed.

School Priority 4: Our children and young people’s wellbeing is ensured through equity and inclusion

NIF Priority Improvement in Children’s and young people’s health and wellbeing; improvement in employability and sustained positive leaver destinations for all young people

NIF Driver All

HGIOS?4 QI(s) 3.1; 3.3

Progress and Impact The health and wellbeing of each child and young person is our first priority within St John’s RC Academy. Our community is supported through our relationships policy which places restorative practices at its heart, while recognising the importance of motivating and engaging learners and having staged intervention approaches when required. Our staff have positive learning relationships with the children and young people and staff and pupils value highly the quality of these relationships. This session we trained staff on mental health strategies in partnership with CAHMS and raised awareness of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) through showing and discussing the Resilience documentary. We have developed a new PSE programme in the primary school through ICE (which supports our God’s Loving Plan RE programme), and have completely revised the PSE programme in our secondary HWB classes (which in turn is supported by our Called to Love RE programme). After an extensive consultation the majority of staff and pupils supported our approach to tutor group and HWB and the balance this brings to our curriculum. We are gathering data and evidence about what the barriers are to children, young people and their families within our community. This has led to intervention programmes being devised, some of which are supported by PEF, and has focused on resilience and metacognition, as well as opening up further opportunities to participate in wider achievement opportunities. Some of our children and young people are concerned about bullying within the school. We are revisiting our anti-bullying policy and engaging our children and young people in this. We use the wellbeing web to identify young people who self-report that they are not alright and follow up on these through our pastoral support. Our rates of participation in Active School activities have risen. We have reduced the levels of exclusion in primary and secondary and reduced the length of these exclusions. We have developed alternatives to exclusion for individual and groups of children, using core resources and PEF funding. This has included working with the Educational Psychology service and Mindspace. Attendance is tracked very well and interventions are timely and often effective. Almost all school leavers enter into a positive destination, with the majority continuing in education. We continue to have a very positive relationship with Skills Development Scotland (SDS) and work with them to ensure that we agree and share the risk matrix and target pupils for both SDS and school interventions. Our DYW strategy is very well developed particularly in the secondary. This promotes career management skills and includes curriculum offers as well as a range of opportunities across the PKC entitlements. Many of our departments have business links and young people have opportunities to engage in entrepreneurial activities (eg P7 Fundraisers and the S3 YPI).

Next Steps We will ensure that health and wellbeing of our learners is improved and barriers to successful learning are addressed. We will aim for all leavers to achieve positive and sustained destinations.

Key Priorities for Improvement Planning 2017-18

Our focus for 2017-18 and beyond will be to build on our current work, focusing on the following

four strategic aims:

The school’s capacity for continuous improvement is very good.

Quality Indicator School Self-Evaluation (validated by the ELAV)

1.3 Leadership of Change Very good

2.3 Learning, teaching and assessment Good/very good

3.1 Ensuring wellbeing, equity and inclusion Very good

3.2 Raising attainment and achievement Very good