School Matters

Standards and Quality Report for Kirkhill Primary School

September 2014

The Highland Council

Education, Culture and Sport Service

Our school vision, values and aims

At Kirkhill Primary School and Nursery we aim :

To be a happy, friendly and safe community where we respect and care for each other as we are learning, living and playing.

To make our learning fun and to continue our learning in and out of school.

To become responsible for ourselves, our health and our actions.

To encourage each other to try our best at whatever we are doing.

To accept each other’s differences and co-operate with each other during all activities.

Our School Values:

Respect, Fairness, Commitment, Co-operation, Truth and Honesty.

‘A value is something you can strive to achieve to make our school/society

a better place to grow up in.’ – pupil definition.

Reviewed following consultation between pupils, staff & parents in Spring 2014

The Core Areas of our Practice

This report summarises the strengths of our school, our recent improvements and what needs to improve further. We gather this information throughout the year in a variety of ways so we can make sure our report is as accurate as possible. We take time to compare what we do with national examples of best practice. We visit each others’ classes to share standards in learning and teaching. We look at children and young people’s work to see how they are progressing. We cross mark work. We make use of factual data and information including attainment results responding and adapting our teaching in line with children’s needs. We assess using our own expertise, standardised testing, cross marking and results tracking. Children peer assess and self assess. We gather the views of children, parents, staff and members of the local community. We use all of this information to arrive at our view of the quality of education we provide.

Our Key Strengths

Our school ethos ensures we have our children’s education and wellbeing at the centre of our practices evidenced through inclusion, fairness and high expectations of our pupils’ learning and achievement and behaviour,

Our commitment to providing engaging learning experiences and our aim to meet the learning needs of all our pupils.

Our team work in school and partnership with families and the local community.

Our Improvements Last Session- Aug’13 to July ‘14

We improved numeracy and mental maths as evidenced by our Assessment for Excellence data.

We have shared the AFE data with parents during parents’ evenings and staff have used the data in a number ways to improve our teaching and the pupils learning.

We have used Literacy jotters throughout school to improve the pupils’ awareness of their next steps in Literacy learning.

We have continued to work towards developing consistently high quality learning throughout school through use of Interdisciplinary Learning planning and linking this more closely to our curriculum class assessments.

We have continued to develop peer and self-assessment as a way of encouraging pupils to become more responsible for their own learning and developing their understanding of the next steps they need to take to improve.

We have improved out Nursery /P1 transition by holding shared core curriculum learning days and actively encouraged Nursery families to become more involved with their child’s Learning Journey.

We have had whole school staff training in Autism to increase our awareness, knowledge and practices in order to meet learners’ needs.

We have improved our teaching and learning through further regular engagement tracking of our pupils’ progress.

Our Priorities For Improvement for Next Session-Aug’14 to July ‘15

Develop a more consistent whole school approach to personal learning planning that engages our pupils’ in their learning and target setting and develops their ownership of their Pupil Folios (school) & Learning Journeys ( nursery)

To focus our curriculum development on progression of our Health and Well-being programmes.

Develop skills trackers to enable all pupils to track and assess their wider achievements and become more aware of the effect these have on their educational achievements.

To promote the professional development of all staff and ensure teaching staff are prepared for changes to Professional development and engage with the GTCS process for continuing professional learning.

Developing a Nurturing ASG-Charleston schools project