Staff Development and Continuous Improvement

CPD is a continuous thread running through all SIP focus areas, ensuring that professional learning is directly aligned with school priorities, the needs of pupils and the development of high-quality teaching.

Enhance staff training and ongoing professional development to ensure all staff have the knowledge, skills and expertise necessary to deliver consistently high-quality education and achieve strong outcomes for every child.

Develop a strong culture of continuous improvement, where all staff reflect on their practice, respond positively to professional learning and feedback, and are committed to continually developing their practice and striving to do better.

Writing

Enhance writing proficiency across the curriculum for all children, ensuring they develop secure foundational skills and the ability to apply them and express ideas effectively in various contexts.

Success Criteria:

All children demonstrate secure foundational writing skills, including proficiency in spelling, grammar, handwriting and composition, preparing them for more complex writing tasks.

Children show increasing accuracy in applying these writing skills across various genres and throughout all areas of the curriculum.

Staff maintain high expectations for all children and utilise age-related expectations and writing curriculum end points in their planning and instruction, ensuring that children are aware of these and can apply them in their writing tasks.

Teachers provide timely and constructive feedback on writing tasks, enabling pupils to recognise their strengths and identify areas for improvement.

Teaching adaptations are implemented based on ongoing assessments, ensuring tailored support for all pupils, especially those who are disadvantaged.

Children develop increasing independence as writers by using metacognitive strategies to plan, draft, review, assess and revise their writing, making informed choices and responding constructively to feedback from themselves, their peers and teachers.

SEND

To ensure that SEND provision is consistently ambitious, evidence-informed and impactful, so that pupils’ emerging needs are identified early, barriers to learning are reduced through high-quality adaptive teaching and targeted provision, and leaders can demonstrate the positive impact of SEND support on pupils’ progress, achievement, independence and wellbeing.

Success Criteria:

Emerging and changing SEND needs are identified quickly and accurately, and appropriate support is put in place at the earliest opportunity.

High-quality inclusive teaching and adaptation are consistently reducing barriers for pupils with SEND, without lowering expectations.

SEND interventions are streamlined, purposeful and demonstrably effective.

The APDR cycle is used consistently to translate assessment into precise targets, appropriate provision and measurable next steps.

SEND monitoring becomes increasingly strategic and evaluative, with the SENDCo able to demonstrate the impact of provision across the school.

Pupils with SEND make appropriate progress from their starting points and increasingly develop independence, confidence and access to the wider curriculum.

Disadvantaged

To ensure that disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils are identified and supported through a targeted, inclusive whole-school approach that removes barriers to learning, improves attendance and outcomes, and ensures that every pupil experiences a strong sense of belonging, participation and opportunity.

Success Criteria:

Disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils are identified early, and barriers to achievement, attendance, engagement and wellbeing are understood and addressed promptly.

Disadvantaged pupils make strong progress from their starting points and achieve well, with a particular focus on reducing underachievement in writing while maintaining high expectations across all subjects.

The Pupil Premium strategy is implemented effectively, with funding used strategically to strengthen quality-first teaching and provide targeted support for pupils experiencing disadvantage.

Disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils have equitable access to a broad range of curriculum and wider school opportunities, developing confidence, responsibility, participation and a strong sense of belonging.

Parent and pupil voice is used systematically to understand what motivates pupils, identify barriers and shape provision and opportunities.

Attendance for disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils improves through early identification, strong relationships with families and appropriate, timely intervention.

Monitoring of disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils is purposeful, triangulated and leads to timely changes in provision.

Assessment for Learning (AfL)

To embed a consistent and purposeful approach to assessment for learning that enables teachers to accurately identify what pupils know, remember and understand.

Use this information to adapt teaching and learning, and provide appropriate next steps so that all pupils build securely on prior learning and make strong progress through the progressively sequenced Meridian Curriculum.

Success Criteria:

The Meridian Curriculum is embedded, enabling teachers to identify prior learning, essential knowledge and vocabulary and plan appropriate next steps.

Connect tasks are embedded in every lesson and used purposefully to assess and respond to pupils’ prior knowledge and retention.

Teachers use purposeful questioning to assess pupils’ understanding during lessons and respond effectively to the answers they receive.

Impactful live marking and feedback are embedded so that assessment during learning results in immediate action and improved pupil work.

Assessment identifies gaps and emerging needs and leads to effective adaptive teaching for all pupils, including pupils with SEND, disadvantaged pupils and high prior-attaining pupils, to ensure all make strong progress from their starting points.

Leaders and subject leaders use assessment evidence to evaluate impact and take timely action to improve teaching, curriculum implementation and pupil outcomes.