Author: camerl43

Cornbank St James Primary
School Improvement Plan
2017-18

This newsletter is an opportunity to update our Cornbank Community with the progress we have made so far this year on our School Improvement Plan. All staff are in groups and contribute to the work across the school. As always, we appreciate your contributions and feedback.

Ethos—Vision, Values and Aims
All staff have attended two sessions about Restorative Approaches led by our Education Psychologist, Gillian Allan. Gillian is planning to attend our Partnership meeting to share this approach with parents. Staff have begun to explore their personal and professional values. We look forward to sharing more at our Parent Consultations. We are also looking to update our Positive Behaviour Policy—look out for questionnaires in the next LOLs. Our Pupil Voice group continue to support us being a Rights Respecting School.

Science
A group of teachers across the cluster have worked on developing a skills progression for Science. Teachers will be moderating Science work with each other in March. Children took part in a Science Week in November, working together in their houses. P7 pupils have taken part in a transition visit to Edinburgh College with pupils across the cluster and there has been ongoing transition work with Penicuik High School. We are looking to work with the new Science Outreach Centre at Easter Bush in the near future.

Raising Attainment—Literacy (Listening and Talking)
Mrs Cole, our Support for Learning Teacher, led a staff session about the importance of effective Listening and Talking (L&T) . All staff have focused L&T sessions timetabled every week. Staff worked together to assess pupils’ L&T and moderate the work against our Curriculum for Excellence Benchmarks. The literacy enquiry group created a leaflet for families which shared an overview of some of the skills we are teaching and the opportunities for pupils to consolidate these skills in the classroom.

Visible Learning
We continue to build on our work to enable our children to become assessment capable learners. Teachers have been looking at different types of feedback and ways of helping children know their next steps. This is more apparent when visiting our classrooms and our learners are more able to discuss their learner journeys more confidently. We continue to promote the Cornbank PS Learner Toolkit and children celebrate the toolkit weekly through assemblies and Tea with the HT. We have also been having a weekly focus on the learner qualities from the Midlothian Learner, these have been launched at Update Monday and class teachers have been promoting in classes. We will celebrate this extensive piece of work through a whole school assembly in March. We continue to keep parents up to date through our Twitter feed @CornbankPS.