Happiness E- Equality

61 Mount Stuart website at: http://mountstuart.cardiff.sch.uk/~pk/vision.pdf

104

“Sometimes agencies come into school to work, we do stuff in school that parents should be doing but may not have the confidence to do themselves or they may not have the skills to understand the importance of keeping the appointments or doing the exercises. We will also take children to appointments if parents don’t have transport.”

EMTAS Co-ordinator

In return for their co-operation, a valuable reciprocal two-way working relationship has been forged where school staff can ask agencies for help, guidance and advice.

“The impact of working together means that we get extra help for the children we work with so that we can help parents come to terms with the challenges they face with their children.”

SENCO

Knowing that someone cares for their children has been acknowledged and celebrated by parents, and the school has been nominated for the ‘Investing for Families Award’.

Interventions

Eversheds’ Readers

Eversheds is one of the world’s largest corporate law firms. Every week a team of Cardiff office employees visit Mount Stuart to read with the children. Staff and pupils look forward to the visits and the acting headteacher acknowledges the impact of the scheme:

“Some of our children come from large families where Mum and Dad’s time is stretched thinly; this scheme gives our children one-to-one time to interact with a professional person who is actively taking an interest in their reading progress.”

Acting Headteacher

Sponsored by Eversheds for the fourth year running, ’Business in the Community's Give and Gain Day’ is dedicated to getting thousands of employees in the UK and internationally, out of the workplace to volunteer in their local community. Eversheds also sponsors an end of year party for all the children who have taken part in the reading scheme throughout the year and after enjoying food, refreshments and games, Eversheds gift them a personally chosen book to take home.

“For some of our children this is the first book they have owned.”

105 Acting Headteacher

Open Invitation

Nursery staff at Mount Stuart recognise the acute importance of early years language and play development as many of the children enter nursery without being able to speak English.

“It is not just reading and writing, they need the language to engage in maths, so we also tackle singing songs and rhyme to encourage this.”

Nursery Teacher

Nursery staff actively encourage parents to learn with their children. They wait until the children are well enough settled into the year and then invite parents in to join them on a weekly basis. The ‘Open Invitation’ sessions run for 6 weeks and there is a separate focus each week:

 Importance of talking together

 Using the outdoors

 Beginning mark making and writing

 Creative play

 Sharing books and stories

 Singing songs and rhymes

At the start of the session practitioners will share a story that gets the children and parents involved, then they encourage them to go off and explore different activities related to the story, but the emphases is on active participation and ‘doing together’. The session is drawn to a close with song and rhyme time and has been proven effective in encouraging families to learn together.

“Engaging the parents as part of our school community is the main thing; it has become clear that this builds confidence that they can approach us.”

Nursery Teacher

Nursery staff have actively coached parents how to play and model activities for them so that they can see how to do it which gives them confidence to have a go and try it for themselves. This tackled the misconception that parents thought that learning was all about sitting down and writing.

“Seeing parents as part of the learning is important, our Mums needed confidence to get involved with physical play.”

“We like to get all the family in and engaged, especially Dads; it is about the whole family.”

Nursery Teacher

106 Curriculum Mornings

Staff at the school thought that parents’ evening was too formal, they were very off putting and a lot of parents felt intimidated:

“One year we only had 6 parents attending, now parents are very relaxed when they come to them, we have to run parents’

evening over two nights now.”

Teaching Assistant

Staff thought that parents were reluctant to come to school; it wasn’t that they weren’t interested; they were a bit afraid and frightened. In order to break down this barrier all the parents were invited to a ‘Curriculum Morning’. Children wrote invitations to parents “come to my class and see me reading and writing.” The response was overwhelming and was a hugely successful turning point in how the school approached relationships. The school created a relaxed and informal welcoming atmosphere and allowed visitors to go in any class they wanted to, not just their own child’s class. For example their child may be in Reception but they are welcome to go and see what goes on in Year 6 class without asking permission.

The school opens its classroom doors, letting parents come in to see how their children are being taught regularly throughout the year and each time there is a different topic or focus, e.g. Thinking Skills, Science, Maths, or IT.

Family Literacy

The impact of the curriculum mornings has been that parents see their children learning and they want to learn too, they want to be able to help their children read and also to be able to go into school and understand what the teacher is saying and doing.

“Our parents do value education; sometimes they do not have the skills to help their children. A lot of our parents are now going to classes to gain new skills.”

Acting Headteacher

As well as running a range of adult learning classes Mount Stuart School has a family literacy strategy. Parents can turn up and take their child out of class to go to family literacy;

there is no need to book. During the session teachers model strategies for the parents and offer guidance on how to get skills to support their children.

“We let the parents lead it, they wanted to know how you teach reading and phonics, how you teach handwriting, what is the best way to help their children learn, and how can they help the children at home.”

107 SENCO

Adults can also learn English for themselves and many parents are learning key life skills, e.g. how to write their address, fill out forms, and how to speak to the doctor. These sessions are equally valuable to the children:

“It is nice to have Mum and Dad come into school we learn more when they are there, we do sounds, tricky words- last week we did L words and O words.”

“Mum and Dad are learning the same sounds as us, we take work home and talk to Mum and Dad about it, we talk about things we have done together.”

“The teacher gives out leaflets and Dad tests me.”

Pupil Voices

Pupil Targeted Interventions

Mount Stuart School operates a range of pupil targeted interventions, for example: ‘SAIL’

and ‘Nippers’ mathematics; ‘Rainbow and Rapid Readers’; and ‘STARS’ literacy programmes.

“We assess our pupils in July ready for the next year so that we are prepared for September.”

SENCO

The SENCO tracks pupil levels by banding results in a traffic light system- red, amber, and green.

“The red children are the ones we would target first as they are the ones most in need of support and help.”

“It’s very hard to split the FSM and SEN needs of pupils, we make sure all the children have provision.”

SENCO

The SENCO makes sure that the intervention is matched to the needs of individual pupils and uses tracking sheets to monitor the impact of interventions before, during, and after the programme has run. The data is looked at globally once a year to assess if the intervention is working, if children are making progress, and if they need to change programme or move groups.

STARS stands for ‘Specialist Teachers Accelerating Reading Skills’ in school and is supported by Cardiff Schools and Life-Long Learning Service. STARS is designed for children who have already had an intervention and are still not making progress.

108 STARS operates in small groups and support is given to pupils 3 times a week for an hour over a whole year. Pupils work through the programme to develop a variety of skills in:

hearing and writing sounds and words, spelling activities, and rhyming syllables. They write their own mini book and get a typed copy of their work. Parents are also encouraged to support STARS by making sure that children attend school so that they can access the programme, help with activities sent home, read stories and offer praise and encouragement.

Reading schemes in operation at Mount Stuart have a range of different coloured books, and a set of questions for monitoring reading and understanding through a writing activity. Staff at Mount Stuart state that the reading schemes are popular with the children and pupils like to measure their own progress:

“Rapids has a special teacher, they test you, if you get a good benchmark then they tell you what level you are.”

“I am on orange, when I go up to green I will be happy.”

“This is my second year of Rainbow Readers I have gone from yellow to violet and I’m really proud of that, I have made good progress and I can see a huge improvement

from last year.”

Pupil Voices

Multi-sensory techniques are also reported by the staff as a fun way of teaching; where building up language through reading books is complemented by physical kinaesthetic learning.

“Children love fun, fly swotting- ‘splatting words’; treasure hunting- ‘searching for words’; and magnetic letters- where they can speak, touch, move, and manipulate words.”

Teaching Assistant

Evidence of Impact

Over the last five years Mount Stuart Primary School pupils in the Foundation Phase have averaged results in Key Stage 1 Core Subject Indicator (CSI 2009-2011), and Foundation Phase Indicator (FPI 2012-2013) as follows: