Parish Church Junior School

Being part of the PROGRESS Programme helped me to understand how to better meet the needs of everybody on the staff. It opened our eyes to things that we hadn’t known people needed, and strengthened the internal links within the school, between the senior management and everyone else. This has reinvigorated us working together, going forward with our various projects.
David Morgan, Headteacher

The main impact of the PROGRESS Programme at Parish Church Junior School has been to deepen the engagement of staff and students in helping the school meet challenges, releasing in the process higher levels of energy and commitment.

When the process started, staff said that they felt generally well supported and appreciated. They worked hard to develop the values that they shared. But they found that it wasn’t always easy to get agreement on things and follow through initiatives. This was reflected in concern that children did not always experience the same quality of learning.

They discussed how they could:

• Develop a single staff group that could work as a team, particularly through ensuring TAs could work collaboratively with teachers
• Provide more opportunities to share good practice
• Help everybody to follow through on the commitments they make so as to deliver excellent teaching and learning

These discussions helped to identify people who wanted to take on more responsibility and use their expertise to find creative ways of moving forward. This particularly involved identifying the talents, skills, passions and interests of teaching assistants. Now one runs fitness sessions before and after school, another is helping children with their languages.

Children said they were mostly happy at school, with friends they could trust and lessons they enjoyed. But as they went through the school, they felt more pressure to achieve. This led to the loss of the more creative aspects of the curriculum. They didn’t think there was sufficient recognition of what they were experiencing.

They said that they wanted to take on more responsibility, particularly for helping children to get along better and sort out fights. In response to this, the school has really worked on developing children’s voice.