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Last term teachers across our cluster met to moderate writing. Here are the examples they chose for Reception – emerging and exceeding.

Reception moderation – emerging and exceeding.docx

64. Low Cost No Cost 12th & 13th May.pdf

We are delighted to announce that The Michael Tippett School will be joining the BLC from this term. The School works with secondary age pupils on their site in Herne Hill and with students age 19 – 25 on their College site in Balham. The Michael Tippett School specialises in working with young people with profound, severe and complex additional needs, through an ethos of unlocking the potential in all their students. We look forward to developing projects over the coming years, where students and teachers from across the cluster can learn together and from each other.

61. Low Cost No Cost 21st & 22nd April.pdf

As the term comes to an end, it has been useful to look back on all we have achieved as a cluster this term. We have held 16 meetings for teachers: Headteachers, SLT, moderations from Reception through to year 6, briefings on GDPR, Photography INSET, NACE training and EYFS forums. This has enabled nearly 200 teachers across our cluster to share their professional practice and work together to support pupils’ teaching and learning. Children have taken part in projects including theatre, photography and science and we have organised 2 family film screenings involving giving nearly 500 parents and children the opportunity to enjoy the cinema together. In the last couple of days 140 children have taken part in workshops and visited the Oval House Theatre, a partnership we look forward to developing in the future. Thanks to everyone who has taken part, hosted and led sessions this term and we look forward to more work together in the summer.

Yesterday was the final day of this term’s joint cluster moderations and the first one we have done focussing on Maths. We decided year 2 was a the year group to trial this work as we could use the end of KS1 framework to measure against. Teachers looked at books from each other schools assessed as working towards, at age related expectation and working at greater depth. There was useful discussion over some children’s work that was border line working towards/at ARE and ways in which those children could be progressed. Our session lead is also an LA moderator and gave excellent advice on how to show a child is working at greater depth through close examination of what the government framework requires, looking carefully at the exemplification that the government provides and planning these concepts are specifically shown in the child’s books. She also gave advice on using photographs as part of evidence and how these must be very clear on how it shows the child has grasped the concept, with additional notes. Teachers also shared resources they have found helpful to support children including challenge booklets. In summary this was felt to be a really useful session, particularly for year 2. Many thanks to the team at Loughborough Primary for leading this session.

This week our EYFS forum was hosted by Hill Mead Primary School and our topic was how teachers encourage children to write in Early Years. Our teachers encourage children to write in all sorts of ways: labelling, making lists, registers, letters, mind maps, cards and envelopes. There was general agreement that children enjoyed writing about their own interests and taking ownership eg at Christmas time, staff put out catalogues and children made Christmas lists from them; children set up shops and wrote lists of what they had in there. Hill Mead have introduced using writing books for children in which they can keep their work, and they get a sense of pride from having their work in there. St John Divine staff display all writing on the wall in the classroom. Archbishop Sumner Primary staff attended an Early Excellence training which they have put into practice very successfully. Again the focus was on child initiated writing, with the teacher taking time to move around the children as they engage in activities and encourage them to do some writing as part of it eg writing labels in the construction area. Throughout the week the teacher will do 1 to 1 writing with all the children. They will scribe particular words for some children in order to help them not give up on a sentence they are trying to get down on paper. Children had enjoyed making their own books and writing in them.During the recent snow, teams changed their planning to give children a chance to write about the snow: they changed the phonics focus to support the children. The freeflow environment in some of our schools has supported writing where learning is child led and children write for purpose. Our next meeting will be hosted by Archbishop Sumner where we will be sharing topic and trip ideas and planning.

Friday 16th March was the date for the culmination of a term’s work in Science involving year 5s from BLC Primary Schools and year 9s from St Gabriel’s College as students presented their experiments at the BLC Science Fair. The event was put together and hosted by one of our secondary schools, St Gabriel’s College and it was dedicated to the life and work of Professor Stephen Hawking who died this week, which is also British Science Week. Students from St Gabriel’s spoke about Professor Hawking and his huge contribution to Science. The children from our primaries had planned a wide range of experiments, based on investigative questions, including: Which fruit has the most electronic resistance? Do drinks have the same acidity, Does the type of soil effect plant growth? The entries were judged by 2 Kings College University students who are part of the Kings Scholars programme in partnership with St Gabriel’s. All the children produced fantastic work, and the winning team came from Archbishop Sumner Primary for their work on ‘Do Metals burn different colours?’. It was great to see so many parents and teachers attend the event and congratulations to all involved, with special thanks to St Gabriel’s Science Department.

It was great to see so many of our teachers get together for our year 2 and year 5 writing moderations this week, hosted by Archbishop Sumner and Jessop Primary Schools. During this process this year, we have tried to focus on teachers’ focussing on reading each others’ work samples and drawing on their professional expertise and knowledge of their own children to draw conclusions on the standard of writing, next steps and expectations for the end of the year. Being able to share expertise across the room: some teachers bringing several years’ experience of working with a particular year group, some who are literacy leads in their own schools, some who are NQTs, has been very valuable. There has been some very encouraging feedback from the sessions and a desire for longer sessions and more in other subject areas.