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Last week teachers from both Year 6 and Reception classes met to work together, moderating writing. It was great to see so many teachers working together.
At the Reception moderation, 11 teachers shared how they select evidence of reading and writing. They agreed that videoing children reading was really worthwhile. They went on to explore compare work of children at Emerging, Expected and Exceeding levels in Term 4 of the 6 term year. A useful document was shared, ‘An exploration of Expected and Exceeding descriptors in the EYFS profile’, published online by Oxfordshire Early Years, Oxfordshire CC (www.oxfordshire.gov.uk). Feedback from the session showed teachers found this opportunity very valuable and would like to work together on the other profiles. THanks to Stockwell Primary for hosting the event.
Year 6 teachers also held joint moderation, hosted by St Saviour’s Primary, which was very productive and includes a mix of teachers experienced and new to year 6. This sharing of experience was highlighted as a really valuable exercise and particularly our single form entry schools requested more year 6 teacher meetings during the year to support planning and moderation.

Last week, year 4 teachers from 7 of our primary schools got together to look at writing across their schools. Our aim with moderation is to encourage teachers to get away as much as possible from using any tick lists to assess writing in these sessions, but for teachers to be able to feel confident in their professional judgments of what year 4 writing should look like and next steps for pupils. It was a really rewarding session with teachers commenting on the value they place on being able to look at children’s work from other schools. Exemplars from the meeting will be shared on the blog at a later date. Many thanks to St John’s for hosting and leading this session.

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Last Friday 4 teams of KS2 girls from the cluster took part in their first BLC football tournament, hosted by Archbishop Sumner Primary. Girls from ABS, Loughborough, St John’s Angell Town and St John Divine gathered for the afternoon and played 6 a side matches for nearly 2 hours. The girls showed exceptional skill and enthusiasm and a great afternoon was had by all. A big thank you to all the girls and their coaches, and to Archbishop Sumner for their hospitality. We hope to get a girls football league together in the summer, to capitalise on the girls’ talents.

Teachers from Reception classes in our cluster and Windmill cluster gathered last night to plan ready for the start of our Photography for Learning project, led by Fotosythesis, that starts up next week. This project is all about story making using photography as a stimulus. Looking forward to seeing the children’s story maps develop over the next few weeks!

On Tuesday staff from our schools and neighbouring schools in Windmill cluster attended a very informative session delivered by Barbara Firth from NACE, specialists in building provision for more able learners. Barbara covered many ways in which teachers can give opportunities for able learners to progress in the classroom, emphasising the value of encouraging collaboration between pupils and giving children opportunities to talk about their learning. Barbara left us with a number of initiatives to try out in school. We shall be forming a working party to trial more work and report back on its efficacy together.

Activities for families this weekend

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Family activities in and around London this weekend

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This morning 30 Heads, School Business Managers and Admin Officers convened from our cluster and the Windmill cluster of schools at St John’s Angell Town Primary for a briefing on the new Data Protection Regulations due to come into force on 25th May 2018. Employment Law and HR Consultant Craig Stilwell, from Judicium Education, went through the new regulations with guidance on how schools can prepare, as the ICO brings out more guidance on compliance. Key messages were for schools to audit how they currently process data, to risk assess data needs, to review what policies and procedures need to be in place to comply , to train relevant staff on the new legislation and to think about employing a Data Protection Officer (an internal or external member of staff).

The first groups of year 5s from Archbishop Sumner, Loughborough and St John Divine Primaries got together this afternoon to start planning their experiments for the Science Fair to be hosted at St Gabriel’s College in March. Lots of interesting discussion was going on amongst the teams, keen to chose a question that hadn’t been done in previous science fairs. Looking forward to seeing the work develop!Here’s an example of some of last year’s work.