Dear Parents and Carers

I hope you all had a lovely mid-term break and enjoyed some of the better weather.  Thankfully the days are a bit brighter and the clocks will be going forward very soon too.

There are lots of things happening in school as always, and we are working hard to make sure we provide great experiences for everyone.

P7 have a Hoy Trip in June and our current P5 children have outdoor education in September.  If anyone would like to get help with finances for this trip, or for resources required for the trip or outdoor ed, please get in touch.  We use our Participation Fund to make sure everyone is included and the cost does not stop anyone from taking part.

You can find lots of up-to-date information on the website, as we wait for our new Learning Journals to be installed.  There is new information on outdoor education, dates for the diary, partnerships and we are beginning to populate our class pages.  We have also shared our School/ELC Improvement Plan, Standards and Quality Reports and attainment data and our up-to-date School and Nursery Handbooks.

We do have some super news, we have been successful in appointing a new admin assistant and we are just waiting for the usual check to be completed before we have a start date.  I will let you know more when that happens.  Once we have our admin assistant in place we will get a few things back on track.

We are also waiting for the 15 hours of support to be advertised, and looking for people who can do this on a supply bases.  If anyone knows someone who can do these hours, let them know we are in need of their help.

We recently held a moderation event for schools across Orkney in Firth to share our writing development and moderate with other teachers.  Teachers shared how writing is evolving for the children in our school, and the impact the professional learning has had on the success and attainment of our children.

We hope to have another event next term, as there are some new schools who have asked to be part of the process and a few people couldn’t attend.  We really appreciate having the opportunity to work with other staff and develop strong professional judgements as a result.

We spent our in-service day focussing on Maths Recovery, taking part in training online.  This has further developed a coherent, high-quality understanding of maths and numeracy across the school and gives all our teachers the expertise to provide interventions where needed.  The consistency is particularly effective as a whole school approach to understanding the developmental stages of numeracy and how to support this.

Overall, the impact of our maths training is having a positive effect on attainment and also in the quality of interventions for children who have targeted support.  High-quality support can also be given to children for short periods of time if they have a misconception or misunderstanding, and this is more consistent across each class.

We are going to start working on our pupil groups again this year, as we have had to think about how this works and is sustainable with only two classes and less staff.  We think we have come up with a plan to get us started, that is something we can manage and that will contribute positively to the life of the school.

We have achieved our Bronze Rights Respecting Schools Award, which is a very important accolade for any school to have and really supports us to develop a great ethos and culture.  We will now begin our journey of achieving our Silver Award, which is very exciting.  The children who will be the RRS Ambassadors will communicate their action soon.  We are hoping everyone will get involved and come along to learn with us at one of the events that will be organised by the children.

We are also excited as we are already on our journey to achieving the core award as a Reading School.  We already have our ambassadors and this is something that we are going to support more substantially moving forward.  Our Reading Ambassadors will be communicating with you about World Book Day and other promotions for the enjoyment of reading, including an assembly at the end of term.

In February we look at how we are spending our Pupil Equity Fund money.  This is money we get each year based on how many children are receiving Free School Meals or receiving a Clothing Allowance.  The money is from the Scottish Government to try to close the poverty related attainment gap and is generally targeted for support of learning in literacy and numeracy and for children who meet the criteria.

Over the past few years we have worked hard to establish good resources in Evie, and to provide professional learning for our teachers in literacy and numeracy so that we can support interventions and provide high-quality learning and teaching.  What we would like to do this year, is provide targeted support for children with additional hours from a support teacher.  This would be a few hours each term, so that we plan interventions and provide programmes of work tailored for our children’s needs.

Our report and plan for PEF needs to be completed by the end of February and needs to include the opinion of stakeholders, including parents and carers.  We will ask for your feedback in relation to this proposal in a questionnaire which will go out to all families.  If you have other ideas or opinions, we are very happy to take on board your thoughts, and as always, your support is much appreciated.

Kind Regards

Emma Jane