an SDP on the school and what that means for investors

1. Bridging
School Development
Plan
Maddy and Andy

2. What did you do and why?
• To understand the school's development plans and their goals, we had to research the schools means of self-
evaluation. We had a meeting with the schools headteacher to research and review the school development
plan. Finding out how the school recognised the areas that required improvement would help us to
understand their strategic planning. The school, supported by an ESTYN inspection highlighted three
recommendations for improvement.
• R1- Sharpen self-evaluation and improvement processes to ensure that they focus on the most important
areas of school development.
• R2- Improve the consistency of teaching and provision to ensure that it is appropriate to pupil's stage and age
of development and successfully develops pupil's independence.
• R3- Improve pupil's writing skills.
• To support and implement these recommendations, the school had to consider the stakeholders. The school,
alongside internal support, needed to expand to external support. For example, the school are
working closely with governors and the archdiocesan education team. They come into the school to do book
scrutiny. That said, there are individuals such as Helen Bowen who will directly support with R3 as she has
strong working with the English department

3. What have you learnt
The schools strategic planning spans over 3 years (2023-2026). Each year looks at a separate
year group – predominately in the foundation phase. The main focuses are on leadership and
learning, pupil independence and writing skills and curriculum, wellbeing, equality and inclusion.
For example, their whole school evaluation highlighted health and wellbeing as an area of
improvement. Their budget is not revealed but was suggested to be expensive in cost and time.
To implement these recommendations well the school needs to obtain staff cover which can be
costly. The toolkit NEIR offers prompts on how they can effectively do this. It is a whole school
operation which requires all stakeholder's involvement.
The SDP has an impact on our professional development as it necessitates the use
of professional standards such as innovation, collaboration and leadership. It is imperative that
we have awareness of the SDP as it offers the opportunity to become involved with the inner
workings of the school.

4. What next
As a result of this experience, we will develop aspects of the SDP by developing the
pedological principles such as leadership skills.
To make this happen we must consider what professional learning do I need to
undertake? Do we need to be aware of monitoring or pupil book scrutiny as use of
evidence.
It would be useful to observe other staff teaching to support our understanding of
how the school are implementing the SDP practically. It would be good to actively
see the school undertaken the strategies that will help improve the SDP
This collaboration will allow us to develop our strands of pedagogy in line with the
strategic planning the school has in place. Working alongside that, our pedagogy is
improving as we focus on professional learning and innovation.
As a student teacher we can use our PLP's to check and monitor progression of the
teaching standard and in school, review the SDP by carrying out book scrutiny,
lesson observations and learning walks.