Changes to critical incident support

From 1 April 2017 there will be some important changes to Warwickshire’s Critical Incident support. This is the support provided to schools, colleges and other settings in the event of a sudden or unexpected incident that has a serious impact on the emotional wellbeing of an educational community such as the death of a child/young person, member of staff or parent/carer. 

Thankfully such incidents are relatively rare. The Educational Psychology Service provides direct support to somewhere between 20 and 30 events each year and telephone or email advice in a handful of other incidents. However, as those of you who have suffered a critical incident will know, by their very nature these events usually take you by surprise.

Sudden and unexpected traumatic events can cause significant stress at both an individual and an organisational level for educational staff, children and young people and their impact can be long lasting.  Bereaved children and young people are more likely than their non-bereaved peers to have a serious illness, a diagnosable mental disorder or to be excluded from school at some point in their lives.  Appropriate support delivered in a timely manner can go a long way to mitigating the impact of these incidents.

Please read the attached letter, flyer and SLA that will be included in your packs at the coming Head Teacher Briefings and will go out to all schools and colleges over the next weeks.

You are encouraged to discuss this issue with your senior team and governors.

Dr Helen J Kendall

Principal Educational Psychologist and SENDAR Manager

Would you like to be a Leader of Education in Coventry, Solihull and/or Warwickshire?

Overview

If you would like to work with leaders in other schools to improve pupil outcomes, you might want to consider applying to be a CSW Leader of Education. In addition to leading your own school which includes maintained, faith, free, academy or equivalent, you would have a school improvement role with a headteacher whose school is in challenging circumstances.

The goal of the CSW Leaders of Education is to increase the leadership capacity of other schools to help raise standards. This is an important element of the government’s plan to give schools a central role in developing a self-improving and sustainable school-led system.

Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire Sub Region

The Teaching School Alliances across Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire are working collaboratively across the sub-region to appoint CSW Leaders of Education (CSW LE) to work in a range of schools. As a sub region, we offer a single opportunity to schools, LA, HMI, Dioceses, MATs and governing bodies to engage effectively across this area to access high quality leaders with capacity to provide school to school support.

The Teaching School Alliances that work collaboratively to appoint CSW LEs are:

For further information please click here to see the attached poster OR email your enquires to cswteachingschools@gmail.com

Statutory census dates for maintained schools, academies and free schools

In the January edition of Heads Up, there was an article about the collection of data for the statutory school census on 19 January.

Maintained schools send their data to the LA, who then ‘clean’ the data by dealing with any anomalies or data issues, so they can send error-free information to the DfE. Schools return the data to the LA by the deadline of the day following the census day.

Academies and free schools send their returns directly to the DfE. They are responsible for ‘cleaning’ their own data anomalies. At the same time that they send the data to the DfE, they send a copy to the LA.  It is only at the point that the academy schools copy their data to the LA that the LA can process and formulate all the Warwickshire data. They need a full set of data to do this, which includes data from academies.

For the autumn term and spring term census dates, there is no issue. However, for the May census, there is a big issue regarding the data, because of returns to the DfE for pupil test and teacher assessment data. 

Although maintained schools return their census data by the next day in May, academies and free schools have several weeks more to return their data to the DfE direct. This means the LA cannot use the May census data for checking submissions to NCA (National Curriculum Assessment) tools, meaning they have to use the January data set which is very out of date.

We would therefore like to encourage ALL schools with pupils in Y6 and Y2 to return their May census data as quickly as possible, and before data submission to NCA tools, if at all possible.

Data submitted as part of the May school census will be used in the validation and moderation processes for the statutory primary assessment returns.

The Local Authority acts as the agent on behalf of the DfE therefore by submitting your May school census return promptly, we will be able to better support you with any school census queries.

If you are an academy or free school and would like to know more about our request, please contact Debbie Hibberd 01926 743015 to discuss it further.

Information: post-16 funding allocation statements for 2017 to 2018

The post-16 funding allocation statements for further education colleges, schools and academies should now be available on the EFA Information Exchange. 

All files will be located in EFA Information Exchange in the Document Exchange 'Revenue Funding' folder, under ‘AY 2017-18 (2017/18)’.

To access Document Exchange log into EFA Information Exchange and choose the Document Exchange tab at the top of the page.

As in previous years, the EFA has based funding allocations for 2017 to 2018 on your 2016 to 2017 lagged student numbers. The final allocation statement includes a breakdown of the calculation.

The EFA has published information to help you understand your allocation. The allocation calculation toolkit and guidance help you understand the data that has been used. If you have any queries please contact the EFA using their online enquiry form.

Business cases will be considered where there is a significant error in the data you have returned. The deadline for business cases is 7 April 2017.  Standard minimum thresholds will be applied to decide whether or not your case will be considered.  Please review the thresholds published in the supporting information before submitting your business case.

For support and guidance about EFA Information Exchange, please visit the support page.

Primary Schools PE and Sport Update

Primary PE and School Sport Premium Requirement – 4 April 2017

Schools should have on their website as a condition of the Primary PE and School Sport funding, details of how they have spent their PE funding by Friday 4 April.  This should include:

• the amount of premium received
• a full breakdown of how it has been spent (or will be spent)
• what impact the school has seen on pupils’ PE and sport participation and attainment
• how the improvements will be sustainable in the future.

More information about the PE and sport premium funding and advice on how to spend it can be found on the DfE website. 

Schools can also find further guidance including national case studies demonstrating the impact of the PE premium on the PE and School Sport CSW (Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire) website

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Childhood Obesity Strategy (COS)

Outlined in this strategy is a sugar tax levy to give more resources to schools to promote healthy active lifestyles.  Funding of the PE premium is most likely to be doubled with this levy, or at least the core funding could be, being approximately £16k for primary schools; however this funding is only confirmed till 2020. Schools will have to demonstrate the sustainability and impact of how they are spending their funding. 

The COS also states there will be voluntary healthy schools rating that will be taken into account during OFSTED.  Parents will be actively involved in this rating.

Schools will also have to identify a governor who will be the champion of PE and Healthy Active Lifestyles.  Further information is expected in the summer term. Headlines of the COS and what it means for schools can be found on our home page – www.peschoolsportcsw.org.uk  or the Government’s update can be found here - https://engage.dh.gov.uk/childhoodobesity/

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Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire Primary Premium Awards – 7 April

These are part of national awards that reward and recognise primary schools that are effectively and innovatively spending their Primary premium.  CSW will hold their own nominations, the winners of CSW will get through to the West Midlands awards, and these winners will then go through to the National award.  Closing date is 7 April, for further information visit www.peschoolsportcsw.org.uk/primary-pe-sport-awards

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School Games Review

Currently School Games Organisers (SGO) and other key partners are being consulted on what the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will look like for the 2017 – 2018 academic year.  These will most likely link to the health agenda and participation, not just sport activities. Outcomes should be published by Easter. To find your local organiser and for more information about the School Games visit www.peschoolsportcsw.org.uk/find-your-sgo

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Family Fund - £40 million

Sport England will be releasing information about a £40 million Family Fund, aimed at increasing physical activity and sport within families.  This could be significant for schools, as partners may want to work with schools and use schools facilities as hubs for their projects.  Further information will be available later in March.

 

Teacher assessment of writing at Key Stage 1 and 2 - further clarification

There have been lots of questions about assessment of writing and whether or not teachers still need to teach different genres of writing. The new national curriculum does not specify genres for any particular year group; however, close examination of the programmes of study and of national exemplification materials show that genres will need to be taught in order to meet the expectation of writing for different audiences and purposes.

Please click the attached link below for a downloadable document that explains this in more detail.

Securing accurate assessment of writing at Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 (pdf document)

Appendix 1 - Writing Contexts KS1

Appendix 2 - Writings Contexts KS2