| Highland Council Education, Culture and Sport Service
aims to improve the quality of education and enable all pupils to achieve
their full potential. Head Teachers contribute to this aim through
a variety of management tasks throughout the academic session. These
tasks include managing effective self-evaluation, monitoring learning
and teaching and tracking attainment. Each task will support the school
in identifying key strengths as well as areas for improvement.
Managing Self Evaluation:
- leading the school
community including staff, pupils and parents in self-evaluation
by focusing on Quality Indicators
- ensuring appropriate
feedback to various stakeholders post audit
- regular communication
with parents e.g. reports to the School Board and
- undertaking
annual Professional Review and Development of all teaching
staff.
Monitoring Learning and Teaching:
- monitoring the structure
and balance of the school curriculum through close analysis
of class timetables and agreed use of flexibility
time
- monitoring the planning
of learning and teaching through analysis of long and medium
term forward plans
- informal observation
of classroom experiences through a variety of day-to- day opportunities
- formal monitoring of
learning and teaching using the Quality Indicators from Key Area
3 of HGIOS
2; and
- sampling of pupils’ work
through examination of jotters etc and provision of feedback
on outcome of sampling exercise
to all
staff, pupils and parents.
Tracking Attainment
- tracking individual
pupil, class and whole school progress in 5-14 levels of attainment
in reading, writing and mathematics [through
analysis of set targets against attained 5-14 levels]
- monitoring
of Individual Education Programmes [IEPs] to ensure appropriate
progress towards set targets
- ensuring focused discussion
with each class teacher regarding individual pupil’s progress
in classwork / National Assessments
- ensuring focused discussion
with each class teacher regarding overall class performance
against the school’s 5-14 targets
in reading, writing and mathematics; and
- ensuring discussion
of overall school attainment [comparing school statistics against
national and local authority
data] with collective
staff and with the School Board.
Each class teacher also
has a key contribution to make to the self-evaluation and quality
assurance processes
through:
Participation in self-evaluation
by
- setting the agenda and
agreeing the criteria and procedures for evaluation each academic
session; and
- ongoing involvement
in whole school, stage or class audits using Quality Indicators
from HGIOS 2.
Monitoring learning and teaching by:
- undertaking ongoing
self-evaluation of own classroom practice through use of the
elaborated Quality Indicators
- assessing pupils’ coursework
on an on-going basis to evaluate teaching and
- evaluating
the day-to-day experience of pupils within the classroom.
Tracking Attainment by:
- setting 5-14 attainment
targets as well as curricular targets [within Personal Learning
Plan] for each pupil
- ensuring appropriate
involvement of pupils and parents in the target setting process
- tracking
the progress of individual pupils and groups against set targets
on a regular basis and
- tracking the progress
of the whole class against set class and whole school targets.
By engaging in a systematic
and effective self-evaluation process against a nationally agreed
set of criteria, the school will be
able to identify areas of strength and those which require further
development / improvement. They will be able to use the information
gathered from the self-evaluation process to formulate a plan
of action which meets the needs of the school as well as local
and
national priorities. This plan of action will include maintenance
as well as major development projects.
The ‘Guide to
Management Planning in Primary Schools’ provides
head teachers with a chronological plan of action to ensure a systematic
and methodical approach to self-evaluation, monitoring and tracking
throughout the school year. It should be used in conjunction with
the head teacher’s own monitoring plan [see Appendices 1 and
2]. The head teacher’s plan should be circulated to teaching
staff at the start of each academic session to ensure they are aware
of planned monitoring and evaluation strategies.
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An
example
of an annual management calendar can be downloaded from
here or a view of management tasks for each month can
be accessed below:
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