Head's Page

The Work of the School

This term I thought that I would not spend all my time talking about the New School. You can actually see it being built now, on land at Redmoor High School adjoining Stoke Road, and so you don’t really need me to tell you what is happening!

Instead, I am going to spend some time writing about our results, and by this I mean the ways in which we measure how well we are doing. We do not always publish this information as well as we perhaps should, and so I am going to share some of it with you now. We have many ways of measuring our performance, some of which are more useful than others. And of course it is often said that you can prove anything with statistics – so we always have to be careful to cross-check our information! However, the fact remains that when we look at all of the figures we have available, this has been an extremely good year, and I have to say that this is a clear testament to the quality of the staff we have working here. So, here goes!

  1. Annual Review Targets

    89% of Annual Review targets across the school were achieved this year – we were actually aiming for 90%, which we just missed by a whisker!

  2. PSA Targets

    We set targets for all students in English, Maths and Science, and we then submit these targets to the Local Authority. Our aim was to achieve 84%, and we actually achieved 87.7%.

  3. Value-Added

    Each year we now submit our P-Level results, in English, Maths and Science, to Durham University, who then measure them against other children in special schools across the country.

    For those of you who want to know more about P-Levels and how they work, they are stages of progress which link in to Level 1 of the National Curriculum, and they are used nationally. I will be explaining how they work in more detail at the Spring Term Parents’ Evening.

    A score of 100 or more means that a pupil is doing better than average when compared with other pupils working at the same level. Our average scores across the school were above 100 in all three subjects, and substantially above 100 in English and Maths.

    It is impossible to get results such as these without quality staff who work hard. So thank you to everyone for what has been an exceptionally good year.

Tony Smith

page created : 6th December 2005 : Dorothy Goodman school news