It is very sad and regrettable that most school teachers are going to be going on strike over the coming months. It is not something that is done lightly, and it will be painful for all involved. I do support the strike though and I will be taking industrial action for the first time in my 30-year career.
We had good news this week as provisional figures for Reception 23 suggest that we will probably be full. Last year, for the first time, we were less than full. Along with many other local schools, 15% over-capacity of Reception places across Leeds has meant that places have been left unfilled and budgets have been hit. I have invested a lot of time showing large numbers of prospective parents around the school and, typically, they seem to be very impressed. This is borne out by the upturn in application first preferences as the number of 3-year-olds locally remains relatively low. The fact that I do these tours a few times every week September-January, visiting or looking into every classroom, shows how confident we are as a school that any ordinary day at Farfield is a great day.
I have been looking at books in Years 5 and 6 this week, as well as talking to groups of children from those classes. These sorts of sessions are always enjoyable and illuminating. I was amused by some of the children’s comments and insights: always complimentary about their teachers and their feedback on work. One group complained about a few chatty boys in their class but it is always so calm when I visit the room and the teacher says that they are a wonderful class. This illustrates that the children (and us adults in the school community to an extent) only really ‘know what they know’. It is hard to benchmark – that is part of Ofsted’s role I suppose. A girl in the same group who had transferred from another school put her peers right, telling them that theirs was a fantastic class compared to her previous school where she had sat next to a ‘nightmare girl’!
