St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School is in the town of Leigh in Wigan local authority. The school serves children from a range of backgrounds and has been judged by Ofsted to be outstanding.
How the school has used Focus Education
Since 2003 the school have worked with Focus Education by taking part in a mixture of consultancy, training and conferences. We also use Focus publications. Our work has been in all areas, including target setting, subject leadership, monitoring and evaluation. Since 2008/9 we have purchased a 6-day partnership package each year. This has enabled us to work on a range of areas, most recently the ongoing development of our curriculum using the Learning Challenge approach to ensure the curriculum is rich, exciting and meets the needs of our children. In addition to whole-school training, staff have benefited from one-to-one sessions with the consultant to look at CPD pertinent to teaching their own year group. The Headteacher & SLT have also benefited from support with leadership & school improvement matters. Support staff have attended staff twilights to enable them to support our curriculum provision.
Evaluation
We feel that we have benefited greatly from our partnership with Focus Education. The consultant is extremely knowledgeable and inspires confidence in the staff. The professional development and materials provided are always of high quality. The support from the Focus team in the office is excellent. The early days of attending training and INSET helped move our school from good to outstanding. In 2003 we started to develop a theme based, key skills curriculum which has evolved over the last two years into the Learning Challenge approach. OFSTED said in 2009. “The outstanding teaching inspires and challenges pupils to succeed…The outstanding curriculum enriches and stimulates pupils’ learning in a variety of ways.”
