Our Communities
Each year group is led by a team of staff who will ensure that each child is supported both academically and pastorally.
Heads of Year
The community leadership team’s key responsibility is the development of the whole child. The teams are split between engagement and welfare roles so that all our students receive specialist interventions through their pastoral care. Leadership teams are working more than ever with outside agencies to secure the service to support our students needs. This year has seen a growth in the use of a range of Mental Health and Wellbeing interventions which work alongside the school’s comprehensive mentoring programme.
Heads of Year constantly visit classrooms to support with behaviour and engagement in lesson and positively reinforce the school’s high expectations.
Pastoral Support Managers
Pastoral Support Managers are available to help both staff and students as a non-teaching member of staff they have the time to develop positive relationships with both parents and students. They are responsible for supporting staff and students, particularly focusing on disadvantaged students who consistently need additional support to develop their characters. They ensure standards are maintained by ensuring relevant sanctions set by the communities; leadership teams occur.
The aim of the community is to create a smaller community within the larger school. A place where closer positive relationships can develop between key staff and students to ensure the whole child’s needs are met. In serving the community we do, there is a high need for pastoral support to champion the characteristics that can be absent for some of our young people’s homes.
Monitoring Behaviour and Engagement
This year we have expanded the amount of data used to track and monitor student performance. Techniques include: MCAS conduct log, updated daily by staff to inform communities of issues with behaviour and engagement in either lessons or unstructured time.
Persistently poorly behaviour students who require additional focus upon their behaviour and/or engagement are put on a monitoring report to the community. In some cases this will be a daily report, and in others a weekly report. However, this can be extended depending on the need.
If a student receives a behaviour or engagement call, they are isolated from the lesson or tutor time and placed on report for a day after the call. This report has specific targets related to behaviour and engagement to ensure that this improves in the following lessons. They also receive a break or lunch time detention as part of their punishment, and contact home from the member of staff who made the call. If the student fails this report, they will be placed in the PSP and parents will be informed.
The Pupil Support Provision is an isolation room within the community area in which students are educated in isolation from the rest of the school. This is used as a mechanism to reinstate the schools expectations of behaviour and engagement and to reintegrate students from exclusion.
When a student leaves the PSP, the student is provided with a report which monitors their behaviour and engagement. All students are expected to report to the community office at the end of the day to have their reports checked by the PSMs so that we can ensure that any praise or at times, further sanctions can be given.
Behaviour and Engagement is monitored every morning in a 7.50 meeting using our home grown analyser. This pulls the data from SIMS so that the headteacher, deputies and Community Principals can monitor and discuss the issues from the previous day and strategise solutions as necessary.
For persistent issues, students are placed into an SLT detention from 2-4pm as an extra sanction and a ‘buffer’ before PSP is considered.