Cluster profile
The Abergavenny Cluster is made up of 10 schools in total, 9 English medium primary schools feeding the secondary King Henry VIII Comprehensive. They are: Gilwern Primary School, Our Lady and St Michael’s RC Primary, Deri View Primary, Llanfoist Fawr Primary School, Llantilio Pertholey CV Primary, Goytre Fawr Primary, Cantref Primary and Llanvihangel Crucorney County Primary School.
All of the primary schools are well below the national average for pupils eligible for free school meals, ranging from just 5% to 10%, apart from Deri View, which has 35% eFSM. The secondary, King Henry, has 12% of pupils eligible for free school meals.
What did we do?
Our first input was a project planning meeting with strategic leads from the cluster. We completed a cross phase book scrutiny with staff which identified the following areas for development across all year groups from Year 2 to Year 11:
- Accurate use of punctuation to develop meaning
- Use of compound and complex sentences & associated connectives
- Effective control of language to develop expression and effect
Feedback from Year 11 staff was that a greater level of linguistic control in terms of sentence structure and use of punctuation would have a dramatic impact on pupil attainment in the independent writing element of the GCSE Language exam and across the curriculum.
During this first meeting we agreed a structure for support for the cluster for the following two terms. This consisted of:
- INSET for all staff involved in the project – to cover skill progression, what it looks like, which teaching & learning strategies to use and which research is most relevant for the development of these skills.
- Collaborative Planning support – to include an exemplified learning pathway for key skills complete with a full range of classroom activities and strategies for each progression step, as well as an opportunity to plan with other teachers and with Impact Wales. The result was six common lessons for key skills for Year 4 and three common lessons for Year 11, as well as common, agreed quantitative pre and post tests for both year groups.
- Structured teaching, observation & professional discussions – teachers all had the chance to not only teach all the same lessons but also to observe and collaboratively reflect on lessons within and across phase.
- Evaluation session & report – staff were supported to complete a structured evaluation session that allowed them to reflect on the progress pupils had made as well as the impact on their own professional learning. We then collated all of this evidence and completed a detailed evaluation report highlighting key areas for further development and impact already seen on pupils’ skills and confidence.