School Development Plan
Our Key Priorities this year and how you can support at home are:
All children read with fluency and understanding and love reading
Our English Lead Mrs Granville and our Phonics Lead Mr Guillaume are working with all staff to further develop how we teach early reading. All children from Nursery to Year 2 have two phonics lessons every day. We use Sounds-Write to support our early reading teaching.
As well as learning to read, children are read to at least once a day to develop their understanding, enhance their vocabulary, and learn about our world. This is also when the teachers are ‘influencers’ – modelling their love of reading to the children and sharing new stories the children might want to explore on their own or at home.
Children also have a daily reading lesson where the emphasis is on understanding a story. With our younger learners this is done through discussion, whilst our older children will share their ideas and opinions through written responses.
Practising reading every day with your child for 10 minutes has a hugely beneficial impact on their progress. Reading stories to them develops their brains, vocabulary, curiosity and is also a special shared time.
Embed Mastery in Mathematics approach across the school
Our Maths Leads Mrs Elton and Mrs Pescott are working alongside all staff to embed our new maths scheme. All our children have a daily maths lesson that focuses on fluency, reasoning, talking mathematically and using apparatus to prove and show our maths thinking.
All our children also benefit from daily fluency lessons which are age appropriate. For example, Reception children are working hard to know all their pairs to 5 with automaticity – they know them straight away and don’t use their fingers or any apparatus, while Year 4 are working hard to learn all the multiplication and division facts for all times tables. Everybody counts every day. Again, this is age appropriate. Year 1 might be counting up and back to 50 in 5s, while Year 5 could be counting up and back in 1/5s.
At home, all children from Year 2 onwards have access to TT RockStars from any computer, tablet or phone, regular practice in this will support children with their Mathematics.
Counting up and back at home would also support your child, as well as playing card games, cooking and measuring – anything that involves being fascinated by numbers and patterns.
Ensure all children are happy and regularly attending school
Always tell us if your child is not able to attend school, and talk to us if you need further support with this. Regular attendance matters and you can check your child's attendance on Arbor. It should be above 95%. Roxie Lloyd, Harbour's Attendance Officer, is always here so help you.
Personal Development
In all parts of the school day - lessons, assemblies, lunch and breaktime, all staff are supporting children to become responsible, respectful and active citizens of Newhaven. We teach the children our school values and the fundamental British values and also teach them how to be mentally and physically healthy, and stay safe both online and offline. We talk to the children about equality and diversity and teach them to be curious, respectful and inquisitive about cultures, families and religions that are different to theirs. We actively encourage them to challenge stereotypes. We challenge the children to be the best they can, and talk to them regularly about careers, making sure they understand there is no limit to what they can achieve. Ask your child if they know our five core values - do they use them at home as well as school? Are they curious about other cultures? Have they heard or seen something on the news that has led them to question a person's actions? All of this will support their personal development.
