Working in Partnership
For a number of years, we have been working collaboratively with a group of local schools to support and enhance the quality of education and different opportunities for our school community. This has included a range of different pupil projects, as well as our different staff teams coming together too.
School Improvement
Working collaboratively, our Winwick Staff Team have worked across a range of areas as part of the Grace group.
Headteachers, and other Senior Leaders from across the group of schools, have been working collaboratively on wider strategic approaches to School Improvement for a number of years with the aim of raising the quality of education and opportunities for the children and wider school communities across the group. There have also been opportunities for school Governors to collaborate too.
Our Subject Leaders meet termly to discuss a range of elements of their curriculum areas including opportunities to moderate pupil work, review the curriculum, share best practice, along with identifying shared project work that can benefit our group of schools within their curriculum areas.
In addition to this, our class teachers meet termly with their year group colleagues to moderate and agree on standards of children's writing as well as supporting with the writing target setting process. As part of this collaboration in English, we have also been working with The Literacy Company for the past 2 academic years, who have provided our teachers and teaching assistants with a range of training to support the teaching, learning, planning and assessment of writing.
As wider school groups, we have also held two shared INSET days across a number of academic years, providing our school staff with high quality CPD opportunities, including a conference linked to Flourishing Schools, led by Andy Wolfe (Executive Director of Education for the Church of England), and more recently Evidence Based Approaches to Behaviour, led by Tom Bennett (Lead Behaviour Advisor for the DfE).
Grace Parliament
Children from across the Grace group of schools have been working together for the previous two academic years to develop their own 'Grace Parliament', with their current focus being around the Environment, working on their Courageous Advocacy to build a vision and a project which explores what our children can do to support sustainability. Pupil Voice groups from each school have met at the SMILE Centre as a collective, which has also included guest speakers from our local council. Later this academic year, the children will be coming together at the Town Hall as the project continues to develop.
Worship
To support our children's experience of worship, we have been working together as a group of local Church of England schools to give children the opportunity to share in worship and experience this within different school settings, as well as leading worship for other visiting schools. Children from Winwick have had the opportunity to visit other classrooms and take part in worship at other schools, in addition to different classes at Winwick leading their own class worships where children from other schools have attended. This has been such a positive experience for all involved, as children have loved the opportunity to take part in these different worships together.