Barry Comprehensive School

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Ben Stait & Nathan Taylor from year 8 and Ben Callow & Luke O'Sullivan from year 7 display the Welsh Secondary Schools Association Award

On Friday 10th March Ms. Ford (Head of English) and Ms. Bagshaw (Head of Maths) and pupils attended a presentation ceremony to receive an Award from the Welsh Secondary Schools Association in recognition of the School’s work in raising standards in Key Skills.

Over the past three years we have developed a system at Key Stage 3 which is designed to raise standards in Number, Communication and ICT and, at the same time, raise the profile of what we consider to be the most important aspects of our PSE and transition arrangements. Tutor teams have been reorganised to allow the English Dept. to become the Year 7 tutor team and to deliver the English syllabus, the tutorial and the PSE programme to their own forms thus giving them something more like the overview of pupil progress afforded to Year 6 teachers in Primary. In this fortnightly allocation of time this ‘transition’ team delivers Communication key skills at level 1. In order to complete their portfolios, pupils are required to make a presentation about their progress to their parents during a new ‘Pupil Progress Presentation evening’ held at the beginning of the second half of the Autumn term. They also produce ‘Pupil guides to Barry Comprehensive School’, which are intended to reassure Year 6 pupils about the transition period and these are taken back to feeder primaries during the Summer term.

As a result of the success of our Year 7 reorganisation, we decided to extend the project further by creating a Year 8 numeracy team, consisting of Maths teachers. This team now delivers a PSE/tutorial programme to their own form which focuses on Healthy eating/exercise and from the analysis of heart rates before and during exercise and eating trends etc. pupils produce Application of Number portfolios at level 1. In order to raise the profile of this project and support some of our pupils through the work involved the School has formed a partnership with local industry (Dow Corning Chemicals) and Careers Wales which sees the Science graduates at the plant visit school on a weekly basis to mentor target pupils. The success of this partnership has been recognised by the Basic Skills Agency and December 2005 saw the School make a presentation at the Agency’s National Conference in London in the presence of HRH The Princess Royal.

ICT at level 1 is delivered before the end of Year 8 and over 60% of the current Year 9 pupils, who we started the project with, have received certification at level 1. This year those same pupils are working towards the completion of level 1 ‘Problem Solving’ key skills portfolios with a newly formed Humanities tutor team who are aiming to complete projects on drugs awareness and pupil organisation of their own activities for the School’s activities week at the end of the summer term.