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Headmasters Weekly News

21 Nov 2008

It’s rather a chilly but dry day as I sit at my desk in my house writing my contribution to web news on a Sunday morning having yesterday returned from the ISA Autumn Study Conference at Oxford. I have to say it was a most interesting and stimulating conference with excellent speakers. That of course is not always the case with conferences but I and all the other heads present agreed it had been a great success.

I was particularly interested in two speakers, one Professor Peter Tymms from the University of Durham and the other Professor Kathy Sylva from the University of Oxford. Professor Tymms was talking about value added assessments and how they can be used to raise standards. I’ll not go into the detail of the presentation but the salient point was that high quality provision for reception age children had a lasting effect which could be seen and quantified later in life and that children receiving high quality provision were more successful at age 11. The study is continuing and eventually they will have data to cover the entire school careers of all the children in the study.
Nobody should be surprised at such findings as many of us in education have been banging the drum for improvements in funding for early years provision for years. As you know the Foundation Stage curriculum was introduced several years ago and the new frame work was made a statutory requirement in September. At this point let me bring in Professor Sylva who has been researching early years education for a considerable time. The findings from her study were remarkably similar to the Durham study. They found high quality early years provision had a major impact on future learning both academic and social. The groups who did not perform as well were children who attended poor quality provision and those who stayed at home.

They also found that provided the aims of the settings were to provide academic success then those who adopted an informal, play based curriculum achieved high academic success. You do not have to sit young children at a desk and rote teach to produce academic success. You do need to have that as your aim and if you employ trained teachers then they found that the children performed best of all.
We all know that young children’s brains are like sponges, they soak up information and detail they want to learn, to find out and that is why you have a well planned and stimulating learning environment for the children.

A few facts and figures that interested me; by the mid 90s Ofsted was costing the tax payer £100,000,000 a year they had a negative impact, the Numeracy strategy cost £500,000,000 and had a slight impact, the Literacy strategy £500,000,000 and an impact that could not be measured it was so small. Finally national testing costs £40 a pupil so multiply that by 600,000 and you’ll see how much that costs.
So invest in the future, invest in high quality early years provision and you will reap the benefits in the years to come. That is what we are doing at Highfield.




News from the Sports Field
There will be no Year 5 or 6 hockey and netball clubs after school next Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th due to matches.

Our A and B football teams had home matches against St Pius this week. The A team drew 5-5 and the B team won 7-0, well done boys.

Independent Schools Swimming Gala
Well done to all our swimmers who competed in Rochdale on Tuesday. We came 2nd with 119 points having gained 7 first places, 6 seconds and 6 third places.

Good luck to our four swimmers, Ben, Ella, Joseph and Ryan who are representing ISA North at the national finals at Coventry on Saturday.

Merit Awards
RB Morgan
RK Mack
1B Joshua
2F Alex
2H Daniel
3S The Whole Class
4S Rachel
4W Rachel
5M Hussain
5D Ben
6P Heather
6H Maria

Word of the Week: harsh, Year 6 amiable

And Finally,
Answers to last weeks quiz: He visited Panama, the BBC domestic radio service and the UK singles chart.
This week’s quiz: What reached Cape Cod in 1620, while in 1877 Thomas Edison announced which invention and this time Harry Truman completed which presidential first in 1946?
Did you know there are more chickens than people in the world?