An interview with Sheryl Alexander, Head Teacher.
Please introduce yourself and tell us something about your involvement with Carpenters School.
I’m Sheryl Alexander. I’m Head Teacher at Carpenters Primary School. I’ve been here just over eighteen months. I came here as Acting Head Teacher for one term and stayed. Carpenters Primary School has four hundred and twenty children. It went to two form entry two years ago so we’ve got small class sizes in Key Stage 2 which is great for raising achievement levels. It’s a multi-cultural school in a very mixed area. Lots of challenging circumstances to deal with.
We are very fortunate that the school is now fully staffed. When I started we were actually seven teachers short. We’ve brought in experienced staff and some very good newly qualified staff and one agency teacher.
The school went through an Ofsted inspection in December 2001. In the Ofsted inspection four years previously, the school had been categorised as having serious weaknesses. The Authority, the Head, the governing body and the staff started to work towards major improvements. So, when I arrived it was a very different school, though there was still work to do in terms of consolidating the changes. The new policies were in place but it’s always difficult when you don’t have a steady staff. However, we have gone from strength to strength and in the last inspection the school did very well.
As well as being Head Teacher, you’re also the RE coordinator.
When I came to Carpenters Primary School I discovered that the Head Teacher before me had been the RE coordinator so I had no option but to pick up that challenge though, to be absolutely honest, I shivered at the very thought. I had no idea how I was going to support the staff. You could put on a postage stamp what I knew about coordinating RE. The school had bits and pieces of schemes – allsorts of things on hundreds of separate pieces of paper which seemed impossible for me to put together. I had a staff, fifty percent of which were new to the school, who were looking to me for guidance and support in RE.
I’d been teaching for twenty-one years but in all that time I’d never done any specific training in coordinating RE. I love teaching RE because it’s a subject the children like and it’s a subject in which we can be very creative. I loved to see the children talking about their own feelings as we explored the ideas behind RE, but I knew the level of my knowledge was not what it should be as coordinator for the whole school. That ’s when I decided to contact the LEA for help.
I called Kathryn Wright who is the RE Advisory Teacher here in Newham and explained our circumstances - that as the new Head I had no time to go on courses but I needed to put together a workable scheme for handling RE within our school. She was only too willing to help me.
I felt very lucky that I could book diary time with Kathryn. I didn’t have to dash to meet her at the end of the day after a hard day’s teaching. We organised proper two-hour meetings, during the day, when we could sit down and have quality time together to work on the problem. She came into the school and shared her knowledge with me. She didn’t just arrive, tell me what I needed to do and then head for the door leaving me with the same problem. She sat and worked out the solutions with me. She knew how to piece together all the tasks we needed to deal with. She knows the material and could explain it to me. She didn’t need to go back to the QCA documents at every step so within a relatively short period of time we’d completely reviewed our RE teaching in this school in a way that I could understand exactly what we were trying to do and how we could achieve our objectives. It was fantastic. Understanding the value of contact with the Advisors has been a great lesson to me. Since then I have really, really tried to find ways of releasing our coordinators so that they can have quality time to work with LEA Advisors. It is so valuable.
Can you be more specific about the help she gave you?
We looked at the scheme of work and put the units of work within that scheme into a map so that the teachers could see where everything fitted throughout each term. There had been gaps, there were units missing and I wouldn’t have known how to fill those gaps. Very importantly, we decided to make sure these units were truly relevant to this school. Once we had established what we wanted, Kathryn shared the ideas with other schools in the borough because we weren’t the only school which had gaps. She handled that. I would never have had time to do that.
The result was that Ofsted thought our use of RE was great. Everyone was very confident, our teaching of RE was good, the children’s subject knowledge was good, the planning was good. That’s all in our Ofsted report. They liked how we’d broken down the RE scheme of work and made it relevant to this school and they advised that we looked at the rest of the curriculum in the same way and used that model of working along side a curriculum adviser in order to rebuild some of our other schemes of work. The process was important.
So obviously we work closely with the LEA curriculum advisers but we can only afford so much of their time. Kathryn is a very valuable resource. She is very respected because her subject knowledge is excellent but she is also able to bring teams together. She knows the school’s needs and she’s done a lot of team building work with us, using RE as the subject we can all focus on. The staff meetings that she plans are always very jolly and because Kathryn instils a confidence amongst the staff they, in turn, are willing to express their fears and their concerns about teaching RE. We ’ve built a strong relationship with her.
Kathryn knows our children, she knows our families and has worked with me on some very sensitive issues. She has sat with me in meetings with parents. Because she knows the school and is prepared to join in with the life of the school, that inspires confidence in her opinions.
What are your views on the value of visits to places of worship?
The general ethos of the school is that we should be taking our children out of the school for visits. Clearly, there are important requirements before that can happen. The health and safety requirements have to be met and visits must link-up with our curriculum. With regard to the visit to St. John’s Church – we are very lucky because Dave Richards, the vicar there, has been on our governing board for a long time now. When I came along he was more than helpful about the kinds of things I might need to know about the school. He also has a relationship with the school whereby he comes in occasionally to do our assemblies which the children and staff always enjoy immensely. I’ve never had to talk with David about what sort of assemblies we’d like. He knows we’ve got children from many different religions. He understands that and is very respectful of that. He doesn’t seem to have any problem in dealing with that.
Are there problems for anyone when you are teaching about Christianity in an environment where the predominant faiths of your children is not Christian?
We are very open with parents. We send out to all parents the curriculum maps so that they know what we are doing with their children. The parents also know that if they have any questions or concerns my door is always open. If there are any problems for parents because their children are going into a church, or why we are teaching a particular sort of maths or whatever, then I want to know that. I invite them in and we sit down and we talk about. If they have a concerns I answer them openly in such a way as not to puzzle them. I’m am always happy to explain what our thinking is behind our decisions about what we teach and how we teach it. We try to be ready for the questions. I don’t think it’s any more difficult here to teach about Christianity than it is anywhere else.
What do you want children to get out of the teaching of RE?
I want the children to develop their knowledge. I want them to have the understanding and be able to use the skills. I know that sounds like I’ve read too many National Curriculum documents but that is what I want – that the children are having a really lovely experience. I want the teaching here to be exciting and creative
And what improvements can you see yourself making in the future in terms of the teaching of RE?
We monitor the core subjects very, very closely because the pressure is really on us when it comes to maths and literacy and target setting. But I feel we’ve not been able to do that to the same extent for RE. So over the next twelve months I’d like find more time for more training for our staff so that we are even more confident about what we’re doing with RE. And more time to look at and monitor what they are doing. And how about assessment of RE? I listen to people talking about assessment of their maths work. They’ll say “yes, I really know how the children are progressing over the years in maths.” Do we really know what progression is occurring in our curriculum for RE? I’m not sure we could show the progression in knowledge and understanding from a Year 1 child to a Year 3 child. So, I’d like us to gain a tighter understanding of how to assess what the children have learned. And that’s all part of our professional development as well.