You might notice that the report on ourselves that we send out with your child’s report makes reference to increased challenges with behaviour over the year. Whilst this is true, we ought to be clear that all things are relative. For perspective, here are some recent positive newsflashes to redress the balance! We’re sharing this not to blow our own trumpets, so to speak, but to celebrate the fantastic children of Parkdale, who do continue to be exceptional. When it comes to the statistics, naturally we’d like there to be no behaviour incidents to have reported, but we live in the real world and as far as the real world goes, here is about as good as it gets. Of course, we will continue to do all we can within the means available to us to get this even better!
If you don’t fancy reading all of it, here’s the headline: 85% of Parkdale children have had no behavioural incidents logged against them whatsoever this year.
Feedback from the year 6 residential centre and the activity providers that our children are quite possibly the best they ever get to see. They were glowing about them this week and noted that our children are unusually polite and respectful; also how good they are at communication and teamwork.
Feedback from the CEO of another Trust, who Transform asked us to host to show him how we managed both behaviour and pupil voice. He met, several groups of children, unaccompanied by any of our staff. His feedback: “Your children are amazing. I can’t think of many places where that could’ve happened without adult intervention. It is clear your children receive a full, rich and rounded experience – education in its fullest sense. That they understand and live the school values was just so obvious.”
Organisers of the Gedling Borough and then Nottinghamshire County cricket finals: Your Year 5 and Year 6 teams were amazing. The Year 6 boys managed themselves throughout the day. That you could trust them to do this and that they delivered is incredible. They set a higher standard of sportsmanship and behaviour than any other team
Your Year 5s played as a team, with kindness and respect. They were a fantastic example to those from some schools who did not conduct themselves so well.
Our own statistics and records: In the latest half-term to date, we have only issued 6 SLT detentions, to 4 different children. That is <1% of the school population.
In the following, it is worth noting that incident numbers are over 190 school days for 469 children, a shade under 90,000 total school days.
Over the year: 59 students have had incidents of disruption of Teaching and Learning logged against them, However, of these it is notable that only 9 children have more than one incident recorded. 6 pupils have been responsible for 50% of incidents. It is also worth considering that we maintain very high expectations. We are not a school where disruption means throwing a chair, tipping chairs over or jumping out of the window. We log all minor disruptions. The lack of repetition for the great majority of the 59 suggests either isolated incidents (off moments!), repeated calling out, or just not quite paying attention and that lessons are quickly learned.
In the year, there have been 159 reported incidents of unacceptable or unwanted physical contact between students, with 56 names on the list of those complained about. Again, few children are here multiple times; eleven of them. Suggesting similarly to above. Again, our threshold for recording is low, from bumping, barging and pushing and rough play (sometimes mutual) that we know would not even register in some settings.
If we look at incidents recorded as fights, there have been 17, mostly some jostling and occasionally an actual punch thrown in one direction or another. There have been no prolonged ‘scraps’ and no fights involving more than two protagonists. The ratio of fights to school days is 0.0002, un-mathematically robust as this may be, on the back of the proverbial cigarette packet, a fight per 5,000 school days or one per 25 years of schooling. Some of us have worked in schools with more like 25 fights per day – real ones, some mass brawls!
In the school year, there have been ten cases of bullying concerns raised, again noting that we record any allegation even if it transpires to be unfounded and that our threshold is deliberately set very low.
All in all, in all categories, 73 children have negative reports about behaviour over the year, again noting the very high standards and low threshold we set. 85% of our children have been involved in no reported negative incidents whatsoever. In a class of 30, that’s an average of only 4 who have done anything negative deemed worth recording, again remembering the low threshold. 13 children have multiple (>1) incidents recorded; that’s less than 2% of our school population.