Consultation on the Future of the School

On this page you can follow progress on the consultation procedure for the future of the school.

You may find the following documents useful.

Suffolk Learning Federation and Collaboration Toolkit
Partnership Working in Small Rural Primary Schools

Latest Information


8th February 2016

Dear Parents/Carers

Following our recent note we are now pleased to announce that the County Council have agreed to our making a substantive Head appointment. As we are required to do, we will be advertising the post shortly. The process will take several weeks but we will let you know the outcome as soon as possible.

The Governors


January 2016

From the Governors

A great deal of time has been spent over the last few months talking to a variety of different types of school. We do have something of a problem in that unlike most of our neighbours, we are not a Church school and it is the current intention that all Church schools will join a Church MAT (multi academy trust). Whilst it is possible that non-church schools may be able to join the MAT it would probably not be on equal terms. We have also talked to another MAT in the process of formation but after much thought we felt that their ethos was not right for our school as in their model all control over the School would be from the Trust Board on which the school may or may not be represented. This model is fairly standard but it rather depends on the heaviness of hand by which it is applied. We have also looked at another MAT in the wider area but could not see what it would add to our School

Statistically overall there is little difference in outcome for academies, federations and maintained schools. The outcomes depend greatly on the school/schools involved much more than the structure. Whilst it seems likely that over time all schools will end up in some form of MAT, in our current position, we are concerned that making such a major change now would have an adverse effect on stability and save little on cost.

We have also talked to a local academy consisting of a high school and a primary but given that our children generally either progress to Thomas Mills or Debenham High, to be part of a group with a different High school would probably not work well.

From the web site, you will see that we have joined a family of schools and have since that time been in discussion with Helmingham, with a view to forming a closer collaboration. This is not a ‘formal’ agreement in that it does not involve any alteration in staffing structure or budget but should lead to some cost benefits in joint events and give help to staff with peer group mentoring, lesson observations etc. particularly with the new curriculum and assessment structures.

We are in regular consultation with the LA and are awaiting a response from them which we hope will clarify, following all the above discussions, our current options and as soon as this response is received we will be able to fix a date for a meeting and hope to have more news.

Meetings

An initial meeting was held on Tuesday 7th July 2015 to explore the models under consideration. Download minutes of the meeting.

Budget Plan

Please click here to view the school's three-year budget plan.

Questions and Comments

Please use the comments feature below to leave a question or comment. All comments will be moderated prior to publishing to help safeguard pupils.

3 comments:

  1. Worrying article in East Anglian today July 22nd: Four village schools, one federation.....worrying results. Rapid decline in schools once highly rated by Ofsted. Is this what we really want for our school...?

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  2. Just wondering how things are progressing on this front?

    Many thanks

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  3. We knew in July that within a 10 mile radius most of the schools were Church of England affiliated and not an option. Everybody could have told you that talking to any other high school apart from Thomas Mills or Debenham was a complete waste of time. I am really disappointed that there has been no communication from the Governors since the first meeting...we were told at the meeting that parents would be involved in any decision making regarding the future of the school. From the above many decisions have been made and agreed without our knowledge or input and for me that is not acceptable. How many more pupils/parents do we have to lose before someone sees sense?

    ReplyDelete

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