Questionnaire Results

In the Spring term of 2021, the school asked parents about their views on life here at St Bede’s. The extremely positive responses can be seen in the results below:

Response from the School

Thank you to all of our parents who took the time to share their views with us. We’re conscious that it’s probably not appropriate to compare the above figures with those from previous years, because the circumstances that the school has been working in over the last twelve months, have been far from normal and direct comparisons can’t be made.

The majority of the numerous comments we received, were very positive and we are grateful for this feedback. In particular parents praised the Catholic Ethos, the online learning provision seen in the third lockdown, the school leadership, the teachers’ expertise and commitment and the behaviour of the children.

As can be seen from the above figures, the percentage of parents who said that they didn’t know how well the school deals with bullying was relatively high. However, we would assert that this is because there is virtually no bullying happening at St Bede’s and parents subsequently have little experience of our anti-bullying procedures, which can be found in our behaviour policy here: https://www.stbedesprimary.co.uk/our-school/school-policies

Quite a few parents felt that they would like more regular and/or more specific information about their child’s progress and many of the suggestions about areas to improve, centred on this matter. There are a number of considerations related to this issue. Firstly, because of the third national lockdown, it was not possible for us to hold meaningful conversations about pupils’ progress with parents this spring (as we would normally have done). This is because teachers could not effectively judge pupils’ progress via the online learning platform and really need to be working in person with children to properly assess their learning. As reported in a recent newsletter, we have rescheduled these parents’ meetings to May, at which point teachers will have had sufficient time to fully assess pupils’ academic levels and report on these.

The other point to consider (particularly in providing more regular feedback to parents about pupils’ progress), is that teachers only formally assess pupils’ learning at three points in the year; October, February and in June. The overall results of these assessments are then shared with parents at parents’ meetings or in the annual school reports. Parents also have the opportunity to view the work that their child has produced at these points. Making more regular formal assessments and feeding the results of these back to parents (for example at the end of each term), would inevitably reduce the capacity of teachers to focus on actual teaching and potentially negatively affect classroom provision.

With regards to providing more detailed feedback on pupils’ learning needs (at these three points in the year), we will look at ways in which we can provide this. It is certainly feasible for us to make available more specific information on each pupil, in English and maths, so that parents can work on particular objectives with their children should they want to. In sharing this information, it would be impractical for teachers to go on to provide bespoke homework for individual children, although we would of course be working on these areas with specific pupils in school. We could also provide generic information to support home learning, for example links to websites that cover aspects of the national curriculum.