School Governor of Infant and Primary School
“One of the things schools year on year struggle to do, is to maximise their budget spend on curriculum activities versus getting the most out of their pupils and of course showing this progress in their end of year stats.
I believe that the Smart Start Minds programme would hugely benefit schools, as there will be pockets of children that with the intervention of the Smart Start Minds programme will make significant progress in a relatively short space of time, and children will learn concentration skills to take with them onward in their learning journey.
Currently children that are seem to struggle will be offered some kind of 1-2-1 support, either SEN based or other school learning support via booster groups, extra tuition – this will all be budget permitting, this support tends to be needed for pupils for all of their school life at infant / primary level. If these children were assessed and where suitable their concentration skills developed, they would not need the continuous 1-2-1 support, freeing up time and resource to be used elsewhere.
I ask schools this: If you had the option to improve your end of year Stats by circa 10% positive gain per academic year, what monetary value would you place on this?
If out of a class of 30 Children you could turn two thirds of the more disruptive children into higher achievers how much impact would this have on the rest of the class and the teachers time.
I believe the Smart Start Minds programme will give you as a school the opportunity to capture the coasting children in your year groups and stop them from falling through the cracks in the system.
How often do you look at your end of year progress stats and wonder why certain pockets of children fail to make the expected progress targets! Yet they seem to be on track within the termly assessments albeit perhaps towards to lower end of peer group comparisons.
Children are growing up in a digital age, and teaching practise and schools are struggling to teach in this ever changing technical advancing world.
Innovation needs to be embraced as 100% of schools all, in some way state that as part of their mission statements, all children are treated as individual and given the opportunity to become the best that they can be.
Head Teachers need to lead their schools, and it takes a brave and innovative head to think outside the box and try something new."
