How The Cowplain School is helping children to achieve
LAST YEAR was obviously like no other in schools and we saw extraordinary efforts by all school staff to support children through the pandemic, keeping them safe whilst helping them to progress their learning.
The Cowplain School was no different and, despite all the difficulties and challenges presented to us, we enjoyed an ultimately successful year, ensuring we maintained our ethos of hard work, good behaviour and excellent achievement.
At The Cowplain School we uphold several values that we feel are important for children, including curiosity, kindness and optimism.
We expect children to investigate and question, be kind to each other, look forward to learning and understand how education can positively shape their futures.
Ultimately, we want children to achieve highly; our school’s GCSE results have risen more than 20% in the past few years, with the number of children obtaining the highest grades of 7-9 also rising significantly.
Children move on from us to all the local colleges and, from there, many go on to top universities, whilst others obtain highly sought-after apprenticeships.
We are extremely proud of our broad curriculum which enables all students to access a range of subjects and provides for them an opportunity to excel.
Of course, when starting in Year 7, our children undertake the very important core subjects. But in addition, all have opportunities to participate in subjects such as Financial Education, Dance, Computing, Art,
Music and Spanish.
Later, children can specialise a little more for their GCSE subjects and can choose to study subjects as diverse as Engineering, Psychology or Hairdressing, amongst many others.
To enable this, all our Year 11 students have an extended day, with six periods instead of five, ensuring that they receive as much time as needed to achieve excellent results.
In addition to the content of each subject, teachers focus on three core strands of thinking hard, understanding diversity and building character, which are further developed in tutor and personal development lessons.
We also invest highly in staffing to support our students’ progress. We are fully staffed with specialist teachers to keep class sizes low and many students are also able to access complementary sessions of Maths, Science and English tuition, delivered by our specialist graduate tutors.
We also invest in staff to support the welfare of our children; for example, each year group is led by a non-teaching Head of Year who is available throughout the day.
In addition, the school employs welfare staff, including a school matron/ counsellor and a psychologist so that issues affecting a child’s life, in and out of school, can be addressed.
Visitors to the school, including OFSTED, regularly comment on the ‘friendly and harmonious’ environment. They also confirm that the vision of the school, to ensure all students are treated as individuals with their strengths and talents recognised, is being realised, noting that at The Cowplain School ‘individuals matter.’
This hasn’t been achieved by chance; we expect good behaviour and uphold our mantra that every child deserves ‘disruption-free learning,’ meaning that everyone can express themselves and learn knowing that they will be shown respect by their peers.
In fact, OFSTED commented that students
‘are polite and respectful to each other, their teachers and visitors.’
Over the past few years we have invested heavily in facilities so that our children have the best environment in which to learn.
For example, our Science laboratories are amongst the newest and best in the county, whilst the past couple of years has seen us re-develop our Astroturf pitch.
We have excellent dining facilities for lunchtimes, which have been complemented this year by the installation of two large canopies, providing additional facilities for children to spend their lunchtimes.
Later this year, we will invest £750,000 into our Maths building, whilst future years will see further development of our performing arts facilities.
In addition to their lessons, students at the school participate in many extracurricular and leadership activities, which children, parents and teachers alike value highly.
We run a number of trips and invest in the Duke of Edinburgh scheme and other opportunities that we feel will complement our students’ learning.
Ultimately, don’t take our word for it! In our last OFSTED inspection, inspectors found that ‘students enjoy school and parents are overwhelmingly positive about the education their children are receiving.’
We look forward to another successful year and would be very pleased to show you our school so you can experience the positive, welcoming and high-achieving environment we offer our students.
Please come to our Open Evening on Thursday September 23 and also book a tour of the school with a member of the senior team during Open Week.
We look forward to welcoming you and your child to The Cowplain School.