Archived decisions

Hampshire County Council

SACRE Item 7

26 February 2008

Report on the Monitoring Sub Group

Report of the Director of Children's Services

1

Summary

1.1

The monitoring sub group has met on two occasions in order to monitor standards in RE.

1.2

This paper supports the Corporate Strategy (maximising well being) by ensuring children's provision in religious education is secure.

2

Recommendations

a)

That SACRE notes the report

3

3.1

3.2

3.3

4.

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.5

Background

Autumn term meeting.

The group discussed some RE Self Evaluation Forms (SEFs) that had been provided by Primary and Secondary schools. Some of them were thorough and rigorous and had enabled the schools to produce useful development plans. The group noted that there are some inconsistencies in the quality of the reports, however, and a few reports provided insufficient detail to make useful judgements about the RE provision.

Two Primary Phase school SEFs for RE were scrutinised. In one school the judgement made was that RE is overall satisfactory, but the form was incomplete. In the other school the judgement was that the provision was good with outstanding features.

Five Secondary School SEFs for RE were scrutinised. The judgements made by the schools indicate that two are providing good to outstanding RE, another has made realistic judgements about the need to improve provision and the County Inspector for RE is working with the school. The other two schools judged themselves to be satisfactory to good with a need for development. One Ofsted report was provided to the group which was very positive and indicated that the agreed syllabus, Living Difference, was driving improvement in the subject.

The group also noted the low number of reports submitted to SACRE to view. It was recommended that the issue about SACRE's role of monitoring standards in RE should be raised with NASACRE at their next meeting.

Spring term meeting.

Qualitative research into the effect of Living Difference on teaching and learning

Katherine Wedell was invited to the meeting and she circulated the research proposal for the above study and fully described her background and details of what the research entails. She emphasised national interest in the study. The budget for the study is £13,500, half of which is being provided by HIAS and matched funding has been sought from the Westhill Trust. Confirmation of the success of this funding bid is expected at the end of February.

Discussion followed on the breadth and detail of the study. This research will inform the next review of the agreed syllabus in September 2009.

The group scrutinised the SEFs (Self Evaluation Forms)received

Two Primary school SEFs were available. Both judged their provision to be overall satisfactory. Both schools are in need of further development which they have accurately identified.

One Secondary school SEF was available. It was noted that the school had graded itself outstanding in places where there were still some evident weaknesses. It seemed that the SEF reflected compliance with the requirements of Living Difference, without full understanding or implementation of its methodology.

Conclusion

Following full discussion of the 3 SEFs, the group concluded:

· in this round of SEFs there was a tendency to positively over-evaluate performance, and

· the teachers had not fully taken on board the way in which Living Difference was seeking to alter the purpose and direction of RE.

GCSE results 2007

These were fully scrutinised and the following comments made:

· For the full and short course, there was no significant trend emerging from the figures of the last 5 years. Residuals tend to be variable but only to a slight degree.

· Ethnicity figures were not sufficiently detailed to give any evidential outcomes in order to make any particular judgements. They reflect the low BME rates in the county as a whole.

· Concern was expressed over the 15% differential between the results of boys and girls on the full course, though he acknowledged that this is an issue nationally.

The RE Inspector commented that the overall results figures are most influenced by a few very underperforming schools and he suggested targeting support to these schools should significantly help.

LINK(S) TO CORPORATE STRATEGY

YES

NO

Hampshire safer and more secure for all

_

Maximising well-being

_

Enhancing our quality of place

_

This proposal does not link to the Corporate Strategy but, nevertheless, requires a decision because: