A better life for children and young people

Our aim is to achieve consistent year on year improvements to educational attainment at a faster rate than the national average, and to make particularly strong progress in the foundation and primary stages, as well as in English and maths.

We have a well developed programme of school improvement strategies which are already having an impact on the performance of pupils across the city. These include:

• A Primary Lead Headteacher Team – spearheading improvement and strengthening leadership capacity.
• Local Leaders – using successful and experienced headteachers to work with other schools.
• Learning Partnerships – improving the quality of teaching and learning through collaborative sharing of best practice between groups of schools.
• Improved tracking of pupil progress – through a dedicated data support service so we know every pupil is achieving to the best of their ability.

We are also strengthening the focus on working with parents, who are the most important educators of children, particularly in their earliest years. We aim to increase the involvement of all parents in learning, including supporting schools to work more effectively with families and communities.

In addition to this, we are aiming to launch the first ever city-wide strategy to mobilise universities, the business sector, public sector agencies, the voluntary, community and faith sectors and all Council services in the drive to raise the aspirations and attainment of our children and young people.

In the short term, we aim to raise levels of attainment year on year at a faster rate than the national rates of improvement. Our key measures of success will be an increase in the number of children who have reached a good level of development at age five and in those who have achieved the expected standard in both English and maths at ages 11 and 16. Additionally, we aim to increase the numbers of children who make good progress throughout their education, regardless of their starting points. By 2011, we aim to have substantially narrowed the gap between Sheffield’s performance and the national average.

Every secondary school in the city will be rebuilt or refurbished as part of Building Schools for the Future (BSF). The whole programme involves an estimated investment of approximately £400m in Sheffield’s secondary schools. Work on Phase 1 is well advanced and all projects are due to have started by 2012, with the programme estimated to be completed in 2014.

All the Sheffield projects will be completed to high sustainability standards. Every school being rebuilt or refurbished is given an environmental rating using the Government’s national system to assess new building projects; all our schools will achieve an environmental rating of at least ‘very good’.