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Bottisham Village College


		11-16 schools

		6th form schools

		Colleges

A county-wide personal development project is the foundation for a school’s own coordinated programme taught by specialists and form tutors.

The school

Bottisham Village College is an 11-16 community school serving a rural area six miles south of Cambridge. The social and economic circumstances from which the pupils are drawn are varied but, overall, they are more advantaged than the national average.

Personal development has been part of the school’s ethos for many years. Bottisham Village College has recognised achievement beyond the academic, for example, for contribution to the tutor group, for involvement in extra-curricular activities, or for community involvement.

As a village college, Bottisham sees itself as at the heart of the community. It has a tradition of inviting the community to share its learning opportunities. Currently a group of adults with learning difficulties is taking part in a project that teaches basic skills in horticulture and business. Students from the school can work alongside these adults on gardening projects.

The programme

The Personal Development Programme at Bottisham includes citizenship, PSHE, sex and relationship education and careers and work-related education, although citizenship is taught separately.

The school is part of the Cambridgeshire Personal Development Project, which is a partnership of the county PSHE Service, Cambridgeshire Connexions, the Cambridgeshire Health-Promoting Schools Programme and all 32 secondary schools in the county. All members of the project contribute funding and share new materials as they develop and write them.

Units of work in the Personal Development Programme are based on the QCA model of work units for citizenship. They are clustered and cross-referenced under four broad headings:

citizenship
healthy and safer lifestyles
making the most of my abilities
me and my relationships.

There is a one-hour lesson each week, alternating between citizenship and the other aspects of the programme. The humanities team teaches the citizenship section of the programme. Form tutors teach the other aspects, supported by off-timetable days conducted by specialists.

Teaching and learning

Form tutors receive a curriculum folder containing units of work for each lesson in the programme. Each unit indicates links to other units and identifies relevant extra-curricular and extra-mural student activities. The folder offers clear and practical guidance on teaching, as well as suggestions for student-led assessment. The citizenship teachers have a similar folder for citizenship.

The programme can only work effectively if tutors are comfortable with its style and content. Considerable effort is therefore put into staff training, and any areas that tutors are not comfortable with teaching are undertaken by specialists in the off-timetable days. An example is drug and alcohol education, which takes the form of specialist presentations from the Cambridgeshire PSHE Service and a Theatre in Education group.

Teaching and learning strategies tend to be participative and interactive. For example, Theatre in Education includes freeze-frame techniques: the actors stop and the students are invited to offer ideas and solutions that can change the action and the endings.

Other learning opportunities outside lessons are as follows.

Students in year 8 work for a day in the school’s reception.
There is a very active school council.
Students are involved in interviewing for new staff, including for the head, for which there was a student panel managed by a governor.
Training is offered at the end of years 9 and 10 to students who successfully apply to be a mentor. The mentors support lunchtime staff to address bullying, help with the homework club and establish ‘buddying’ links with forms in year 7.
Year 11 students can be prefects.

Coordination

The personal development coordinator is one of the assistant heads. She works closely with the head of humanities, the careers coordinator and the head of RE. She meets the heads of year and their assistants each term. Heads of year have a meeting with their year teams once each term to discuss the curriculum for their year group, as set out in the Personal Development Policy (PDP) Framework. Citizenship is coordinated by the head of humanities.

There is an overall Personal Development Policy, with links to policies for the national key stage 3 strategy, sex and relationship education, drug education, equal opportunities and inclusion, careers education, work-related learning, spiritual learning and citizenship education.

Assessment

Citizenship is formally assessed, with end-of-unit tests and student self-evaluation. In other parts of the Personal Development Programme students evaluate and record what they have learnt at the end of each unit. Students use these records to write personal statements about what they have learnt as part of the annual report to parents.

Evaluation

Staff listen to students, paying particular attention to the questionnaires at the end of the off-timetable days and work units.

There are discussions between tutors and the appropriate head of year at the end of each unit of work. Heads of year monitor teaching and learning of personal development within their year group. This includes lesson observations. They also submit an annual report to the head teacher.

An annual report on personal development teaching, activities and outcomes is produced by the personal development coordinator.