Kingswood Community College

School Self Evaluation 2021/22

1. 1. Introduction

• The Focus of the evaluation

The School continued with the self evaluation of teaching and learning with a specific focus on anti-bullying. The school continues to use the SSE process with increasing effectiveness to maintain an environment that fosters the management of change. We focused in particular on the following areas.

LAOS Dimension 1 - Teaching & Learning

• Domain 2: Learner experiences - Students grow as learners through respectful interactions and experiences that are challenging and supportive.

• Domain 4: Teacher’s collective/collaborative practice - Teachers contribute to building whole-staff capacity by sharing their expertise

1.2 School Context

Kingswood Community College is a multi-denominational non-designated mixed school under the patronage of Dublin & Dun Laoghaire ETB. The school opened in September 2016 and has just over 860 students on roll.

Students enjoy a range of academic, cultural and sporting pursuits. The school strives to provide a well-rounded holistic education to all students. The staff, pupils, home and the greater community enjoy a strong and active partnership. The school aims to nurture and support moral, social, cultural and academic development.

Physical and mental wellbeing are also of great importance. Wellbeing at the school is integrated into all school policies and school life in general. The 400 hours have been built into the Junior cycle syllabus. There are PDST courses available and promoted by the school for staff.

The school offers a broad and balanced curriculum. The school will present our first Leaving Cert in June 2022. There is a vibrant atmosphere at the school where the different subject departments collaborate and share resources and ideas.

Teaching and learning is greatly supported with the use of technology. Teachers create their own content and each student has an ipad. Such is the magnitude of the innovation and creativity with the use of iPads that the school has this year been recognised as An Apple Distinguished School 2021-2024.

2. The Findings

The participation of all stakeholders is important in the evaluation process.

Parents/guardians and students are constantly in communication with staff at the school. Any material information disclosed by parents/guardians from these interactions is recorded individually by staff and also on the notes section of the online VSWare platform to allow for collaboration between different educational actors.

Relationships, friendships, anxiety, stress, social media and online interactions were areas raised by parents/guardians and students most often.

Students were surveyed about their experiences of unwanted negative attention or antisocial behaviour.

• 54% of those surveyed believed that unwanted negative behaviour or antisocial behaviour is a problem in the community.
• 8% of those surveyed said they saw someone being subject to unwanted negative behaviour every day.
• 3% of those surveyed said they did not feel safe on their way to and from school.
• When asked how often they experienced unwanted negative behaviour from other students at school
• 41% replied never
• 47% replied sometimes
• 8% replied regularly
• 4% replied every day

Speaking to class Tutors gave a clear picture of areas being integrated into tutor time throughout the year to maintain a positive learning environment at the school.

Areas covered during Tutor Times:

• Mental Health Awareness day
• Autism awareness
• World Kindness Day
• Stand up week
• Self reflection and gratitude jar
• Safer internet day – Webwise
• Friendship week
• Wellbeing week
• Cocos Law

The anti bullying FUSE programme is also used at the school and integrated into SPHE lessons to focus on bullying, empathy, relationships, social media and the many other aspects that impact how students grow as learners. This helps highlight the importance of respectful interactions and experiences at school and in the community.

As educators, our relative autonomy is important, we look to engage, be proactive and display professional responsibility by striving to provide a holistic education for our students. The social, emotional and physical needs of the students is of paramount importance at our school. The school has an Anti Bullying Committee in place which helps foster an environment of collaborative practice which allows teachers to share expertise and build staff capacity. The work undertaken by this group is very important in helping students grow and maintain a positive learning environment to cater for effective teaching and learning.

Work undertaken by Anti Bullying Committee

• Reviewed the anti-bullying policy
• Created awareness around the steps to take if bullying is either witnessed or experienced.
• FUSE workshops were implemented by 2nd year teachers during SPHE.
• Introduced friendship week.
• Students were made aware of Coco’s law during friendship week.
• Gathered data around pupils’ experiences of bullying
• Facilitated the creation of a student anti bullying committee
• Organised a workshop (The Mighty Bully Brady) for 1^st Years which will now be rolled out every first year cohort going forward.

This is what we are going to focus on to improve our practice further.

The school will seek to grow the student anti bullying committee by creating a sub committee for each year.

Develop a mentoring programme between senior and junior students.