A Word from the CEO

Welcome back to the new academic year!

Hopefully you are all refreshed and feeling ready for the new term.

New Website

We are excited to announce that our newly developed and re-designed website is now live! We have been working hard for the last four months to produce a much more user-friendly and intuitive website for our customers, which will improve the whole user experience. The new website now features a Resources section which will be home to documents, policies, videos and podcasts, keeping our schools up to date with the latest information and guidance.

We have also used this opportunity to review and refresh our company vision and values. As the company has grown and evolved over the last two years, it is important that we reflect on our development and ensure that our visions and values reflect the direction we are moving in. During our staff development day earlier in the year we worked with our board of directors to re-evaluate our visions and values, which have resulted in the below.

Our Vision

Leaders in innovative and creative educational solutions

Our Mission

To offer personalised consultancy, training and development across the education sector. Our ethos is that collaboration gets the best results, between our partners, our services and our customers.

Our Values

Excellence | Responsive | Collaborative | Ethical | Innovative

Mathematics Focus

This year, one of the focuses for our School Improvement team will be on the curriculum area of mathematics. Assessment in maths has been identified by the RSC as a key area of growth for the South West London area at KS2 and can also be a challenge for some of our vulnerable secondary schools. As a result, it is of utmost importance that we ensure we are doing our best to address any recruitment and retention issues so that we can successfully recruit strong maths teachers to help us with our growth.

As a result, we want to ensure that we are doing all we can to support schools in successfully recruiting and retaining strong maths teachers and having the very best maths teaching within each school.

Therefore, we are committed to providing packages of support to assist schools in improving mathematics for their pupils. Our programme for 2017/18 academic year includes:

• The Croydon Mathematics Teaching for Mastery Project will work with a group of invited Croydon primary schools to develop whole school practices and structures for mastery.
• The Octavo GCSE Resit Project Resit Project (Information to come) will be funded by SHINE, a national educational charity, and will focus on supporting and enabling year 12 re-sit students.
• Preventing the Gap – Making Big Impacts through Small Changes in Mathematics is a one day special of our Primary Mathematics network meeting which will explore what effective mastery looks like and discuss how to leverage the powerful aims of the 2014 National Curriculum to support Mastery.

We are also optimistic about the outcome of our bid to the DfE for the Strategic School Improvement Fund to support Croydon teachers to develop their Maths teaching skills.

Financial Efficiency

As a mutual trading company set up by Headteachers and Croydon Council, we are very aware of the need to ensure schools receive best value IT, HR and Finance support services.  Our Account Manager would be very pleased to discuss services with you to help ensure you are getting best value (Tamsin.mills@croydon.peachpreview.co.uk).