Governance Statement 

for School Year September 2021- July 2022

The Governors are committed to providing strategic direction and resources to support each member of the school community to draw out the light and diverse gifts of every child and person. The unity of purpose throughout the school provides a dynamic virtue based culture and curriculum in order that all may flourish, learning about ourselves and one another - pupils and staff alike.

The school will nurture the childrens’ personal development, to equip them with the academic, social and emotional skills to make a successful transition to secondary school. We will endeavour to ensure that your child will have joyful and enriching experiences, beyond the academic excellence offered, in a personalised, child centred, Christ centred learning environment.

Anna Murphy-Sullivan

Chair of Governors

The purpose of governance is to provide confident and strong strategic leadership which leads to robust accountability, oversight and assurance for educational and financial performance.

School governance has three core functions:

• Ensuring clarity of vision, ethos and strategic direction;

• Holding executive leaders to account for the educational performance of the school and its pupils, and the effective and efficient performance management of staff; 

• Overseeing the financial performance of the organisation and making sure its money is well spent.

The key features of effective governance:

Governors must be ambitious for all children and infused with a passion for education and a commitment to continuous school improvement that enables the best possible outcomes. Governance must be grounded in reality as defined by both high-quality objective data and a full understanding of the views and needs of pupils, staff, parents, carers and local communities. It should be driven by inquisitive, independent minds and through conversations focussed on the key strategic issues which are conducted with humility, good judgement, resilience and determination.

The features of effective governance are common across the education sector and share their fundamental principles with governance in the charity and business sectors.

Effective governance is based on the following key features;

• Strategic leadership that sets and champions vision, ethos and strategy.
• Accountability that drives up educational standards and financial performance.
• People with the right skills, experience, qualities and capacity. 
• Structures that reinforce clearly defined roles and responsibilities. 
• Compliance with statutory and contractual requirements.
• Evaluation to monitor and improve the quality and impact of governance.

How we approach this: 

The Full Governing Body meets every term, and receives reports on progress on delivery of Vision Strategy, and the Catholic Life of the school, in addition to updates from the two sub committees: Finance & Resources (F&R) chaired by Neville Conn and School Improvement Plan and Standards (SIPS), chaired by Joanna Hooper, all of which have been organised to provide coverage for a robust cycle of creating, monitoring and reviewing the vision strategy, they meet every half term.

Our Governing Body draws expertise from a wide range of professional sectors and experiences represented by the governors.  Vision Strategy 2022, looks beyond narrow academic performance measures and commits to a broader curriculum and quality of the whole education experience offered at school.  While both supporting and holding the senior leadership team (SLT) to account for the delivery of the vision, governors understand not all improvement priorities are quantitative and some of the most important outcomes will not lend themselves to simple quantitative measurement.

The role of governors may be characterised as that of a ‘critical friend’, in relationship with the staff and families of the school, while able to challenge the school to constantly strive to do better in a constructive way.  

2018 - 2019

In Autumn we had a short, one day OFSTED inspection, the judgement as a ‘good’ school was upheld with outstanding elements noted.  

Letter to school, from OFSTED, 19th November, 2018:   

"Governors share your passion for the school and provide strong challenge and support for leaders. They are highly reflective and use feedback from a range of sources including the local authority, parents and staff, as well as the school’s own performance information, to set priorities for improvement. They challenge leaders about the use of additional funding for disadvantaged pupils, so that gaps between their progress and that of other pupils nationally continue to diminish. “

The school year started with the formation of a new Mission Statement for the school, with the support of Sister Judith and Joanna from our local Convent.  We hosted joint governor training for our partner school - Our Lady Queen of Peace, Pennington. In the annexe, the EYFS the canopies for outdoor classroom space and other refurbishments were completed.

In December we welcomed two new Governors - Ade Bamboye (Parent Governor) and Hayley Upton (Borough Governor).

In the winter term we were warned of the ‘High Level Needs Block’ (HNB), shortfall/deficit experienced by the local authority.  Consequently, the expected school contribution will be expected to increase, which alongside the responsibility for increased wage budget provides a significant challenge to schools.  

In March, staff and Governors with input from an external facilitator from the National Governors Association initiated the process to form our Vision Statement 2022, children and families contributed to the vision too.  This has formed the basis for the School Improvement Plan (SIP), structured how the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) report to the governor meetings and provided the ‘key performance indicators’ for all staff - as appropriate to role and remit.

The school finances remain within budget, this is remarkable with the challenges that this sector is facing.  Further complicated by the merger of the local authority to Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole Borough. My thanks and credit to Susan Solly, School Business Manager, Robert Corsi, Finance Officer and Neville Conn F&R Chair, who monitor, prepare and report the figures minutely.  

In April, our partner school ended our shared Executive Head agreement, largely due to budgetary reasons.

A long held ambition was able to be put in motion in April, when we recruited a dedicated Music teacher and re-developed an area to form a resourced music room.  The objective is that every pupil will have an hour of music every week with the music teacher.

Another initiative is to have a renewed IT drive across the school, including Qwerty keyboard skills for the children.

Our school became a Lead school for Trick Box which is a whole child, whole school, whole family, emotional management and personal development programme for Primary children, their parents and school staff teams.  Congruent with the school’s approach, progressiveness and ambition to excel. The Diocese has identified Corpus Christi School as a Pilot School for S48 National Inspection  Framework. This inspection will take place in academic year 2019/20 

In May I accepted the resignation of Declan Goodwin from his role of substantive Head Teacher of Corpus Christi with effect from 31 December 2019.  Be assured the Governors have been investing a great deal of time and energy to ensure a well constructed rigorous recruitment process. The role is widely, nationally advertised, to ensure we have maximised our chances of securing the best suited Head Teacher to take Corpus Christi School to the next phase.  

Our Mission is to provide the best education for all our students.  This is reflected for the fourth year in a row where the end of KS2 results in English writing, reading and SPAG and Maths were significantly above national and local average across the board.  Significantly there were ‘no gaps’ for children in the pupil premium category of need, this is an exceptional achievement for the children and staff.

The SATs results are outstanding, due to the consistent quality of teaching throughout the school, with high expectations for each child to progress and deepen their ability to learn, understand and enjoy curiosity.  This alone, I believe, would not be enough to achieve such results. The culture and ethos of the school, the engagement of teaching and non teaching staff with the whole school approach to the child and their needs has ensured that this progress has continued to increase over the past four years. 

The SATs are a national litmus test, and it is clear Corpus Christi School has enabled our children to achieve their potential, make progress, deepen their understanding, have ambition and belief in all their gifts.  Naturally it is affirming to hear from our local authority that Corpus Christi is one of the top performing schools locally and nationally. Yet we as Governors understand the ‘back stories’ and the endeavour involved with the individual children, it is the impact to children and families that we find the most up lifting.  The education and formation of young minds and their sense of themselves is no more no less than life changing in preparing our children to become responsible global citizens in the 21st century.

My thanks to the dedicated Governors who attend evening meetings, training and link visits during the day and make valuable and insightful contributions.  Governance is an essential aspect of a school hence is scrutinised by OFSTED during an inspection.  

Governors set the aims and objectives for the school and set the policies and targets for achieving those aims and objectives. They monitor and evaluate the progress the school is making and act as a source of challenge and support to the headteacher. In action, this means:

• Appointing and performance reviewing the head teacher and senior leaders, including making decisions about pay

• Managing budgets and deciding how money is spent

• Engaging with pupils, staff, parents and the school community

• Sitting on panels and making decisions about things like premises, policies, potentially grievances or complaints and staff disciplinary

• Addressing a range of education issues within the school including disadvantaged pupils, pupils with special needs, staff workload and teacher recruitment

• Looking at data and evidence to ask questions and have challenging conversations about the school

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Governors must be prepared to adopt the Nolan principles of public life: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. 

Governors and trustees should also be committed to their role and to young people; confident in having courageous conversations; curious with an enquiring mind; able to challenge the status quo to improve things; collaborative to build strong relationships; critical to improve their own work and that of the governing body; and creative in problem solving and being innovative.  

If you are interested in joining or nominating someone to join the Governing team, please do not hesitate to contact me via our Clerk: clerk@cccpschool.com so that we can meet and arrange a visit to the school.

In summary, academic year 2018/19 has been a tremendously successful year. Clearly, this has only been made possible by the sheer hard work, commitment and dedication of all our pupils, parents, staff and governors. The school’s constant drive to develop the whole child and push the boundaries to ensure every pupil is given the opportunity to develop their uniqueness has been clearly demonstrated in the successful Key Stage 2 2019  SATs results and the many compliments the school receives praising the behaviour of our children from external agents, such as OFSTED. With the new school year well on its way, I have no doubt we will be confronted with many challenges going forward but I am confident that our school community will continue to ensure we do the very best to prepare our children to become global citizens in the 21st century. 

Anna Murphy- Sullivan

Chair of Governors