Middle Street Primary School

EQUALITIES INFORMATION & OBJECTIVES

OUR EQUALITIES STATEMENT

Middle Street Primary School and Nursery is a learning community for all, where children are valued equally. We will not tolerate and will challenge discrimination on the grounds of sex, gender identity, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, culture, social background, special educational need or disability. We will promote positive attitudes towards and will celebrate the diversity of families and cultures in the school, and in the local and wider communities.

MIDDLE STREET CHILDREN’S VERSION OF EQUALITIES STATEMENT

It is important that everyone at Middle Street Primary School treats each other with respect.

We have all got equal rights, but we may sometimes need to be treated differently: fair means that everybody gets what they need, not that everybody gets the same.

We will not put up with:
· Name calling
· Being unkind

Making anyone feel unhappy about themselves because of a person’s race, colour, religion, how clever they are, if they find their work difficult, if they are a boy or a girl, if they have a disability, no matter what they look like.

We will help each other by:
         ·         Being kind
         ·         Encouraging good behavior
         ·         Being proud of ourselves and what makes us all different and what makes us all the same

We recognise and welcome our equality duties as set out in the Equality Act 2010 and have due regard to the need to:
     ·         Eliminate discrimination and other conduct that is prohibited by the Act,
     ·         Advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and
          people who do not share it,
     ·         Foster good relations across all characteristics - between people who share a protected
          characteristic and people who do not share it.

We recognise that it is unlawful to discriminate against a pupil, prospective pupil or a member of
staff by treating them less favourably if they have protected characteristics:

· age (staff only),

· sex,

· race,

· disability,

· religion or belief,

· sexual orientation,

· gender reassignment,

· pregnancy or maternity (staff only)

We link our work on equality to our duties under the Education Reform Act 1988 to provide a balanced and broadly based curriculum which:

· promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society; and

· prepares such pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life.’

We take seriously our duty to show due regard and this is evidenced through minutes of meetings and through the completion of equality impact assessments.

We welcome the involvement of and feedback from the school community on the information and objectives published. We also actively aim to recruit parents and carers who belong to protected groups to our governing body and Parent Teachers Association. Please speak to the Head teacher with any feedback, feedback via other staff members or via parent and carer meetings.

Middle Street Primary and Nursery school is a popular, oversubscribed one form entry school situated in the city centre of Brighton and Hove. The school serves a diverse community with children from a wide range of ethnic, cultural, social and family backgrounds reflecting the diversity within Brighton and Hove as a whole:

SEN: 22% (Raise Online 2012 –National 18.5%)

EAL: 14.7% (Raise Online 2012 - National 17.5%)

Ethnic Minority: 38.8% (Raise Online 2012 - National 27.7%)

The largest group of pupils state they have ‘no religion’. The other religions represented in our school, according to records, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. We are also aware that there may be or are children in our school community who question their gender identity and may express their gender identity in a way that does not conform to stereotypical norms or the sex they were born as. We are also aware that children in our school may grow up to be lesbian, gay or bisexual. We also know that our staff, parents and carers will be represented across all the protected groups.

The school building is not an easily accessible building and outside areas are limited in physical space. This could be seen as a challenge but the school community make every effort to positively work round the accessibility difficulties and work hard to ensure the indoor and outdoor space is used imaginatively and the intimate nature of the space is often considered to be a bonus contributing to positive behaviour and collaborative learning.

Equality of opportunity

At Middle Street we expect the highest possible standards. Staff have high expectations of all pupils and continually challenge them to reach higher standards.

The school recognises and values all forms of achievement. We will annual monitor and analyse pupil performance by ethnicity, religion, gender, disability and special educational need and social background. Where we have information related to any other protected characteristic we will apply this. Any disparities which are identified will be addressed through targeted curriculum planning, teaching and support. We will annually report pupil performance by protected characteristic to school governors.

The 2012 analysis of our school attainment data showed:

differences in the achievements of boys and girls in some areas of reading writing and maths
difference in the attainment of children with English as a second Language compared to children who have English as their first language

Equality of opportunity objectives:

· To close the gap for EAL (English and maths) and SEN (maths L5) children in English and Maths in KS2

· Improve attainment for girls in KS1 and KS2 in English

Fostering good relations:

In our school we take pride in the range of work we do to foster good relations and in fact 96% of our
pupils feel safe at school and 90% agreed that the school helps them to get on with others (Safe and Well
School Survey 2012).

2009 Ofsted report states: ‘The contribution the school makes to community cohesion is good. A plan and clear actions are in place for promoting pupils' understanding from a local perspective. Links with other schools and agencies are harnessed very well.’

The impact of the school's outstanding support, guidance and care is evident in the pupils' consistently high standards of behaviour and social skills. Pupils' knowledge of how to keep safe is outstanding. They are given an excellent grounding in good citizenship and in contributing to the community through, for example, being playground buddies’.

We aim to foster good relations by:

· Providing regular staff training on at least one aspect of equality and diversity.

· Ensuring the whole school environment and curriculum reflects the diverse community within which we live. We aim for all pupils in our school to see themselves reflected in the stories we read, the assemblies we hold and in our displays and curriculum.

· Giving clear messages about expectations as part of school values and this includes regular assemblies which may make use of the Equality Calendar. For example we regularly celebrate Black History Month, LGBT History Month and Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month.

· Constantly reviewing and developing the PSHE Education curriculum so that it provides opportunities to explore values and attitudes, understand similarities and differences and builds understanding of different groups and out own identities.

· When appropriate we use the curriculum to explore global perspectives including working with schools in this country and wider

· The charity work that is lead by pupils also helps to foster good relations.

· Using our Pupil Equalities Team to review and develop our practice, including auditing how inclusive our environment and resources are

· For pupils who struggle to understand the importance of respect for others we have a range of interventions including buddy systems, learning mentor support, processes such as ‘team around the class’, small groups work and discussions with the Police Neighbourhood Schools Officer.

We are aware of wider prejudice issues within our society related to gender and gender identity and are seeking a preventative approach through our curriculum.

Fostering good relations objective

· Review the PSHE including sex and relationship education curriculum to ensure gender stereotypes are being challenged and pupils supported to develop healthy relationships and keep safe now and in the future

Eliminating discrimination

We work in partnership with parents and carers, pupils and the whole school community to prevent all forms of bullying and prejudiced based behaviour and you can read more about our approach to bullying and eliminating discrimination in our Anti-Bullying Policy, Equality Policy and Sex and Relationship Education Policy. The last Ofsted Report for our School (2009) stated that: ‘The school takes its duty to promote equal opportunities seriously. It values the opinions of parents and pupils and acts upon these to ensure all are treated fairly.’

Bullying and prejudiced based incidents are recorded. These records are used to inform the assembly programme and the PSHE education curriculum and to support and track individual pupils. Incidents are discussed during pastoral meetings and reported termly to governors meetings. The school also participates in the local authority Safe and Well School Survey this data is also analysed and used to measure impact and inform next steps. This data is reported back to the whole school community on an annual basis.

Our understanding of how discrimination could affect groups of our pupils / students is further informed by national research such as that from Stonewall (homophobic bullying), research complied by the
Anti-Bullying Alliance and local documents such as the Domestic Violence Needs Assessment.

The results from the Safe and Well School Survey show that the reported rate of bullying is lower than the city average and 88% of pupils report our ‘school is good at dealing with bullying’.

We actively encourage parents and carers to report bullying and prejudiced based incidents to us and this has happened on several occasions. However, we are pleased to say that we have received no complaints from parents and carers about how we are dealing with bullying and discrimination in our school.

We have recognised a need to ensure our systems for recording prejudiced based incidents are extended beyond recording racism.

Eliminating discrimination objective

· To develop school systems to record bullying and incidents by all protected groups

· To develop whole school understanding of definitions of bullying and prejudiced based incidents

In 2013-14 this may result in an initial increase in numbers of prejudice based incidents recorded