Professional Development

It’s not just the children who are learning at Oasis Academy Johanna! 

Every member of staff is part of an appraisal system.  We all have a Performance Manager and meet with them to agree targets to work towards.  We have meetings to discuss our progress towards our targets and we are observed during the year and assessed at the end. For teachers and senior leaders, our targets are linked to pay progression.

We work together as a staff team to learn from each other.  We all have skills to develop and expertise to share with others.  Teaching staff have weekly training meetings which are linked to our Academy Development Plan. Support staff meet weekly to share best practice regarding interventions and children’s specific needs. We all attend a briefing meeting each week to keep abreast of academy developments. 

We continue to invest in employing an Education Psychologist and Speech and Language therapist. They support our pupils but also provide support and training to staff and parents to meet our pupils’ needs. 

We have been using the Maths Mastery approach for teaching maths for the past three years, and last year we bought a curriculum called Cornerstones for teaching topics (history, geography, art and DT) which we have adapted to meet the needs of our pupils. We have regular training sessions to support our continued professional development in teaching and learning using both of these curriculum tools.

We were lucky to be offered LifeSavers training and resources for free, as we agreed to be a case study pilot school. This is a money management curriculum and saving scheme which has been a huge success. We will continue to use this in the coming year and know it will benefit our families as well as our curriculum.  

Our two Teaching Assistants, Louise and Danny, have been trained to become Emotional Literacy Support Assistants (ELSAs) who support pupils with emotional needs. 

We all continue to use our training from Pivotal to support our behaviour management strategies and policy.

Each year we all refresh our safeguarding training and we have to pass an online test. Throughout the year our Safeguarding Leaders provide training around key safeguarding issues including FGM, Prevent, Sexual Exploitation and Children Missing in Education. We have also all passed a test to ensure we understand the government GDPR regulations.

All Oasis staff meet annually for a day of seminars and workshops together.  This year we are focusing on building pupil and staff resilience.