Last updated 17:57, Thursday, 27 March 2008

flashback: Matthew Messenger and fellow St Joseph’s Catholic High School students during rehearsals for last year’s ‘Be Your Best’ Rock Challenge

BECAUSE of its outstanding academic success, St Joseph’s Catholic High School has been identified as a “high performing school” by the Department for Children, Schools and Families and been invited to take on a second specialism.

In addition to being a successful Business & Enterprise College, St Joseph’s will now be part of the ‘Leading Edge Partnership Programme’.

The purpose of the programme is to use outstanding professional practice in successful schools to raise standards, not just in their own school, but also with partner schools.

This is achieved by sharing staff, resources and ideas. The programme also recognises that very often the improvement in schools comes about not because of materials sent to them from London but because of good ideas being shared at classroom level – teachers working with teachers.

The programme aims to use exciting innovative practice to help Year 9 pupils achieve Level 5 in their SATs exams and at least a Grade C in the GCSE exams.

Tom Ryan, head teacher, said: “Here in St Joseph’s we have decided to build upon our growing reputation for performing arts and make this our second specialism. We will then use this specialism to tackle the broad area of communication skills.

“We know from experience that using drama is often an excellent creative way to involve pupils who may ordinarily find some subjects difficult to comprehend.

“We have found that ‘acting-out’ excerpts from the various Shakespeare plays or the GCSE novels considerably aids understanding, which then allows the pupils to perform better in their written examinations.

“Drama has always been a great way to develop self-esteem and confidence and we believe that here in St Joseph’s pupils have benefited in all their other subjects because of their work in that area. Because of our new status the school will be able to invest in additional resources and our aim is to create a first-class, professional style ‘theatre’ within school. We will also be sharing our resources with at least two other local schools and the local community.

“This partnership and collaboration is at the heart of the project and I am convinced that sharing not just resources but also expertise is the very best way of bringing about overall school improvement and opening up the very best opportunities to more and more young people.”