BEATH High School is continuing to make good impressions at home and abroad, the Cowdenbeath school’s awards ceremony heard. Rector Douglas Young talked about how Beath’s examination results have shown positive signs of improvement and on the international stage pupils have been making an impression on a link with United States universities while a great deal of work has been going on with the Malawi community of Chonde.

Mr Young said at the school awards ceremony,, “I want to say a public and very well-earned ‘congratulations’ to our young people that are here tonight. You deserve to be sitting here allowing us to recognise and reward your efforts – but you know as well as I do that I could fill the same seats again, and possibly again, with other pupils who have done great things over the last twelve months.

“I am very pleased to report to you that Beath remains in a very good place and that we do continue to develop. Our exam results, for example, were very encouraging with us once again seeing improvement in all areas. The results are reported differently now so it is hard to draw direct comparisons to previous years – but we are all very pleased with the direction of travel.

“As well as brilliant results at Higher and National 5 we continue to close the gap in attainment between those who enjoy the whole exam process and those who find it much more challenging.

“Closing that gap tho’ is a very hard process and one that even with the investment of loads and loads of time and effort will be very slow to change – but we are very much committed to seeing improvement there as it is an integral part of being the inclusive school we claim to be. I’ll return to this in a moment or two as I continue to reflect on our development.

“We have seen attendance figures improve little by little every year for some time now suggesting that it is an improvement we can continue to develop”.

He added, “Our curriculum has changed to reflect the demands of a Curriculum for Excellence. We now have the Broad General Education in S1 to S3 fully established and we just moved to a fully integrated Senior Phase for pupils in S4 to S6 just a few weeks ago.

“This is quite a different model to the one we had in place before and I guess a move like this always carries a little risk. That said, if you don’t ever have the courage to change something then you are never going to be able to move forward. We’ll continue to look at the impact of these changes to our curriculum to ensure it is as ‘destination led’ as we say it is. By ‘destination led’ we believe that the curriculum we now have in place allows all our young people the opportunity to get to the end point they need from school to be able to move on to the next stage in their life be that employment, a modern apprenticeship, training, further or higher education. We need to cater for all needs. With that in mind we have seen the percentage of our young people who move in to a sustained positive destination continue to improve and I am proud to say that over 91% of our leavers last year did just that – and given the times we currently live in - that’s not bad. Is our work finished – of course not. Until we can say 100% leave Beath every year for positive destinations there will be room for improvement.

“At this stage I am delighted to inform you that a scheme that has been trialled with great success in the Levenmouth area over the last two years is now being rolled out Fife-wide. Next session we will have three Graduate Aides working in West Fife and they will be based in Beath.

“Their sole task is to build up links with local employers and businesses and to work with those pupils most at risk of leaving school with no positive destination. They will look for suitable work placements, and work experiences for all who wish to try certain things out and they will help us out with appropriate flexible arrangements as and when the need arises. They will be a very valuable addition to the resources we already have to hand.

“I am also delighted to inform you that we were successful at the Cowdenbeath Area Committee and have secured a little additional funding for the next two years to allow us to set up a ‘Connections to Learning Base’ in Beath.

“The aim of this work will be to support our most challenging pupils – those we exclude from school too often. Now we only exclude pupils when there is serious disruption to the school or to learning and teaching in particular.

“However, excluding a pupil simply makes the classroom an even more daunting prospect for them on their return. With this extra resource we believe that we will be better able to manage those most at risk of exclusion, connect them to their learning and through appropriate well-considered flexible packages reduce the need for exclusion completely. We must have presented a compelling case because, as I said, we were successful with our bid”. Mr Young said that during the course of the last session the school has been trying to define the ‘Journey to Excellence’ he has been keeping saying they are on.

“As a staff and in conjunction with the PLT and the PBU we have set out five headings and are well on the way to developing the sub headings we want to see under each of them. The next step is to bring a draft to you our parents for your thoughts as well as run that draft past HMIe to see if they are happy with our thinking. We’ll be looking for your advice in the first term of the new session.

“Once our vision of excellence is finalised it will provide a point of reference for all our improvement work – one that is unique to our school and our own community. It really is important we get this right – and that we continue to revisit it in the years ahead”.