Agenda and minutes

It was resolved that:

1. Jenny Stonhold be elected as Chair for the remainder of the academic year 2006/7.

2. Andy Yarrow be elected as Vice-Chair for the remainder of the academic year 2006/7.

Apologies were received from Ms Naina Parmar, Mr Ali and Mr G Mariner.

The minutes of the 11^th September meeting were approved.

The Annual Report was presented to the meeting. There was concern about the table of A-level results and it was proposed that this be deleted, pending the provision of further data from Children’s Services.

Textual amendments were also made, including the replacement of the phrase ‘Headquarters’ with ‘centre’ to refer to the Salvation Army Centre in Wood Green.

Rev. Allaway pointed out that the Baptist and Pentecostal movements were not referred to as ‘churches’ due to the different structure of those groups from the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church.

There was discussion about attendance at meetings. There was concern that a number of representatives on SACRE had not attended any meetings in the last academic year. It was agreed that the Clerk should write to them to ask if they still wished to be members of SACRE and, if they did not, to ask them if there was anybody else from their denomination who wished to serve as a member of SACRE.

RESOLVED:

That the annual report, as amended, be submitted to the QCA

The exam results from Haringey Schools, as supplied by the Children’s Service and included in the Annual Report, were discussed by members. The gap between performance in Haringey schools and the national averages was greater in RE than in other subjects (49% Grade A* - C locally, 70.6% nationally).

Also, there seemed to be an incline downwards in performance from 2005 to 2006. The number doing full-course RE had fallen but the number doing short-course RE had risen. Members were concerned about the fall in performance.

Members expressed concern at the fact there was no way of measuring the learning of pupils who were not entered for an RE GCSE. There was no metric to measure their performance and what they had learned.

The Chair of Haringey SACRE (Ms Stonhold) reported back to the Committee on her attendance at the “Strong SACREs, Good RE” conference”. It was 1 of 3 national events being held on this topic.

She reported that the meeting was addressed by the QCA subject officer who spoke about the subject self-evaluation framework. It was a very “statistics-heavy” framework.

The Committee were informed that 13 schools had been contacted, with a view to asking them to participate in the RE Council funded project regarding self-evaluation framework. Schools had until the end of term to respond.

The Holocaust Memorial Day Programme for 2007 was circulated to members of the Committee.

Ms Chaplin reported back about this programme. There had been a disappointing lack of interest from Haringey schools in this project.

There was a suggestion from Mr Yarrow that the project could be offerred to Middlesex University for their teacher trainees.