Specialist Status

What is Specialist Status?

This is when a school submits an application to the DFES to become a Specialist School in a given area. For St Wilfrid’s, this is Business and Enterprise with Ethics. We are now a centre of excellence within this area and our three specialist subjects are Business, Mathematics and ICT. St Wilfrid’s is the only BE&E School within Crawley and we have to work within and outside the school community to embed BE&E in order to develop the learning experiences we offer our students and other groups such as parents and adult learners.

Specialist Status brings with it extra funding that we will spend on the specialist areas so they can benefit from the latest resources and technologies in order to raise standards. There are two key strands within the Specialist Status Action Plan. These are school plans i.e., developing teaching and learning of BE&E across the school curriculum and the other is the community plan, whereby we use our BE&E status to raise standards outside the school eg, adult education, other local secondary schools, our feeder primaries and small businesses.

Our Vision

Our vision is to become the leading provider of Business, Enterprise and Ethics education in the South East. We will seek to develop and work by a set of ethical principles that will govern our interaction with all stakeholders, internal and external to the school. This will dovetail with the Catholic ethos of the school.

Aims for the School

1. Use the Specialism of B&E to drive whole school improvement and develop innovative approaches to teaching and learning;
   
2. Encourage, enrich and develop learning by encouraging Enterprise Education and business and economic understanding across the school curriculum;
   
3. Provide our students with the skills (including literacy, numeracy and ICT) needed to progress into employment, self-employment and further/higher education;
   
4. Extend our vocational provision by offering a true vocational curriculum and a wide range of work related learning pathways;
   
5. Invest and support the development of leadership skills of all our staff, including through innovative ways of deploying staff;
   
6. Cultivate a positive attitude toward risk taking and entrepreneurial attitudes;
   
7. To work with our extensive range of community stakeholders to meet their identified needs and thereby use our B&E specialism to help develop strategies that lead to wider benefits for the local community.

Working to Achieve Our Aims

At St Wilfrid’s we have 6 key Enterprise Skills and Attitudes. These are:

Skills Teamwork Leadership Presentation Research Problem solving Communication

Attitudes Self-reliant Dynamic Autonomous Versatile Resourceful Committed

These will be used to create an enterprise culture across the school curriculum whereby we will have a school of enterprising teachers and enterprising learners. All subject departments as well as the three Specialist Subjects will embed BE&E into their schemes of work. Students will be given the opportunities to practice, develop and fine tune their Enterprise Skills and Attitudes.

These activities will encourage and motivate students in their learning.

Subject areas are also auditing their current practice to identify areas where work related learning can also be embedded so that students can develop vocational skills that inform and prepare them for their working life whether that is immediately after school or after completing studies within further/higher education.

The three specialist subjects (Business, Mathematics and ICT) have been working tremendously hard to raise standards in their respective areas:

• 

  Business & Enterprise with Ethics: our school's specialism.
  Mathematics has acquired interactive whiteboards and interacting software for all their teaching rooms. They are also integrated BE&E into all their schemes of work. Work has already begun with HSBC bank and other businesses to bring functional mathematics to life for our students eg, the world of banking, personal finance and mobile phones.
  
• ICT has also acquired new resources and have created highly innovative projects eg, students creating their own websites, theatre booking systems and advertising campaigns.
  
• Business, Economics and Vocational students are now working closely with local businesses in an integrated way to bring the subject to life. New resources are also enabling the subject to be taught in an interactive and dynamic way, stimulating and encouraging students in their learning.

Our launch of Status on the 16th November was a truly spectacular event and allowed all subject areas and students to showcase their enterprise talent. The event was so popular we ran out of seats and there was a clear “business buzz” about the event.

We have appointed a Business and Enterprise Community Manager to roll out our community plans and to develop a “St Wilfrid’s Business Community” in order to support the curriculum developments within the school. Our plans include:

• working with primaries/secondary schools to develop B&E, ICT and Mathematics projects that utilize our specialist experience, eg Enterprise days for primary children; children;
  
• offering adult education classes in Business related courses in order to raise attainment amongst the local adult population;
  
• working with local business associations to offer training facilities in ICT;
  
• offering staff training to local schools as required eg, in Enterprise Education/Planning.

The photos throughout this section highlight examples of pupils taking part in enterprise activities.