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 through adult education, work 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 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 embed BE&E into their schemes of work. Students are given the opportunities to practice, develop and fine tune their Enterprise Skills and Attitudes.

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.

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

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  Sixth formers tackle the Stock Market in Enterprise Week
  Mathematics has interactive whiteboards and software for all their classrooms and have integrated BE&E into all their schemes of work. Financial literacy is a key aim for BE&E and Maths, and we work with local banks and Business Partners to ensure students hve 'real world' examples of the application of their mathematical skills.
  
• ICT has acquired new resources and have created highly innovative projects. Business Partners regularly attend lessons to support the teachers and 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Business and Enterprise

Community Manager, Holly Myers

Our Business and Enterprise Community Manager, Holly Myers, rolls out our community plans and develops a “St Wilfrid’s Business Community” in order to support the curriculum developments within the school. Our plans include:

• Working with other schools to develop B&E, ICT and Mathematics projects that utilize our specialist experience.  These include joint Enterprise days with our partner secondary schools and Enterprise sessions with our feeder primary schools.
  
• Auditing the local community's needs and offering adult education classes in business related courses in order to raise attainment amongst the local adult population;
  
• Sharing best practice with interested schools in running a successful Business, Enterprise and Community programme.
  

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