At Culworth School, we teach children according to their ability and not just their age and year group. We regularly assess children each term to ensure they are making good progress. These assessments are shared with our School Improvement Partner from the Local Education Authority who visits us each term to observe teaching, look at children’s work and behaviour and ensure that the children are making good progress.

The School Improvement Partner continues to judge us as an 'outstanding' school.

Each year, our budget is set on the number of children we have in school in January. To be able to afford to run single year groups, we need between 28 and 30 children in each year making a school total of between 195 and 210. We currently have 125 and it looks as though this is the number we will have in September 2011.

We are currently looking at how we split some of our year groups between our six classes - The Nest, The Burrow, The Drey, The Den and The Eyrie next year.

This is never an easy task.

The easiest way to divide a class would be by using age. However, when we looked at our children, it often meant that a group of girls was left with only one boy or vice versa. This is often not easily remedied by simply changing the date.

In the past we have split year groups by friendship groups. The children are asked who they enjoy playing and working with and the team at the school spend considerable time observing to ensure that this friendship group is accurate.

Some years our numbers allow us to split year groups by gender and some years we have considered children’s maturity as part of the process.

In the end, no matter which class your child is placed in for registration, you can rest assured that he or she is always taught by ability in each subject throughout the school day.

As always, we operate an open door policy and if you have any thoughts about class splits we would be happy to hear them. You can email us or use the Contact Form at the bottom of the Contact Us page