February 2025

At the end of the first spring term, we have distributed our staff, parent and pupil surveys, The information gathered will enable us to see the views of our school community on play and we will use feedback to help build our OPAL adventure.

After half-term, in our first whole school assembly, the children will be introduced to OPAL and what lunchtimes could look like.

January 2025

Our OPAL mentor (Libby Truscott) led a whole school INSET on Monday 5th January for our school staff (senior leaders, teachers, support staff, office staff and the caretaker). We are all very much looking forward to starting our OPAL journey with Libby guiding us along the way. 

Mr Beavan HT, Mrs Pope DHT/OPAL Curricular Play Lead and Mrs Patrick TA/OPAL Play Coordinator met with Libby Truscott (our OPAL mentor) to go through the OPAL audit for the first time. Our Baseline score was 40% (most schools score between 30 - 40% at baseline). As part of the audit, Libby looked at our school site and the play spaces available for our children. The feedback from the audit was that our school site has great opportunities to develop wonderful play experiences for pupils.

At the end of January some of the OPAL team met with our OPAL mentor Libby for our first development meeting. We updated our OPAL action plan and discussed some quick 'playtime wins'. We discussed the storage of OPAL resources and how we will repurpose storage accordingly.