Balcarras School Development Plan 

Balcarras sets a three-year development plan with the latest one beginning in 2025. The plan sets out the broad strategic goals for the school over the next three years and is overseen by the senior management team and the Board of Governors. The plan is reviewed formally once a year but also influences the ongoing work of the senior staff, the heads of department and the programme of scrutiny put in place by the governors. 

Each of the last two development plan cycles have been hugely successful. The original Development Plan’s and their final reviews are available below.

The 2017-20 School Development Plan

The 2017-20 SDP was a huge success. At the heart of the plan was the desire to continue to achieve the very finest academic outcomes possible. Our Progress 8 of +0.82 in 2019 was the highest in the school’s history and in that same year we also achieved incredibly high value added at A level, +0.33. Taken together there wasn’t a school in Gloucestershire that can rival this level of performance. In fact, across the 13 local authority districts that make up the Southwest, there was only one school who had a higher combined figure. We should take enormous pride in this and the fact that our performance in 2020 was similarly strong. For five years running Balcarras had been named as the highest performing comprehensive school in the Southwest (2017,18,19, 20, 21) by The Sunday Times and in 2021 we were named as the Sunday Times Southwest State School of the Decade.  

The 2021-24 School Development Plan 

In the autumn of 2021 we engaged with staff and governors to develop a new but equally ambitious SDP. The plan that we eventually agreed can be found below. The targets we have set ourselves were hugely ambitious. This cycle of school development was carried out during the pandemic and there is no doubt that running a school during a global pandemic proved to be quite a challenge! In November 2024 the school's governors conducted a final review of the 2021-24 SDP before its final publication. The senior staff and governors are delighted to have achieved the vast majority of the aims set out in the original plan. The final review document contains all of the review comments added as the plan was implemented over these last three years. Reading through it now reminds you just how ambitious we were and how much we have achieved. The final review is published below. We were delighted that during the course of the plan we had broken our record for GCSE performance (+0.83 Progress 8 in 2024) and our record examination performance at A level (72% A* to B at A level in 2023)

The 2025-2028 School Development Plan

In the Autumn of 2024 we began work drafting a new School Development Plan. This process involved the senior management team, other staff and the governors. We chose to amend the structure slightly and framed the plan around ten core areas:

1 Curriculum                                                                                                                  

2 Teaching                                                                                                                         

3 Achievement  

4 Leadership  

5 Behaviour and values  

6 Attendance  

7 Preparation for next steps  

8 Opportunities to thrive   

9 Inclusion and belonging  

10 Safeguarding  
 

The new plan is available below.

The Governors are ultimately responsible for overseeing the plan and they have set up a review committee that includes members of the senior staff and staff across the organisation. The Full Governing Board will consider progress on the plan and it will also be a key part of the work of the Governing Board’s Committees. The Curriculum Committee will scrutinise the schools progress towards meeting the targets that relate to academic progress and the development of our curriculum. The Community Committee will focus on targets related to the development of pastoral care and issues related to the personal development of our students.

Dominic Burke
Headteacher