About the Bristol Primary Teaching School Alliance

Whitehall Primary is a nationally designated teaching school. Teaching schools have been recognised as having excellent teaching and leadership and have a broad remit in supporting other schools to improve and to provide high quality training for teachers and school staff.

The Bristol Primary Teaching School Alliance is made up from the primary schools in Bristol who have been designated as national teaching schools. These are Whitehall Primary School, Bridge Farm Primary School and Ashley Down Schools Federation.  We are joined by strategic partner, Fair Furlong Primary School and many other schools and organisations who all support our work.

The Alliance works alongside Bristol Local Authority and the Primary Heads’ Association of Bristol (PHAB) to ensure we are able to respond to local and national priorities quickly and effectively. We also work together with the Bristol Early Years Teaching School Consortium and the secondary teaching schools in the city to develop a robust and joined up approach to school support.

We have more than 40 specialist leaders of education (SLEs) linked to our alliance, from primary and special school across the city who are class teachers, nationally recognised for their excellent work in and out of the classroom. These SLEs work to support other schools and teachers to improve and help the alliance run training too.  We are an accredited trainer for the National Professional qualifications for leadership – NPQs

Our vision and values

We believe that a learning culture of professional openness, honesty, trust and collaboration is essential to enable teachers to grow and improve their professional skills so they can provide the very best learning opportunities for their pupils. We will seek to work with and learn from a wide range of partners, including schools from different phases, localities and areas of specialism and school improvement organisations from a wide variety of backgrounds – as long as they share our desire for continuous and supportive improvement. The notion of joint practice development must lie at the heart of all we do, based on an understanding that we can all learn from each other to improve the collective educational experience for all learners.

The Alliance is guided by its vision and values:

Vision

  • focus on improving outcomes for children;
  • focus on empowering the workforce;
  • focus on strengthening the community;
  • focus on effective partnerships and collaboration;
  • focus on evidence based practice;
  • focus on working across phase, locality, area, city and local authority and national boundaries.

Values

  • working with a spirit of openness, integrity and transparency;
  • building sustainability and building strength;
  • being inclusive and learning from each other;
  • making sure that pupil voice is listened to and acted on wherever possible;
  • behaving in a socially responsible way;
  • being self-evaluative.

For more information, do visit our website: www.bptsa.org