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School Support Programme (SSP)
The SSP provides a period of intensive professional and financial support for improvement measures normally lasting three years, but exceptionally for five years. The programme has strong emphasis on:
- the quality of teaching and learning
- the quality of school leadership and management; and
- school development planning, oncorporating realistic and appropriate targets for improvement
SSP replaces and builds on the Raising School Standards Initiative (RSSI) which ended in June 1998. Secondary schools are selected on the basis of their weighted performance index over the past three years (based on public examination results) and primary schools on the basis of free school meals uptake and, as far is available, transfer procedure grade Ds/opt-outs over the last three years and Key Stage 2 assessment outcomes. Other indicators, such as attendance, teacher absenteeism and suspension and expulsion rates, are taken into account as appropriate. The final decisions as to which schools should be admitted are informed by the advice of the Education and Training Inspectorate, Education and Library Boards and the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools.
A small number of post-primary schools (four in Belfast and one in Londonderry) which serve areas with particularly high levels of social deprivation made only limited progress under SSP, and a new, more intensive, Group 1 programme was implemented for these schools in 1999/00. £200k per year has been made available to each of these schools over the period to enable them to take forward strategies to address the severe difficulties they face.
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The School Support Programme: Intensive Support for Schools PDF 471 KB
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