Deborah Baker

This is my own part-time business. Growing flowers and making arrangments for weddings, funerals and other events. We plan for a range of flowers in every season, making sure that every arrangement is sustainable, whimsical and on-trend with what current brides are asking for. Running my own business comes with the requirement to use varied skills including planning, marketing, advertising, creative writing; not to mention expertise in growing, harvesting and arranging flowers.

Working with this Christian Charity, I was a part of the team taking the Christianity based part of the RE curriculum into local schools. I created lessons, delivered lessons of my own and others prepared by the team to classes of 30 children ranged in age from 5 to 16 years. These lessons encouraged children to consider the teachings of Jesus, ask questions of volunteers with a living faith and to carry out follow up activities helping children to investigate what they think for themselves. I was also instrumental in completing funding applications, preparing resources, organising the office and keeping the accounts.

I have been the leader of each of the children's groups at Emmanuel as I have moved up with my eldest child. I started in the youngest group with approximately 20 children and reformed the curriculum they were being taught, changed how the sessions ran to make them more engaging and appropriate for 0-4 year olds. I worked extensively with children struggling to settle into the sessions because of behaviour and created strategies to help them settle in.

As I moved up to the next 2 groups (5-7) and then (7-9) I have created the teaching plan, using some resources from Faith in Kids, and the rest have been written by me using the same format to create a 2-year rolling program across each of the age groups. As the children's work has grown, I have I have undertaken training sessions for a growing but inexperienced team of leaders. I supported/mentored them in taking on parts of the session, helping them to grow in experience with the large group of children numbering 25 in each age group. All the children's work is structured with quick-fire changes so so children are so busy and engaged and that transitions between activities are easy to manage with a large number of children. Most recently I have written a discipline policy to work across all of the children's groups and to give confidence to adults leading about the expectations for behaviour and the responsibilities of the adults leading. I have also written a number of progression statements on key parts of our faith and how we teach these to 5,8 and 11 year olds in a way they will understand.

Responsible for taking minutes of meetings, facilitating the sharing of papers, making amendments to policies, maintaining confidentiality and communicating with different groups within management. (Part time role)

Year 5 teacher responsible for all teaching and learning responsibilities with a class of 30 children. I was also the RE Co-ordinator in this school and brought in Christian visitors, extended the links with the local Church, approached the Bible Society and had Bibles distributed to every child in the school, I wrote and shared a new classroom worship curriculum, training every teacher in how to deliver the sessions, especially those who did not hold their own faith.

Year 3 teacher in a mainstream school with an autistic unit attached to it. I was responsible for all teaching and learning responsibilities and in addition; outdoor education which included a unit planned by me on Survival skills. These outdoor skills were designed to increase confidence, help children with no experience of it to discover the outdoors and to create meaningful links with the core curriculum areas. I was also responsible for creating links with local engineering businesses; planning and delivering science/engineering projects for the whole of the Primary age band.

Classroom Teacher for Year 5. Responsible for all teaching and learning responsibilities and for mentoring and training all Student Teachers.