Serena Caine - School Improvement Leader EYFS

Serena is the school improvement leader for EYFS at Leigh Trust. She started her career in education over 26 years ago, initially as a Nursery Nurse, and then later on as a class teacher, EYFS lead and for the last twelve years as an Education Advisor specialising in the EYFS.  Her teaching years provided her with extensive experience of working with children in early years, key stage one and two. Having this breath of experience and knowledge has enabled her to appreciate the importance of transition phases between these years, as knowing the children’s next steps across the primary phase allows the EYFS to build a proper foundation of learning. 

Serena believes that from children having a solid foundation provides the base for a steep education trajectory, leading to high expectations.  During her teaching phase, she also completed a Master of Arts in Education, in action research.  The knowledge and experienced gained during her studies strongly impacted on her work within school improvement and has given her the skills, knowledge, and processes necessary to conduct effective school evaluation. 

During Serena’s time as an advisor, her duties included CPD training, consultancy, and providing school improvement.  She is an accredited profile moderator and has been for the last ten years the EYFS profile moderation manager for the Birmingham Local authority. In addition to this she has also been privileged to work on several funded programmes, which has given her a further insight into the world of educations.  The nature of her previous role as an advisor means that she was regularly involved with a large number of stakeholders from all levels.  In turn her ability to communicate effectively during all of these activities, has greatly contributed to increasing standards of the early years in a large number of primary schools across the city. From visiting the wide variety of schools enable Serena to accurately identify the improvement priorities for a setting, and once identified, work with the leadership to develop a clear, logical, and well specified plan for improvements.  Serena is extremely passionate about providing all children with quality early years’ education so that they can build on their strong foundations for future lifelong learning.