1. Understand the importance of resilience

2. Introduce opportunities for risk-taking

3. Celebrate mistakes

4. Embed these values in the wider school culture

5. Share the approach with parents

“Character” may be the latest buzzword in education – but it’s long been at the core of the NACE Challenge Framework, as NACE Challenge Award Adviser Elaine Ricks-Neal explains…

Increasingly schools are focusing on the development of “character” and learning dispositions as performance outcomes. Ofsted is also making it clear that it will look more at how well schools are developing resilient, well-rounded, confident young learners who will flourish in society.

The best schools, irrespective of setting, have always known the importance of this. And this focus on character has long been at the heart of the NACE Challenge Framework – a tool for school self-review and improvement which focuses on provision for more able learners, as part of a wider programme of sustainable school improvement and challenge for all.

Here are 10 key ways in which the Framework supports the development of school-wide approaches, mindsets and skills for effective character education:

1. “Can-do” culture

The NACE Challenge Framework embeds a school-wide “You can do it” culture of high expectations for all learners, engendering confidence and self-belief – prerequisites for learning.

2. Raising aspirations

The Framework challenges schools to raise aspirations for what all learners could achieve in life, irrespective of background. This is especially significant in schools where learners may not be exposed to high levels of ambition among parents/carers.

3. Curriculum of opportunity

Alongside a rich curriculum offer, the Framework asks schools to consider their enrichment and extracurricular programmes – ensuring that all learners have opportunities to develop a wide range of abilities, talents and skills, to develop cultural capital, and to access the best that has been thought and said.

4. Challenge for all

At the heart of the Framework is the goal of teachers understanding the learning needs of all pupils, including the most able; planning demanding, motivating work; and ensuring that all learners have planned opportunities to take risks and experience the challenge of going beyond their capabilities.

5. Aspirational targets

To ensure all learners are stretched and challenged, the Framework promotes the setting of highly aspirational targets for the most able, based on their starting points.

6. Developing young leaders

As part of its focus on nurturing student voice and independent learning skills, the Framework seeks to ensure that more able learners have opportunities to take on leadership roles and to make a positive contribution to the school and community.

7. Ownership of learning

The Framework encourages able learners to articulate their views on their learning experience in a mature and responsible way, and to manage and take ownership of their learning development.

8. Removing barriers

The Framework has a significant focus on underachievement and on targeting vulnerable groups of learners, setting out criteria for the identification of those who may have the potential to shine but have barriers in the way which need to be recognised and addressed individually.

9. Mentoring and support

Founded on the belief that more able and exceptionally able learners are as much in need of targeted support as any other group, the Framework demands that schools recognise and respond to their social and emotional and learning needs in a planned programme of mentoring and support.

10. Developing intrinsic motivation

Beyond recognising individual talents, the Framework promotes the celebration of success and hard work, ensuring that learners feel valued and supported to develop intrinsic motivation and the desire to be “the best they can.”

Find out more… To find out more about the NACE Challenge Development Programme and how it could support your school, click here or get in touch.

Lesley Hill, headteacher of NACE member Lavender Primary School in North London, explains how the school’s approach to marking and feedback has evolved alongside the development of a strong learning mindset culture.

Our marking and feedback policy cannot stand alone. It only works because we have embedded the learning culture on which it depends.

About five years ago, we were proudly using assessment for learning (AfL) strategies, such as no hands up, colourful cups, and thumbs up, thumbs down and thumbs somewhere in between. None of this was particularly useful for those learners who were unable to be honest about where they were in their understanding. This became apparent to me during a Year 2 literacy lesson. I shook my lolly-stick pot and was ready to pick a child to answer my question, when a higher achiever visibly shuddered. That said it all.

We turned to the work of Carol Dweck and immediately introduced growth mindset, understanding that higher-achieving children can often be those with the most fixed mindsets, causing barriers to learning.

Developing skills for effective learning

We knew that embedding a growth mindset culture was essential, but we also realised very quickly that the skills of being a good learner had to be taught too. A school full of determined children chanting (albeit sweetly) “We can do it!” doesn’t necessarily mean better outcomes. We introduced themes around Guy Claxton’s work, Learning to Learn, and our children learnt to be resourceful and reflective, as well as resilient.

We also understood that if children were truly going to understand where they were as learners, we needed to examine our success criteria. Hours had been spent trying to put English success criteria into a hierarchical order with a must, a should and a could. Whilst our lower-achieving children stayed safely with the “musts”, some of the higher-achievers completed the “should” and “coulds” and missed some basic “musts” altogether. We ditched MSC for toolkits, after attending a Pie Corbett course.

Giving children ownership of their learning

The same training also prompted us to establish cooperative reviews, which offer a focused and structured peer assessment strategy. We have trained our children to give effective feedback and to have useful discussions around their learning. This is key. Our current marking policy includes lots of peer assessment and reflection, which begins to give ownership to the child. We firmly believe that ownership of learning impacts positively on children’s motivation to challenge themselves.

This ownership was previously promoted by allowing learners to choose their own level of maths tasks, where they would be encouraged to make decisions about the levels of challenge they could manage. We have since bought a Singapore Maths scheme; the reflective approach and decisions around which strategy to use to solve a problem fit perfectly with challenge and ownership.

Learners also have ownership over the marking of maths. The answers are on the tables and learners check after solving a few problems. If they have some wrong, they will unpick the steps they have gone through to understand where they have made an error or have a misconception. This deeper-level thinking can enable them to change their approach to get a solution. Should they not be able to see where they have gone wrong, the teacher will step in to guide or re-teach through a face-to-face conference.

Moving on from written marking

Conferences have taken the place of written marking. It was apparent to us for some time that reams of written marking or rows of ticks and dots, carried out away from the learning context and delivered back the next day, was, at best, hard for children to relate to and, at worst, a meaningless waste of time. With teacher workload high on the agenda, our decision to stop written marking altogether, for every subject, was not difficult to make. Our children already owned their learning, they knew how to self- and peer-assess effectively, and they were reflective, resilient and skilled learners. It was an easy step to hand over the pen.

Our marking and feedback procedure is simple. Children mark their own work according to the success criteria and they write a reflection on their learning – commenting on their understanding, successes and difficulties. They are also challenged to consider how they have approached the work and what they might do differently. Teachers look at the books every day and identify where there is a need to support or extend children’s learning. They plan in targeted 1:1 or group conferences for the following day, or hold spontaneous conferences, to address misconceptions, clarify points and extend thinking. During conference discussions, children are encouraged to consider where they have met their targets and to choose new ones, and to talk about the reflections they have made.

Children’s reflections are a window to their understanding, not just of concepts, but of themselves as learners. They provide teachers with far greater insight than a piece of work on its own and thus teachers can cater far more effectively for each child’s needs. Our approach to marking is not a stand-alone. It is an extension to the learning culture we have worked to create: a culture of learners who can recognise and be honest about where they are, who know where they need to go, and who are not afraid to share the responsibility for getting there.

Lesley Hill is headteacher of Lavender Primary School, a popular two-form entry school in North London, part of the Ivy Learning Trust and a member of NACE. She has taught across the primary age range and has also worked in adult basic education and on teacher training programmes. Her current role includes the design and delivery of leadership training at middle and senior leader level, and she also provides workshops on a range of subjects, such as growth mindset and marking. Her forthcoming book, Once Upon a Green Pen, explores approaches to create the right school culture.

Read more: log in to our members’ area to access the NACE Essentials guide to learning mindset, and the accompanying webinar.

Lesley Hill, headteacher of NACE member Lavender Primary School in North London, shares her school’s approach to ensuring the curriculum remains broad, engaging and meaningful – alongside a successful focus on good outcomes for all learners.

“Lavender” School conjures images of a delightful school in a leafy suburb. It is a delightful school, but we have our challenges. The number of children with English as an additional language, and of those eligible for FSM, are both above national averages. We also have a high number of children with need. However, challenges are not just about closing gaps, and when it comes to curriculum one particular challenge is to hold on to what is important.
 
In the late 80s, I was an advocate of themes, of helping children see links in learning and maximising creativity. Although I understood the need for a national curriculum (to avoid children potentially repeating the same topic year after year!), I had serious concerns about a rigid, dictated and narrow curriculum that would merely feed standardised tests.
 
A few decades (and curriculum reviews) on, and I don’t believe that prescription has to stifle creativity, or that children have to learn within a narrow framework to get results.

Empowering learners to make choices… and mistakes

For some years, most of our subject teaching has been done through cross-curricular topics and we insist on at least one pupil choice topic per year. Classes or year groups vote on different themes and teachers ensure that the statutory knowledge and skills are covered within the topic. In KS2, we aim to include children in the planning process by asking them to consider how the required topic content could be taught.
 
Our use of pupil voice helps to engage and motivate our learners, but we also want them to have ownership over their learning. The introduction of growth mindset five years ago made a marked difference in terms of attitude, and was particularly empowering for those higher-achieving learners who find it so hard to “get something wrong”.

Developing skills for self-evaluation and reflection

Learning to learn strategies were also embedded and this culture enabled us to introduce fast, effective feedback a year ago. Teachers do not write in any books, but mark verbally during lessons, through 1:1 or group conferencing. Children peer- and self-assess and write reflections on their learning against success criteria. The self-evaluative process needs higher-order thinking, and allows learners at all levels to develop those skills.
 
Meta-cognition is promoted through peer work and is particularly successful for higher achievers when working with lower achieving or younger children (such as through our Reading Buddy scheme). Talk partners are therefore picked randomly to allow a range of peer-work experience. Group and paired feedback has been successful across the curriculum. I opened a sketch book recently and read, “I spoke with my partner and we thought that I should put more shading and detail on the petals.” Our “drafting and crafting” approach is used across the curriculum, enabling children to reflect on all learning, not just the core subjects.

Encouraging creativity at home

The fact that we value all subjects is visible in our homework policy. Learners have the usual spellings and number facts to learn, but also work on given topic themes. Because the titles are quite open (such as “Enfield Town”), children can access them and deepen their learning according to their own starting points. On home-learning day, you might see children carefully manoeuvring a model volcano, clutching a home-made booklet about local history or a USB stick with a slideshow about chocolate. They might just have a sheet of notes that have been prepared for a “lecture”. They share these projects at school, paying special attention to their presentation skills, which are then peer- and self-evaluated.

Extracurricular experiences and engagement

Visits and outings are built into our curriculum. We develop enterprise and aspiration through trips to businesses and institutions, such as Cambridge University, and by inviting in key people. We value working with others, getting involved with school cluster creative projects wherever possible. Last year, we were able to buy in a British Sign Language (BSL) teacher from a partner school to teach sign language to every class from nursery to Y6. We also encourage entries to events such as the annual Chess Tournament and Mayor’s Award for Writing, and are in the process of organising a spelling bee across our partner schools.
 
Home-school partnerships are important to us. Family days, where parents come in and work alongside their children, as well as exhibitions and information fairs, help us to share our wider curriculum. One event saw parents being led on a tour through the WWI trenches and, last year, families came in to learn the school song (written by the children themselves). We also work to build wider community links through events such as bulb planting with the local park group, or charity choir performances. Our School Council representatives are confident and vocal when considering local and wider issues and how we can support others.

What does it all mean?

Lavender's results are very pleasing across all key stages. Our GLD, phonics, KS1 and KS2 combined outcomes remain above national figures, with progress data of our higher-achieving children being better than national in all subjects.

OK, so Year 6 do have to do practice tests and more homework than most, but you'll still catch them sneaking into my office during a unit on mystery texts, going through my bin, and desperately trying to work out if I'm actually a spy. Despite budget pressures, I will continue to find the money for Herbie's insurance (our school dog's work with the most vulnerable children is priceless) and I’ll always value our subject leaders for the passion and drive they bring to our curriculum.

Data will always be top of my agenda, but it's there alongside breadth, depth and enrichment. A broad and balanced curriculum doesn't have to be at the expense of good outcomes for our children.
 
Lesley Hill is headteacher of Lavender Primary School, a popular two-form entry school in North London, part of the Ivy Learning Trust and a member of NACE. She has taught across the primary age range and has also worked in adult basic education and on teacher training programmes. Her current role includes the design and delivery of leadership training at middle and senior leader level, and she also provides workshops on a range of subjects, such as growth mindset and marking. Her book, Once Upon a Green Pen, which explores creating the right school culture, is due to be released early next year.