Guidance, ideas and examples to support schools in developing their curriculum, pedagogy, enrichment and support for more able learners, within a whole-school context of cognitively challenging learning for all. Includes ideas to support curriculum development, and practical examples, resources and ideas to try in the classroom. Popular topics include: curriculum development, enrichment, independent learning, questioning, oracy, resilience, aspirations, assessment, feedback, metacognition, and critical thinking.
Holme Grange School's Tom Greenwood shares six steps to maximise the impact of your practical science lessons.
Science is more than just memorising facts and following instructions. True scientific thinking requires critical analysis, problem-solving, and creativity. Practical science provides the perfect platform for developing these skills, pushing students beyond basic understanding and into the realm of higher-order thinking.
Why challenge matters in science education
Practical science sits at the peak of Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), requiring students not just to remember and understand but to apply, analyse, evaluate, and create. These skills are essential for developing scientifically literate individuals who can tackle real-world problems with confidence and insight.
Steps to maximizing the impact of practical science
To truly challenge students and develop their higher-order thinking, practical science lessons must be carefully structured. Here’s how:
Step 1: Solve real-world problems
Practical science activities should be grounded in real-world applications. When students see the relevance of their experiments, their engagement increases. For example, testing water purity or designing a simple renewable energy system connects scientific principles to everyday life.
Step 2: Get the groups right
Collaboration is key in scientific exploration. Thoughtful grouping of students – pairing diverse skill levels or encouraging peer mentoring – can enhance problem-solving and communication skills.
Step 3: Maintain a relentless focus on variables
From Year 5 to Year 11, students should develop a keen understanding of variables. This means recognising independent, dependent, and control variables and understanding their importance in experimental design.
Step 4a: Leave out a variable
By removing a key variable from an experiment, students are forced to think critically about the design and purpose of their investigation. They must determine what’s missing and how it affects the outcome.
Step 4b: Omit the plan
Instead of providing a step-by-step method, challenge students to devise their own experimental plans. This pushes them to apply their understanding of scientific concepts and fosters creativity in problem-solving.
Step 5: Analyse data like a pro
Teaching students to collect, visualise, and interpret data is crucial. Using AI tools to display class results can make data analysis more engaging and accessible. By linking their findings back to the research question, students develop deeper analytical skills.
Step 6: When practicals go wrong (or right!)
Failure is an integral part of scientific discovery. Encouraging students to reflect on unexpected results – whether positive or negative – teaches resilience, adaptability, and critical thinking.
Bonus step: Harness the power of a Science Challenge Club
A Science Challenge Club can provide a platform for students to explore scientific questions beyond the curriculum. Such clubs foster independent thinking and offer opportunities for students to work on long-term investigative projects, deepening their understanding and enthusiasm for science.
Final thoughts: why practical science is essential
Engaging students in hands-on science doesn’t just make lessons more interesting – it equips them with crucial skills:
Critical thinking: encourages deeper questioning and problem-solving.
Collaboration: strengthens teamwork and communication.
Real-world problem solving: helps students connect theory to practice.
As educators, we can design activities that challenge high-achieving students, encourage independent experiment design, and foster strong analytical skills. By doing so, we prepare students not only for exams but for real-world scientific challenges.
The future of science lies in the hands of the next generation. Let’s ensure they have the skills to think critically, innovate boldly, and explore fearlessly.
Posted By Jonathan Doherty,
13 March 2023
Updated: 07 March 2023
NACE Associate Dr Jonathan Doherty outlines the focus of this year’s NACE R&D Hub on “oracy for high achievement” – exploring the impetus for this, challenges for schools, and approaches being trialled.
This year one of the NACE Research & Development Hubs is examining the theme of ‘oracy for high achievement’. The Hub is exploring the importance of rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse in the context of shared classroom practice. School leaders and teachers participating in the Hub are seeking to improve the value and effectiveness of speaking and listening. They are developing a body of knowledge about provision and pedagogy for more able learners, sharing ideas and practice and contributing to wider research evidence on oracy through their classroom-based enquiries.
Why focus on oracy?
Oracy is one of the most used and most important skills in schools. To be able to speak eloquently and with confidence, to articulate thinking and express an opinion are all essential for success both at school and beyond. Communication is a vital skill for the 21st century from the early years, through formal education, to employment. It embraces skills for relationship building, resolving conflict, thinking and learning, and social interaction. Oral language is the medium through which children communicate formally and informally in classroom contexts and the cornerstone of thinking and learning. The NACE publication Making Space for Able Learners found that “central to most classroom practice is the quality of communication and the use of talk and language to develop thinking, knowledge and understanding” (NACE, 2020, p.38).
Oracy is very much at the heart of classroom practice: modern classroom environments resound to the sound of students talking: as a whole class, in group discussions and in partner conversations. Teachers explaining, demonstrating, instructing and coaching all involve the skills of oracy. Planned purposeful classroom talk supports learning in and across all subject areas, encouraging students to:
Analyse and solve problems
Receive, act and build upon answers
Think critically
Speculate and imagine
Explore and evaluate ideas
Dialogic teaching’ is highly influential in oracy-rich classrooms (Alexander, 2004). It uses the power of classroom talk to challenge and stretch students. Through dialogue, teachers can gauge students’ perspectives, engage with their ideas and help them overcome misunderstandings. Exploratory talk is a powerful context for classroom talk, providing students with opportunities to share opinions and engage with peers (Mercer & Dawes, 2008). It is not just conversational talk, but talk for learning. Given the importance and prevalence of classroom talk, it would be easy to assume that oracy receives high status in the curriculum, but its promotion is not without obstacles to overcome.
Challenges for schools in developing oracy skills
Covid-19 has impacted upon students’ oracy. A report from the children’s communication charity I CAN estimated that more than 1.5 million UK young people risk being left behind in their language development as a result of lost learning in the Covid-19 period (read more here). The Charity reported that the majority of teachers were worried about young people being able to catch up with their speaking and understanding as a result of the pandemic (I CAN, 2021).
With origins going back to the 1960s, the term oracy was introduced as a response to the high priority placed on literacy in the curriculum of the time. Rien ne change, with the current emphasis remaining exactly so. Literacy skills, i.e. reading and writing, continue to dominate the curriculum. Oracy extends vocabulary and directly helps with learning to read. The educationalist James Nimmo Britton famously said that “good literacy floats on a sea of talk” and recognised that oracy is the foundation for literacy.
Teachers do place value on oracy. In a 2016 survey by Millard and Menzies of 900 teachers across the sector, over 50% said they model the sorts of spoken language they expect of their students, they do set expectations high, and they initiate pair or group activities in many lessons. They also highlighted the social and emotional benefits of oracy and suggested it has untapped potential to support pupils’ employability – but reported that provision is often patchy and that CPD was sparse or even non-existent.
Another challenge is that oracy is mentioned infrequently in inspection reports. An analysis of reports of over 3,000 schools on the Ofsted database, undertaken by the Centre for Education and Youth in 2021, found that when taken in the context of all school inspections taking place each year, oracy featured in only 8% of reports.
The issue of how oracy is assessed is a further challenge. Assessment profoundly influences student learning. Changes to assessment requirements now provide schools with new freedoms to ensure their assessment systems support pupils to achieve challenging outcomes. Despite useful frameworks to assess oracy such as the toolkit from the organisation Voice 21, there is no accepted system for the assessment of oracy.
What are NACE R&D Hub participants doing to develop oracy in their schools?
The challenges outlined above make the work of participants in the Hub of real importance. With a focus on ‘oracy for high achievement’, the Hub is supporting teachers and leaders to delve deeper into oracy practices in their classrooms. The Hub supports small-scale projects through which they can evidence the impact of change and evaluate their practice. Activities are trialled over a short period of time so that their true impact can be observed in school and even replicated in other schools.
The participants are now engaged in a variety of enquiry-based projects in their classrooms and schools. These include:
Use of the Harkness Discussion method to enable more able students to exhibit greater depth of understanding, complexity of response and analytical skills within cognitively challenging learning;
Explicit teaching of oracy skills to improve independent discussion in science and history lessons;
Introduction of hot-seating to improve students’ ability to ask valuable questions;
Choice in oral tasks to improve the quality of students’ analytical skills;
Oracy structures in collaborative learning to challenge more able students’ deeper learning and analysis;
Better reasoning using oracy skills in small group discussion activities;
Interventions in drama to improve the quality of classroom discussion.
Share your experience
We are seeking NACE member schools to share their experiences of effective oracy practices, including new initiatives and well-established practices. You may feel that some of the examples above are similar to practices in your own school, or you may have well-developed models of oracy teaching and learning that would be of interest to others. To share your experience, simply contact us, considering the following questions:
How can we implement effective oracy strategies without dramatically increasing teacher workload?
How can we best develop oracy for the most able in mixed ability classrooms?
What approaches are most effective in promoting oracy in group work so that it is productive and benefits all learners?
How can we implicitly teach pupils to justify and expand their ideas and make clear opportunities to develop their understanding through talk and deepen their understanding?
How do we evidence challenge for oracy within lessons?
Teachers should develop students’ spoken language, reading, writing and vocabulary as integral aspects of the teaching of every subject. Every teacher is a teacher of oracy. The report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group inquiry into oracy in schools concluded that there was an indisputable case for oracy as an integral aspect of education. This adds to a growing and now considerable body of evidence to celebrate the place that oracy has in our schools and in our society. Oracy is in a unique place to support the learning and development of more able pupils in schools and the time to give oracy its due is now.
References
Alexander, R. J. (2004) Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk. York, UK: Dialogos.
Britton, J. (1970) Language and learning. London: Allen Lane. [2nd ed., 1992, Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann].
I CAN (2021) Speaking Up for the Covid Generation. London: I CAN Charity.
Lowe, H. & McCarthy, A. (2020) Making Space for Able Learners. Didcot, Oxford: NACE.
Mercer, N. &. Dawes., L. (2008) The Value of Exploratory Talk. In Exploring Talk in School, edited by N. Mercer and S. Hodgkinson, pp. 55–71. London: Sage.
Millard, W. & Menzies, L. (2016) The State of Speaking in Our Schools. London: Voice 21/LKMco.
Millard, W., Menzies, L. & Stewart, G. (2021) Oracy after the pandemic: what Ofsted, teachers and young people think about oracy. Centre for Education & Youth/University of Oxford.
Claire Gadsby, educational trainer, author and founder of Radical Revision, shares five practical approaches to make your students’ revision more effective.
Did you know that 88% of pupils who revise effectively exceed their target grade? Interestingly, most pupils do not know this and fail to realise exactly how much of a gamechanger revision really is. Sitting behind this simple-looking statement, though, lies the key question: what is effective revision?
In my revision work with thousands of pupils around the world, I have not met many who are initially overjoyed at the thought of revision, often perceiving it as an onerous chore to be endured on their own before facing the trial of the exams. It does not have to be this way and I am passionate about taking the pain out of the process.
Revision can – and should – be fun. Yes, you read that right. The following strategies may be helpful for you in motivating and supporting your pupils on their revision journey.
1. Timer challenge
Reassure your pupils that not everything needs revising: lots is actually still alive and well in their working memory. Put a timer on the clock and challenge pupils to see how much they can recall about a particular topic off the top of their head in just five minutes. The good news is that this is ‘banked’: now what pupils need to do is to focus their revision on the areas they did not write down. It is only at this point that they need to start scanning through notes to identify things they had missed.
2. Bursts and breaks
It is quite common for young people to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of revision. Be confident when you reassure them that ‘little and often’ really is the best way to tackle it. Indeed, research suggests that a short burst of 25 minutes revision followed by a five-minute break is the ideal. Make the most of any ‘dead time’ slots in the school day to include these short revision bursts.
3. Better together
Show pupils the power of collaborative revision. Working with at least one other person is energising and gets the job done quicker. Activities such as ‘match the pairs’ or categorising tasks have the added advantage of also promoting higher-order thinking and discussion.
4. Take the scaffolds away
It is not effective to simply keep reading the same words during revision. Instead, ‘generation’ is one of the key strategies proven to support long-term learning. Tell pupils not to write out whole words in their revision notes. Instead, they should write just the first letter of key words and then leave a blank space. When they look back at their notes, their brain will be challenged to work harder to recall the rest of the missing word which, in turn, makes it more likely to be retained for longer.
5. Playful but powerful
We know that low-stakes quizzing is ideal, and my ‘lucky dip’ approach is helpful here. Keep revision information, such as key terms and concepts, ‘in play’ by placing them in a gift bag or similar. Mix these up and pull one out at random to check for understanding. Quick, out of context, checks like this are a type of inter-leaving which is proven to strengthen recall.
Following feedback from pupils and their parents that they would benefit from more sustained support and structure in the lead up to their exams, in 2021 I launched Radical Revision – an online revision programme for schools with short video tutorials (ideal for use in tutor time) to introduce students to our cutting-edge revision techniques. The online portal also contains a plethora of downloadable resources and CPD for teachers, as well as resources and webinars for parents. For more information please visit the Radical Revision website, where you can sign up to access a free trial version. We’re also offering NACE members a 15% discount on the cost of an annual subscription for your school – log in to the NACE member offers page for details.
Sources: National strategies GCSE Booster materials, DfES publications 2003.
For even more great practical ideas from Claire, join us the NACE annual conference on 20 June 2023 – details coming soon!
Posted By Ann McCarthy,
25 April 2022
Updated: 21 April 2022
Dr Ann McCarthy, NACE Research & Development Director, shares examples from our recent member meetup on the theme “rethinking assessment”.
As part of NACE’s current research into effective assessment strategies, we recently brought our member schools together for a meetup at New College Oxford, to share thoughts and examples of successful practice. We examined assessment as a systematic procedure drawing from a range of activities and evidence. We saw how this contrasted with the necessary but limiting practice of testing, which is a product not open to interpretation.
Practitioners attending the meetup generously shared established and emerging approaches to assessment and were able to discuss the related strengths and challenges. They had time to examine the ways in which new practices had been introduced and strategies used to overcome any barriers or difficulties. Most importantly, they articulated the positive impact that these practices were having on the learning and development of pupils in their care.
When schools develop successful assessment strategies, they consider the following questions:
How does it link to whole school vision?
Where does it sit inside the model for curriculum, teaching and learning?
Who is the assessment for?
What is the plan for assessment?
What types of assessment can be used?
What is going to be assessed?
What evidence will result from the assessment?
How will the evidence be used or interpreted?
How can assessment information be used by teacher and pupil?
What impact does assessment information have on teaching and learning?
How does assessment impact on cognition, cognitive strategies, metacognition and personal development?
Example 1: “purple pen” at Toot Hill School
Toot Hill School shared how the use of the “purple pen” strategy can be effective in developing the learning and metacognition of secondary-age pupils.
Pupils most commonly receive feedback at three stages in the learning process:
Immediate feedback (live) – at the point of teaching
Summary feedback – at the end of a phase of knowledge application/topic/assessment
Review feedback – away from the point of teaching (including personalised written comments)
A purple pen can be used to:
Annotate purposeful learning steps;
Make notes when listening to key learning points;
Respond to whole-class feedback;
Facilitate peer assessment;
Respond to teacher marking;
Question and develop themes to achieve learning objectives;
Recognise key vocabulary;
Explain learning processes.
Much of the success of this strategy at Toot Hill School can be attributed to the clear teaching and learning strategy which is in place and the consistency of practice across the school. Some schools have used this practice in the past and abandoned it due to inconsistency, lack of evidence of impact or increased workload. At Toot Hill this is not the case as its introduction included a consideration of overall practice and workload. Pupils are fully conversant with the aims and expectations. Subject leaders are well-informed and work together to ensure that pupils moving between subjects have the same expectation. Here we find assessment planned carefully within ambitious teaching and learning routines.
This example of effective assessment demonstrates the importance of feedback within the assessment process. In this example pupils are being assessed but also assessing their own learning. They have greater control of their learning. This practice is particularly effective for more able learners, who will make their own notes on actions needed to improve. They are also influential in promoting good learning behaviours within their classrooms as they model actions needed for improved learning. This practice keeps the focus of assessment on the needs of the learner and the information needed by the learner to become more independent and self-regulating.
Successful assessment practice places the pupil at the heart of the process. Assessment enables pupils to:
Example 2: “closing the loop” at Eggar’s School
Eggar’s School shared details of an initiative which is being piloted, aiming to improve outcomes in formal assessments. A template for whole-class “feed-forward” sheets has been introduced. This shared template enables teachers to keep a track record of assessments. It also tracks their intentions to adapt their teaching as a result of evaluating student assessments. They are focusing on “closing the loop” in feedback and learning.
The rationale behind the strategy is that it is easier for teachers to:
Reflect on attainment over the course of the year, comparing pieces of work by the same student over time;
Compare attainment between year groups and ask: Has teaching improved? Are there different needs / interventions required in the current cohort compared with those of previous years?
Get a snapshot of a student’s work.
The approach also allows the Lead Teacher and Curriculum Leader to spot-check progress and discuss successes or concerns with the class teacher.
As this is an emerging practice, the teachers are learning and adapting their practice to make it increasingly useful. The school’s findings include:
The uniformity of the layout of the feed-forward sheets is helping students to understand the feed-forward process.
Completion of the feed-forward sheets was originally time-consuming, but is now taking less time.
In feed-forward lessons live modelling is being used rather than pre-prepared models.
More prepared models are created in advance of assessment points as guidelines/reference tools for students.
Prepared models are used after formal assessment as a comparison for students to use when self- or peer-assessing their performance.
The specific focus in the feed-forward sheets on SPaG has been a helpful reminder to utilise micro-moments in lessons to consolidate technical skills.
The teacher uses a ‘Students of Concern’ section (not visible to students) to provide additional support and interventions and to reflect on the success of any previous intervention.
‘Closing the Loop’ books have been introduced and have become a powerful tool in improving the value of assessment as a teaching and learning experience. These use a template for whole-class feedback and enable teachers to keep a track record of assessments and a track of their intentions in terms of adaptations to teaching as a result of assessment information about students’ knowledge, understanding and progress.
This is an example of assessment which is increasing the teacher’s criticality of the teaching and learning process and their expertise within this. The pupils benefit from the focused response to their work and the modelled practice. This exemplifies aspects of assessment used to achieve high-quality teaching:
“Rethinking assessment” across the NACE community
Other NACE member schools shared their experiences, including:
A focus on understanding personal development – considering ways in which pupils’ overall experience and development can be better understood and supported, as part of assessment.
Retrieval introduced as a core and explicit part of lesson sequences and schemes of work.
The use of science practical activities linked to examination questions, to expose pupils to desirable difficulties. These reveal pupils’ knowledge and skills; support development and progress; and provide information needed to scaffold support at an individual level.
Changes to reporting introduced to empower pupils, as well as informing leaders, teachers and parents.
Developing the use of Rosenshine’s principles with a focus on higher-order questioning; this challenges more able pupils to think more deeply, extends their thinking, and has demonstrable benefits for other pupils in a mixed ability classroom.
Models of excellence shared with pupils.
Use of film resources and extended book study to encourage critical thinking and application of skills.
These varied approaches to assessment reflect the different contexts in which teachers work. They include assessment being used in three distinct ways:
Each of these has a place within teaching and learning. It is important that each type of assessment has a clear purpose and will impact effectively on the quality of teaching and the depth of learning. Pupils need to develop both within and beyond the content constraints of a curriculum. They need to learn about concepts as well as content. They need to understand what they are learning and how it links to other areas of learning. They need to develop cognition and cognitive strategies so that their learning is more useful to them both within school and in life.
The greatest gains can be achieved when the assessment itself is a part of learning and pupils have greater ownership of the process. As assessment practices develop within schools, the aim should be to upskill pupils so that they have the information they need to become self-regulating and to develop metacognitively.
Key factors for successful implementation
During the meetup, we observed that the schools with well-established assessment practice have introduced this within a whole-school ethos and strategy. Staff and pupils have a shared understanding of the use, purpose and benefits of the practice. Middle leaders are influential in the development of strategy, its consistency and the successful use within a subject specific context. Pupils are at the heart of the model and interact with assessment and feedback to improve their own learning. They develop cognitively and understand their own thinking and learning.
Share your experience
We are seeking NACE member schools to share their experiences of effective assessment practices – including new initiatives, and well-established practices.
You may feel that some of the examples cited above are similar to practices in your own school, or you may have well-developed assessment models that would be of interest to others. To share your experience, simply contact us, considering the following questions:
Which area of assessment is used most effectively?
What assessment practices are having the greatest impact on learning?
How do teachers and pupils use the assessment information?
How do you develop an understanding of pupils’ overall development?
How do you use assessment information to provide wider experience and developmental opportunities?
Is assessment developing metacognition and self-regulation?
Plus: NACE is partnering with The Brilliant Club on a webinar exploring the links between metacognition and assessment, featuring practical examples from NACE member schools. Details coming soon – check our webinars page.
Kyriacos Papasavva, Head of Religious Studies at St Mary’s and St John’s (SMSJ) CE School, shares three ways in which the school seeks to nurture a love of learning – for students and staff alike.
Education becomes alive when educators and students love what they do. This is, I think, the whole point of teaching: to inspire a love of learning among those we teach. Love, however, is not something that can be forced. Instead, it is ‘caught’.
For such a desire to develop in our pupils, there must be a real freedom in the learning journey. From the teacher’s perspective, this can be a scary prospect, but we must remember that a teacher is a guide only; you cannot force children to learn, but it is genuinely possible to inspire among pupils a love of learning. To enable this, we should ask ourselves: to what extent do we as teaching practitioners allow the lesson to go beyond the bulwark we impose upon any limited, pre-judged ‘acceptable range’? How do we allow students to explore the syllabus in a way that is free and meaningful to the individual? If we can find a way to do this, then learning really becomes magical.
While there is the usual stretch and challenge, meta-questions, challenge reading, and more, the main thrust of our more able provision in the religious studies (RS) department at SMSJ is one which encourages independent research and exploration. Here are several of the more unique ways that we have encouraged and challenged our more able students in RS and across the school, with the aim of developing transferable skills across the curriculum and inspiring a love of learning amongst both students and staff.
1. Papasavitch (our very own made-up language)
We had used activities based on Jangli and Yelrib, made-up languages used at Eton College, to stretch our pupils and give them exciting and unique learning opportunities. These activities were so well received by our pupils; they wanted more. So we developed ‘Papasavitch’, our very own made-up language.
This is partly what I was referring to earlier: if you find something students enjoy doing, give them a space to explore that love; actively create it. To see if your pupils can crack the language, or have a go yourself, try out this sample Papasavitch activity sheet.
2. The RS SMSJ Essay Writing Competition (open to all schools)
In 2018, SMSJ reached out to a number of academics at various universities to lay the foundations of what has become a national competition. We would like to thank Professor R. Price, Dr E. Burns, Dr G. Simmonds, Dr H. Costigane, Dr S. Ryan and Dr S. Law for their support.
Biannually, we invite students from around the UK (and beyond) to enter the competition, which challenges them to write an essay of up to 1,000 words on any area within RS, to be judged by prestigious academics within the field of philosophy, theology and ethics. While we make this compulsory for our RS A-level pupils, we receive copious entries from students in Years 7-11 at SMSJ, and beyond, owing to the range of possible topics and broad interest from students. Hundreds of students have entered to date, including those from top independent and grammar schools around the UK. (Note: submissions should be in English, and only the top five from each school should be submitted.)
You can learn more about the competition – including past and future judges, essay themes, examples of past entries, and details of how to enter – on the SMSJ website.
3. Collaboration and exploration – across and beyond the school
The role of a Head of Department (HoD), as I see it, is to actively seek opportunities for collaboration and exploration – within the school family and beyond into the wider subject community, as well as among the members of the department. At SMSJ, this ethos is shared by HoDs and other staff alike and expressed in a number of ways.
Regular HoD meetings to discuss and seek opportunities for implementing cross-curricular links are a must, and have proven fruitful in identifying and utilising overlap in the curriculum. Alongside this, we run a Teacher Swaps programme where teachers can study each other’s subjects in a tutorial fashion, naturally creating an awareness and understanding of other subjects.
The Humanities Faculty offers a ‘Read Watch Do’ supplementary learning programme for each year group, which runs alongside regular home learning tasks. The former also supports other departments through improved literacy, building cultural capital and exploration via the independent learning tasks.
Looking beyond the school, our partnerships with the K+ and Oxford Horizons programmes help our sixth-formers prepare for university, while mentoring with Career Ready and the Civil Service supports our students to gain new skills from external providers. Our recent launch of The Spotlight, a newspaper run by students at SMSJ, has heralded a collaboration with a BBC Press Team. Again, this shows other opportunities for cross-curricular overlap, as students are directed to report on different departments’ extracurricular enrichment activities. The possibilities are endless, and limited only by our imagination.
To learn more about any of the initiatives mentioned in this blog post, and/or to share what’s working in your own department/school, please contact communications@nace.co.uk.
In the opening weeks of this term, we held two online meetups for NACE members – focused on exploring challenges and opportunities in the current context, sharing ideas and experiences with peers, and identifying priorities and core principles for the coming weeks and months.
While acknowledging the significant differences in the experiences of both students and staff members over the past six months, the two sessions also highlighted some strong common themes and key messages:
1. Humanity first and teaching first
While wellbeing is and should remain a priority, NACE Associate Neil Jones makes the case that for more able learners, study is in fact an intrinsic part of their humanity. The meetups highlighted the need to focus on restoring learners’ confidence and self-belief; reinstating healthy and effective learning routines; showing care, calm and confidence in learners’ abilities and futures; continuing to consider the needs of the more able in planning and practice (and supporting colleagues to do so); maintaining high expectations and ambitions; and being aware of the risk of learning becoming “endless” for the more able (particularly in remote/independent learning).
2. Assess, but don’t add stress
While meetup attendees agreed on the importance of understanding where students are and identifying gaps in learning, they also emphasised the importance of achieving this without creating additional pressure, either for staff or learners. Take time over this, building in low-/no-stakes assessment, regular verbal feedback, and involving students in the process of identifying where they feel more/less confident and what they need to do next.
3. Stay ambitious in teaching and learning
A recurrent message from the meetups was the importance of remaining ambitious in teaching and learning – balancing the need to pare back/streamline without narrowing the curriculum or lowering expectations, and auditing deficits without leaping to remedial/deficit thinking. Key ideas shared included a focus on meaningful tasks; teaching to where learners could be now; choosing language carefully to inspire, excite and set high expectations; finding ways to incorporate hands-on as well as theoretical learning; finding opportunities for collaboration; and prioritising dialogic teaching and learning – recognising the loss of rich language exchange during school closures.
4.Continue to build on “lessons from lockdown”
Both sessions also highlighted the many innovative practices developed during school closures, many of which will be retained and further developed. Examples included the use of technology and/or project-based learning to support learners in working both independently and in collaboration with one another.
Finally, the meetups reinforced the importance of engaging and listening to students – involving them in conversations about their experience, interests and passions, and making them part of the creative, innovative thinking and discussion that will help schools and individuals continue to move forward positively. Or as NACE Associate Dr Keith Watson has written, “Not merely recovering, but rebounding and reigniting with energy, vigour and a celebration of talents.”
For more on these key messages and other ideas explored during the meetups, watch the recordings:
NACE member meetups are free to attend for all NACE members, offering opportunities to connect and share ideas with peers across the UK and beyond, as well as hearing from NACE Associates and leading schools.
Not yet a NACE member? Starting at just £95 +VAT per year, NACE membership is available for schools (covering all staff), SCITT providers, TSAs, trusts and clusters. Members have access to advice, practical resources and CPD to support the review and improvement of provision for more able learners within a context of challenge and high standards for all. Find out more.
This past month has been marked for me by the death of two major influencers on my thinking and life over 30 years. Lord Harry Renwick died from COVID-related complications and Sir Ken Robinson from cancer.
Harry was a past Chairman of the British Dyslexia Association, a lifelong passion, and an early supporter of the societal and economic good that computing could bring. He was generous to me with his time and opened many doors in parliament, but also outside. Importantly, he led me to the work of Thomas G West. I still have a signed copy of “In the Mind’s Eye” (first edition) on my shelf. I have been delighted to discover that there is a new edition now available.
Tom’s work in the USA on visual giftedness ought to be as influential and well-known as Howard Gardner’s books. His evidence on visual thinking and creativity in science and mathematics made sense of various anecdotes I had collected over the years but could not make coherent.
That is where the link with Sir Ken Robinson comes in. I did not know him well; we met five times over around 15 years, the last time being a decade ago. I would like to add my tribute to him and address a criticism of his thinking that has been raised in many of the otherwise warm obituaries and tributes to a life well-lived.
I followed Ken Robinson speaking at a conference around 1995. My advice to anyone who would listen was, “Do not accept an invitation to speak after Ken Robinson.” At that time the usual reaction was, “Who is he?” I don’t think there is anyone connected with education now – since his famous TED lecture "Do schools kill creativity?" – who would ask that. He was a brilliant communicator, of that there is no doubt, but I want to pay tribute to him outside the podium.
He was as engaging and fun away from the speaker platform as he was on it. He was an avid networker who loved to connect people who he thought would find each other stimulating company. His network of contacts was truly global. An educator I much admire, Richard Gerver, who was mentored by Sir Ken, has written a very personal tribute here. It is well worth a read.
1999 was the 40th anniversary of a famous speech by C P Snow, “The Two Cultures”. I gave a talk at a conference on the “Renaissance of Learning”. After leaving the platform Ken came up to me. He wanted to talk about one slide. I had argued that there was a false dichotomy in education policy in the UK but also internationally, that the arts were creative, and engineering was a discipline. Drawing on C P Snow’s ideas I suggested that you could not be a great engineer if you were not creative or a good artist without discipline. I had given examples of “seeing” the mathematics as an aesthetic experience. Ken wanted the reference, which was to Tom West’s work. His advice to me was simple: “Keep saying it, one day they’ll listen.”
Over the years I have been contacted by people around the world on email or social media, where the opening line has been: “I met Sir Ken at a conference and he suggested I look you up. He said you’d been thinking about this for years.”
None of the exchanges that followed have ever been with timewasters. I think the last was around five years ago, five years after we last spoke. He used his global celebrity status to bring like minds together. He was far humbler and more cautious than the public speaker image may project.
The criticism I want to address is this: that he did not appreciate creativity in science and maths. In my opinion, for what it’s worth, he avoided the celebrity status trap of pontificating on things that he had little mastery of. I think he was right to do so.
Of course, he was a passionate about the arts, but he had a genuine interest in creativity in all its forms. The people he pointed in my direction were engaging with his ideas in physics, chemistry, mathematics and many more disciplines.
He will be much missed as an inspiration, but he has left a legacy of a life lived well.
If you are passionate about creativity in education, I can pay no finer tribute to Sir Ken than his own words to me: “Keep saying it, one day they’ll listen.”
About the author
NACE patron Dr Chris Yapp is an independent consultant specialising in innovation and future thinking. He has 30 years’ experience in the ICT industry, with a specialisation in the strategic impact of ICT on the public sector, creative industries, digital inclusion and social enterprises. With a longstanding interest in the future of education, he has written and lectured extensively on the challenges of personalised learning, lifelong learning, educational transformation and the knowledge economy.
Join Chris at this year’s NACE Leadership Conference (16-20 November) for a session exploring the use of learning technologies to extend and enrich learning. View the conference programme.
This article was originally published in our “beyond recovery” resource pack. View the original version here.
In the context of “recovering” teaching and learning at secondary level, I want to suggest that the principles of working with the most able learners remain the same. The crisis – as crises do – has provoked polarised responses: Tiggerish optimism about opportunities to change the way education works on the one hand; Eeyorish despair on the other, doubting whether anything can be recovered during or after this hiatus.
There is no doubt that this crisis has brought disasters with it for young people and their secondary education. But crises reveal, in a sharp and heightened way, what is already the case. It remains the case that schools need:
To include the most able students explicitly in their thinking, for those students’ benefit and the benefit of all;
To use current technology (the word “new” gives away how slow we can be), intelligently and responsively, to enable excellent work from the most able students, independently and collaboratively;
To remember that teaching and learning, with the most able and with all students, is fundamentally a human relationship, not a consumer transaction.
Below are some suggestions that you may already be considering as you gear up to get back into the secondary classroom.
1. Take “accelerated learning” seriously – but don’t use it as “cramming”.
Tony Breslin, in the draft preface of his forthcoming book Lessons from Lockdown: the educational legacy of COVID-19 (Routledge, to be published end of 2020 / beginning of 2021), writes: "from a societal and educational standpoint, post-virus rehabilitation is not about how quickly we can get back to where we were. Nor is it about reconstituting our schools in the image of ‘crammer’ colleges, obsessed by catch-up and curriculum recovery, as if all the last few months have left us with is a shortcoming in knowledge and a loss of coverage." [Emphasis mine]
This is an important point, worth serious reflection. Teachers and most parents will understandably be anxious to make up for lost time and lost learning, particularly those whose children and students are at the pinch points of transition between key stages. Breslin continues: "Rather, it is about how far we can travel in light of our shared experience, and the different educational and training needs that will surely manifest themselves in the years ahead. It is also about acknowledging those longstanding shortcomings at the heart of our schooling and education systems, around persistent inequalities of outcome, around the need to build inclusion and attainment alongside each other rather than posing them as different and sometimes conflicting opposites, and around attending to the wellbeing of children, their families and all who support their learning – as if we could build a sustainable education system without doing this." [Emphases mine]
Most teachers would agree, surely, with the wisdom here. “Cramming” or force-feeding our students course content as if we were fattening geese, would be horribly stressful, and pedagogically ineffective in the long term. Yet there is an opportunity for us, instead of “cramming”, to take accelerated learning very seriously indeed.
In his article exploring current priorities and opportunities for primary schools, NACE Associate Dr Keith Watson highlights Mary Myatt’s insistence on professionals paring back course content to the essentials. He is, of course, right to point out the dangers of narrowing the curriculum even further. As an English teacher, I understand why the GCSE exam boards have elected to remove poetry from the exams, but it chills my blood to think of the lost potential for thought, feeling and understanding that this represents – particularly for our more able students.
I do wonder, though, whether we now have an opportunity to introduce just a little more urgency – but not panic – into teaching and learning. Accelerated learning strategies aim to achieve both inclusion and attainment in learning, in the ways that NACE has advocated for so many years: help your most able students to go as far and fast as they can; teach to the top, support from the bottom, and so on. This approach should still be used; we will just have to use it on less material. Don’t over-rehearse, i.e. don’t plan to teach new Year 10 students six months of missed Year 9 course content first. Do over-learn, with regular, no-stakes tests to embed knowledge and build confidence and mastery. Crucially, teach what needs to be taught now and scaffold knowledge and skills “just in time.”
A document that has garnered interest, originating from the US, is the Learning Acceleration Guide published by TNTP. Like anything, you’ll not want to swallow it wholesale, but it does give a range of sensible suggestions, including those set out above. The main thrust is that we should not panic about teaching new material, as if the students will never be ready for it. Instead, teaching new and necessary material, if scaffolded, can prompt memory of previous learning and help students “catch up” by stealth, rather than by “remedial action” that brings their learning up to speed to where they should have been, rather than where they could be now. This is clearly a leading attribute of the challenging classroom at any time in history, pre- or post-COVID.
2.Be bold with remote learning – “homework” could be transformed.
You may have found yourself cursing Zoom, Loom, Vidyard, Microsoft Teams or Google Classroom at several stages over lockdown; or you may have been excited to learn how to use them, because you had to. Most likely, like me, you felt both. But I can’t complain any longer that I don’t have time to learn about “flipped learning”. For those students with access to a laptop, we should continue to experiment with how far we can enable students to work independently and with each other. Again, this is an opportunity for us to make a virtue of necessity.
At our school, and I’m sure at yours, our departments have put in place planning and resources that can be both taught in the classroom and remotely. A lot of labour has been put into producing packs of work. For the more able students, however, we mustn’t stop offering exciting invitations to push their interest further.
For the last two years, I’ve been able to group the most able students by subject and year cohort and set them up to research and write up their own projects, guided by their interest. I have been impressed and inspired by how well I could trust students to be “entrepreneurial” in their independent work, supported pretty minimally by caring subject specialists, but a lot by each other. We use Microsoft Teams to enable this, and I would point you to Amy Clark’s blog post on this topic for further possibilities in using Teams. See too, the recorded NACE webinar on using technological platforms to develop independence (member login required).
Our students, in these times and in all times, should be putting in at least as much creative labour as their teachers. A remarkable result of more enforced student independence is how much more we can trust them to adapt, re-combine and invent new responses to the information and tasks we give them. Many students, at all key stages, are adept at using technology in a way that most of their teachers haven’t been.
Consider, too, how you can use technology to gather student voice so that you know how your most able students are faring; and even better, garner suggestions from them of how they would like to extend the curriculum, so that they feel they have a say in the direction of educational travel. As always, these students’ insights into their experiences of teaching and learning bring us priceless information on what’s going well and what’s not. Online platforms make this process so much easier now.
3.“Humanity first” – but that doesn’t necessarily mean “teaching second”.
Barry Carpenter’s work on the very notion of a “recovery curriculum” has received widespread coverage among school leaders and teachers. At one stage in his talk for the Chartered College of Teaching, Carpenter urged teachers to “walk in with your humanity first, and your teaching skills second.” In the context of the therapeutic, wellbeing-centred vision for recovery from the shocks and anxieties of the last year, this clearly makes sense. With more able students in mind, however, and especially the exceptionally able students we teach, we must remember that study is an intrinsic part of their humanity: they are one and the same thing.
Again, then, crisis reveals what is already present. Our more able students will still need to know, in their relationships with their teachers and with supportive peers, that it is cool to be clever, interesting to be interested, exciting to be excited by the discoveries involved in learning. They do not need to be glum, or despair that they have stopped learning, because we can be confident that we are always learning if we have a mind to, and seek – as Dr Matthew Williams advocates – to turn work into study.
Those interesting questions that we pose; that palpable delight in our own subject interest; those personalised phrases of praise; the hints and foretastes of exciting future study and work – all those confident connection-points with our more able students are always vital, and continue to be so as we all move forward into an uncertain “first term back”. I found at the end of the summer term, teaching small bubble-groups of sixth formers, that they were desperate to talk and explore what was going on. So was I! This is clearly no surprise. The teaching skill required here will be to move between the personal and the abstract, as it always is in pedagogy worth the name.
Our most able students often think and feel things at a greater intensity. Managing this intensity with the general intensity of the overall experience of socially distanced schooling will take skill and humanity – but we as teachers are not in uncharted waters here: it is what we do under normal circumstances, too.
Join the conversation: NACE member meetup, 10 September 2020
Join secondary leaders and practitioners from across the country on 10 September for an online NACE member meetup exploring approaches to the recovery curriculum and beyond. The session will open with a presentation from NACE Associate Neil Jones, followed by a chance to share approaches and ideas with peers, reflecting on some of the challenges and opportunities outlined above. Find out more and book your place.
Not yet a NACE member? Starting at just £95 +VAT per year, NACE membership is available for schools (covering all staff), SCITT providers, TSAs, trusts and clusters. Bringing together school leaders and practitioners across England, Wales and internationally, our members have access to advice, practical resources and CPD to support the review and improvement of provision for more able learners within a context of challenge and high standards for all. Learn more and join today.
Posted By The Bromfords School & Sixth Form College,
03 July 2020
Amy Clark, Assistant Headteacher for Quality of Education, explains how The Bromfords School and Sixth Form College has used Microsoft Teams to support both students and staff – delivering remote learning, pastoral support and peer-led CPD.
Being thrust into the world of remote learning has galvanised us to dig deep as a profession and do what we do best: find ways to make learning enjoyable – even in the toughest of times. At The Bromfords School, a small group of us had already been trialling the use of Microsoft Teams with our sixth form pupils to enhance the provision they were receiving, with the focus on enabling students to participate in a learning-rich environment without having to be in the classroom. Students loved having access to a digital learning space, outside of school, that they could use to have academic debates on key topics, share links to wider reading or resources and generally support each other in a collaborative way.
We also saw Teams as a way for staff to share best practice CPD. We all know what happens when you attend an amazing INSET day or twilight session; you eventually find time to do planning and create some wonderful resources that you share with colleagues, but they get lost amongst the mass of emails, meaning the brilliant work done often gets lost. The plan was to use Microsoft Teams to provide a specific space for professional dialogue about teaching and learning, where teachers could share resources, upskill each other and continue to develop as professionals.
Then along came COVID-19 and thrust our plans forward…
Using Teams for academic, pastoral and peer support
Even though the timeline for rolling out Microsoft Teams across the school was sped up, our staff certainly rose to the challenge. Whilst Teams isn’t the only software we have used to communicate remote learning to students, it is quickly becoming a space that students use for both academic and pastoral purposes.
Tutor group channels were set up on Teams for every year group, where tutors have been able to ‘check in’ each week with pupils. This has ensured that students’ academic needs are met, that students have access to advice should they need it, but most importantly, tutors could keep track of students’ mental wellbeing. Open lines of communication meant that if a child was struggling, we could support them. Students didn’t know how to work remotely, how to organise their time or how to be self-motivated; our use of Teams has provided them with methods for easy communication with an adult they are familiar with on a daily basis.
We hope that by having the lines of communication open to students and having a compulsory check-in each week, the bridge between students working in isolation at home and returning back into the building is eased and that that we are able to lower anxiety for our students.
Our Teams CPD channel has supported staff not only in developing their IT skills to enable the best possible provision for students, but also in accessing a range of ideas they might not have come across before. Our channel has ‘How to…’ videos on topics including the use of narrated PowerPoints, quizzes or forms on Teams, how to use ‘assignments’ within Teams and mark these using a rubric to give feedback on the work completed, to name just a few. Staff have also shared information on how to create drop-down and tick-boxes in Microsoft Word, where to go to get icons for dual coding, methods for increasing student engagement and other concepts that will improve remote learning.
Even staff members who are self-proclaimed ‘technophobes’ have been able to develop their IT skills to ensure the digital learning process for our pupils is as strong as it can be. The channel has enabled everyone to feel like we are all in this process together, all learning together – and nothing is as daunting when you have others by your side.
Five core principles for effective remote learning
As a school, we were keen to ensure we were catering to the needs of all our pupils during this time, with our more able students being a key focus. We wanted to ensure the provision offered to this group remained high quality so they were able to continue to be challenged academically – avoiding the dreaded generic worksheet, a one-size-fits-all approach. We also found that many of our more able were struggling with managing workload, which developed increased levels of anxiety.
A group of leaders and I developed what we felt were the five core principles of remote learning and delivered this to staff through CPD meetings, to ensure our more able students were academically and emotionally supported.
We felt that remote learning should be:
Concrete: it should have a clear purpose and learning intent that fits with the wider curriculum. There should also be clear timings for tasks so that students do not spend excessive amounts of time on projects.
Inclusive: consider how you stretch your most able students by providing links to wider reading, podcasts, challenge tasks or breadth of choice such as presentation methods.
Considerate: taking into consideration students’ learning environments and access to materials they could need. Also planning tactically so that students do not become overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work expected of them.
Reflective: students should have feedback at key points and self-assessment opportunities through sharing clearly defined success criteria.
Engaging: staff should incorporate a range of learning activities and software to avoid students becoming demotivated. Also focusing on mechanisms for praise so that students know their hard work is being recognised.
The concepts here are not new. But when staff are also dealing with the pressures and anxiety a COVID-19 teaching world presents, it is a timely reminder that the core principles of teaching must remain so that students can continue to succeed. The five core principles listed above all aim not only to enrich the remote learning a student receives, but also take into consideration students’ mental wellbeing too.
When we return to school, I hope the lessons learnt from using technology during this time do not get lost. Many members of staff have told me how much they have enjoyed using Microsoft Teams to support learning and how they will continue to use it moving forward, particularly to aid collaborative work with peers and to support home learning. Our eyes have been opened to the potential of this technology in supporting and enriching the curriculum for more able students though many of the methods listed above. It has certainly provided both staff and students with a very different learning experience, with the potential to continue to enrich learning beyond the classroom for students and increase enjoyment in developing pedagogy for staff.
NACE Education Adviser Hilary Lowe explores the challenges of “lockdown learning”, how schools are responding, and what lessons could be learned to improve provision for all young people both now and in the years to come.
We have been submerged with COVID-19 stories. But very few of those have told the tale of what is happening to thousands of young people whose lives have been disrupted and delayed or of their teachers who have been keeping calm and carrying on, often going to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure continuity and quality in those young people’s education.
NACE too has been trying to run business as usual wherever possible, working with members and colleagues to find creative and innovative ways of serving the school community in immediate practical ways. We have also been planning for possible future scenarios in the way we work with schools and others involved in supporting the education of highly able young people. We know that things may never be quite the same again. We could even go so far as to hazard that many of the changes we are seeing in the way schools and national organisations are supporting young learners in lockdown are heralding a new age in education.
Could this be the watershed in the paradox of a pandemic that has shut down many forms of normal life which will usher in some of the radical changes pundits are predicting might emerge in other areas of social and economic activity? Could this be the time we move from what is still in many ways the Victorian order of schooling to a new order for the 21st century? An order which connects the best of what we know about how we learn and what we need materially to learn – and how we teach, with the benefits of technology and informed by the needs of society and the individual in the uncertain years to come.
Facing up to the cracks and gaps in the current system
It has been both fascinating and humbling to hear how NACE member schools have moved with great alacrity from largely classroom-based learning to providing schooling, including pastoral support, from a distance. This has often been – although not of course exclusively – from a low base of technological skills and hardware and little training in designing distance learning.
We know with even greater certainty than we did before that young people’s home environments are not always conducive to good learning. We also know that millions of young people do not have access to the technology and basic resources which could support their learning and wellbeing at a distance. The deep cracks in social and economic equity are becoming even more obvious to teachers whose profession at its noblest aims to develop young people to aspire to be the best that they can be. Recent reports from the Sutton Trust, amongst others, attest to the ongoing deep social divisions with which we are already familiar and to the emerging impacts of the pandemic learning lockdown on young people, not only on their achievement but also on their aspirations (Sutton Trust, 2020).
Acknowledging the stark picture painted by the Sutton Trust research on pupil engagement and the capacity of schools to deliver distance learning, we know through contact with our member schools and through our two recent online member meetups that there are both state schools and independent schools making things work despite the odds. NACE has been privileged to be able to gather a wealth of knowledge about both what is working well in supporting learning at home and what is proving most challenging.
Challenges and concerns
Lack of engagement from learners and parents
Lack of technologies and resources at home
Marking and feedback
Accelerating and monitoring progress for all learners
Learner choices and future decisions e.g. options, post-16, post-18
Future behaviours and engagement when back in school
Growing ‘disadvantage gaps’ and how to manage/remediate
Supporting learners with additional, particular needs e.g. SEND
More able learners who are socially disadvantaged
More able learners affected by the pressure they put on themselves or excessive pressure from parents
Transitions and transition points e.g. Years 6 and 13
Negative effects on mental health and wellbeing
Realities of what can be achieved at home
Teacher capacity and skills
What’s working?
Clear, consistent cross-school strategy regarding distance learning and learner contact
Systematic approaches with checks and monitoring
Making expectations clear to learners and parents (e.g. parental guidance and communication apps)
Different models according to need, age, experience of online learning, populations, access to technology and resources e.g. some schools delivering a “normal” timetable of lessons virtually; some providing a mix of timetabled lessons, extended projects, suggested downtime activities; some schools delivering individualised learning packs to pupils’ homes
Many schools favour a mix of online and offline learning
Some schools are trying to tailor provision to individual needs e.g. more able learners having access to appropriately challenging resources, guest speakers, debates and projects which involve higher level skills and knowledge
Some schools are prioritising language development and reading as a priority
In the best of cases schools plan home learning according to best practice in effective learning and effective distance learning e.g. retrieval/recall, use/application, new learning etc; judicious use of what can be learned without too much scaffolding; sometimes readjusting planned schemes and schedules of work; allotting “transition time” for catch-up and individual support
Some schools are trying to connect current distance learning to future work to be undertaken when school restarts
Emphasis on motivation and keeping learners engaged e.g. feedback, praise and rewards, competitions
Emphasis on supporting wellbeing and mental health
Regular contact via email/text and phone e.g. once a week and sometimes once a day for more vulnerable groups
Platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Classroom enable greater participation and interaction, peer-to-peer and peer-to-teacher
For more insights into how schools are responding to current challenges, watch the recordings of our recent virtual member meetups:
Secondary session (28 April 2020)
Primary session (29 April 2020)
What lasting improvements will be made?
In addition to considering how the many and significant challenges will be addressed, it is interesting to speculate on what will be taken forward from all the excellent practice we have seen being developed. Even more interesting might be to speculate on the more radical consequences of the current period on how we teach and learn in future, not only to be ready for further periods of uncertainty but perhaps because we have glimpsed and exercised approaches that might simply allow to do things better for all our young people. Perhaps we have also glimpsed ways in which we as educators would prefer to approach our profession, learning and development.
To conclude then, here are a few future schooling scenarios. Some are more readily doable and could in the short-term help to mitigate the educational damage currently being wrought. Some will require more radical changes in thinking and resourcing at a national level. It is encouraging that we are seeing in this country at least a recognition of and the opening of a debate about how to alleviate some of the collateral damage produced by the present schooling situation and the educational inequalities it is making more visible.
Future scenarios:
Every child in school ensured access to appropriate education technology (basic internet access in every home with school-aged children?)
Schools open longer as “learning hubs”, equipped and resourced to support children’s and parents’ learning and wellbeing
Priority given to developing parental and community engagement
School structures and timetables to allow greater tailoring of learning and greater personalisation e.g. through mixed-mode learning, time for one-to-one, consolidation etc
A major focus in all schools on high-level language development, reading and cultural capital
Emphasis on development of metacognition, independent learning and study skills
Planned opportunities for all learners, including the more able, to learn and be assessed at appropriate levels and points in their learning
School staff trained in designing online learning and assessment in conjunction with evidence-based classroom pedagogies
Greater use of technology for professional dialogue, planning and CPD
As well as responding to the current situation through increased online CPD, resources and guidance, NACE is planning additional ways to support schools and more able learners in the medium- and long-term. As always, this will include listening to what members are telling us about what they need, encouraging more schools to join the NACE community, and making our voice heard at policy levels and with partner organisations to ensure that learners, including the most able, are at the heart of any educational change and improvement.
What would be most useful for you and your school this term? Complete this short survey to help shape our response.
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