In July 2021 St Luke’s CE Primary School in Islington, London, attained the NACE Challenge Award for the first time. Executive Headteacher Ann Dwulit explains why the school continued to work towards this accreditation throughout the trials and tribulations of the past 18 months, and what attaining the Award means for the school.
St Luke's has been working with the
NACE Challenge Development Programme since early 2019. We decided to pursue the Challenge Award accreditation because there was a lack of consistency in children achieving greater depth at the end of KS2. The NACE process helped us to get to the root causes and develop and implement an action plan to address these – even throughout the pandemic.
Our NACE consultant worked alongside us, even during lockdown, and this support was invaluable. Together we identified that children and the staff team gained valuable skills through home learning, such as independence and improved IT skills. Like many schools, we now have a lot more devices available for children to flexibly use in the classroom. We realised that some children's education did not suffer as much as we thought it would during lockdowns. Some children caught up faster than others too.
It was the improved independence that we saw amongst more able children, as well as others who had/have the capacity to be more able, that we hooked onto when the children returned to school each time from the lockdowns. We had to fill the gaps in children's knowledge, understanding and skills, so the staff team agreed to pitch learning higher and to be more enquiry-led so that more able children could fly, enabling us to do catch-up interventions and work with those who needed it. The NACE process also enabled us to develop the role of subject leaders to a deeper and broader level as we un-picked how to catch-up learning in different subjects.
The NACE Challenge programme – the Challenge Framework, the website, the resources, the lesson observation format, doing the case studies, and following through on our action plan – kept us focused and support was always there from our consultant. It was a whole-school commitment.
No school has stood still in the last 18 months and our setting a higher bar has had an impact upon all learners. More able children are now leading learning more, being great role models even within their individual bubbles, and they are more able to articulate their views, their feelings and their aspirations to each other and to anyone who asks. Talented children and those who have the capacity to be talented have opportunities to develop their talents. We use existing staff to facilitate this; we are not paying for additional specialist teachers and tutors to come in, we are just using the team we have more efficiently. In many respects, Covid has made us stronger, more resilient and more determined to ensure every child really does achieve their potential.
By the time the NACE final accreditation came around, working differently was well embedded as we had achieved the goals we set out to achieve since 2019 – one of which was to improve reading across the school. We have also raised the profile of subjects that had been more dormant during lockdown and we know we need to see through curriculum development. Our end of KS2 teacher assessment showed a marked improvement in scores for more able children and even though this does not count as statutory testing, it counts to the children and it counts to us. This is something we will strive to maintain. I do not think this would have happened without our NACE consultant and without us going through the process of working towards the Challenge Award. Even if we had not achieved the Award this time round, I would still have said the process was worth doing and would just have re-applied to achieve the Award itself.
Hearing that we had achieved the Award and had gained this external verification means the world to the team. Being told this by our consultant who we all know has really high expectations of us and for us – that what we are doing is working – means so much. The process will go on as we have our reviews, and all of this sits well alongside the Ofsted framework. Our work is never finished in schools, but it helps to know that what we have set up is working and is having a positive impact on outcomes for children and making a difference to their lives.
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