NACE Challenge Award and Ambassador Schools
We now have five NACE Challenge Ambassador Schools in place across England and Wales; I am delighted to welcome Nettlesworth Primary School and Holme Grange School, which both recently joined this prestigious group. It’s been a busy year for the NACE Challenge Award, with 31 schools being accredited or reaccredited with the award in the 2023/24 academic year and a further 12 schools working towards accreditation, having completed their pre-assessments.

The NACE Challenge Award recognises high-quality whole-school provision for more able learners within a context of challenge for all. To learn more about the award or the NACE Challenge Framework, on which the award is based, please contact Karen Burnham by emailing challenge@nace.co.uk

In-person and online events
We were delighted this year to offer an increasing number of in-person events as the year progressed. It remains important that we give our members as many opportunities as possible to learn from each other. Our free member meetups have once again been very popular this year, and we will be adding more in-person events to the calendar for 2024/25.

Opportunities to connect online have also remained important – including the recent launch of the next phase of our ‘Making Space for Able Learners’ research (more details below). Our popular online network groups have continued to grow, and our online primary and secondary subject workshops have also again been very popular. We are on the lookout for subject specialists to run future workshops; if you are interested please contact cpd@nace.co.uk for more details.

Research
2023/24 saw the completion of the second stage of our 'Making Space for Able Learners' project on rethinking assessment. We have offered an online version of this publication free to our member schools, and phase 1 and 2 publications are also both available to purchase in book form here.

We are now moving on to the third stage of this project, focusing on how we can best support more able learners who experience disadvantage. This will be led by NACE Research and Development Director, Dr Ann McCarthy, and our recent launch meeting was a chance to discuss ways in which we can best share information and provide opportunities for schools to contribute – highlight effective practice as well as challenges for which a solution has yet to be found.

This is an exciting time, with the opportunity for schools to get involved at the start of such an important piece of research. Our aim is for this initiative to become a vehicle for professional development and school improvement. You can find out more here.

Member mailing
Keep an eye out for your NACE member mailing, which will be posted out to you for the start of September. The NACE wallplanner will contain the dates for our key events, including the NACE Conference which is set for Friday 27^th June 2025. Updates will be provided through our monthly newsfeed emails as the year progresses.

I wish you all a very enjoyable summer break and we are all looking forward to working with you again throughout the next academic year.