NACE CEO Rob Lightfoot shares an update on opportunities for NACE members for the coming year – including our research focus for the year, the 2025 NACE Conference, the launch of our subject-specific resources, network groups, primary and secondary subject workshops and our continued cluster offers for both membership and the Challenge Development Programme.

As we enter the start of the new academic year, I wanted to take this opportunity to give you a brief overview of what we have planned to support you this year…

Research focus for 2024/25

As I am sure you will be aware already, this year we will be concentrating our efforts on researching how we can best support more able learners who encounter disadvantage in any of its many forms. Our research will demonstrate the successes of schools in enhancing the motivation, engagement, achievement, experience and education choices for more able learners who experience disadvantaged circumstances. Our aim is for this work to become a vehicle for professional development and school improvement.

We are holding an in-person research event on Friday 18th October at the NACE offices for anyone interested in being part of this project. Register here or contact research lead Dr Ann McCarthy on annmccarthy@nace.co.uk if you have any questions.

NACE Conference 2025 

The research outlined above will be the focus for our conference this year, taking place on Friday 27th June 2025 at Pangbourne College. Our early bird 2-for-1 will end soon – take advantage of this offer by signing up now.

Subject-specific resources

Following member feedback, we are delighted to be launching our new subject-specific resource collections – to support subject leaders and individual teachers in embedding cognitively challenging learning across the curriculum. We will continue to add to these collections throughout the year. If there is a particularly resource or strategy that you would like to share with our wider member network, then please get in touch with us via info@nace.co.uk.

Network Groups

We will continue to run our popular series of Network Groups for the new academic year. These groups offer the opportunity to connect and collaborate with peers and seek support for the issues you currently face. There are dedicated groups for More Able Leads (meeting half-termly), EYFS and KS5 (termly), as well as a free termly group exclusively for schools accredited with the NACE Challenge Award. All are facilitated by NACE’s senior education team.

Register now for the full year and you’ll get one session free. 

Subject workshops

Having received outstanding feedback since we started running our subject workshops in January 2023, we will continue to run these popular online sessions. 

You can sign up for our next set of primary workshops taking place on the morning of Thursday 21st November 2024, covering history, mathematics and reading. Our secondary workshops will take place on Thursday 30th January 2025 and will cover computing, English and mathematics. Multi-delegate discounts are available.

NACE offers for groups/clusters of schools

We will continue to offer discounts to clusters of schools for both membership and participation in NACE’s Challenge Development Programme. Working together will promote a consistency in approach, while allowing the flexibility for each school to work at their own pace and in line with their own context. Groups of schools working on the programme can also benefit from shared consultancy and/or CPD to support this process.

NACE Challenge Ambassador schools

We are delighted to welcome Holme Grange School and Nettlesworth Primary School as our more recent NACE Challenge Ambassador Schools – both attaining this status during the 2023/24 academic year – joining existing Ambassadors Toot Hill School, Southend High School for Boys and Ysgol Glan Gele. 

If you have already been accredited with the Challenge Award on two or more occasions, you will have the opportunity to apply to become a NACE Challenge Ambassador School during your next accreditation. To do this, you must meet the Ambassador School requirements, and we look forward to more schools joining this prestigious group in future years when their next accreditation is due. 

I wish you all the very best for the new academic year. As always, please do get in touch if we can support you in any way. 

Welcome to the new academic year! In response to your member feedback, here’s a brief overview of what new we have planned to support you this academic year…

New network groups

Research network groups

We have amended our research programme slightly for the 2023/24 academic year, but the new programme will continue to be free to all NACE members. We will launch our new programme on Tuesday 10 October with our member webinar. It will follow the theme of how to undertake successful change in a school. Following our webinar, we will run a meeting each term in the style of our other popular network groups. There will be one group for classroom practitioners and one for members interested in conducting whole-school change. In addition, for Welsh colleagues, we will continue to run a hub studying effective change within the Curriculum for Wales. Dates for all of these meetings can be found here.

KS5 network group

We have a growing number of colleges joining NACE, in addition to a number of member schools with sixth forms. As a result, we will be introducing a new KS5 Network Group next year – an opportunity to connect with fellow KS5 leaders and practitioners to share experiences, raise questions and discuss current challenges and priorities. This group will run termly and will also be free to members. Register here.

We will continue to run our established Challenge Award Schools, More Able Leads and EYFS network groups.

Research updates

Making space for able learners: phase 2

We have been exploring two key strands in greater depth for the second phase of our Making Space for Able Learners project. The first of these is focused on effective approaches to assessment in the cognitively challenging classroom, exploring questions such as who assessment is for, how it fits within cognitively challenging learning, how to develop effective assessment practices, and what we need to rethink about assessment. The second focus builds on the importance of rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse, and further examines oracy and linguistics in the context of the classroom. We will be launching new resources, free for members, in the new year. More details will follow in our upcoming monthly newsfeeds – keep an eye out for the launch of these new resources.

Subject workshops

Our first set of subject workshops, for secondary colleagues, took place in January 2023. This one-day workshop event explored the balance of subject knowledge and creativity in how we ensure the needs of the most able learners are met. We then focused on the core subject areas of maths, English and science, drawing on the latest evidence and learning to explore the mechanisms of challenge in each subject and how we facilitate higher-order thinking. Delegates left with an understanding of what challenge means for their subject area, what it can look like in the classroom, and practical actions they could take back into school.

Due to the success of this event we will be running a half-day workshop for primary practitioners in November 2023, with a focus on the subjects of science, history and geography. We will also be offering another one-day workshop for secondary colleagues in January 2024, with a focus on three different subject areas – more details coming soon. The events will offer both member as well as multi-delegate discounts.

Exclusive NACE offers for groups/clusters of schools

We have received an increased number of enquiries from clusters of schools for both membership and participation in NACE’s Challenge Development Programme - working with NACE as a group of schools. We have previously introduced individual discounts on membership when schools join as a cluster, and we will now be offering significant discounts for groups of schools seeking to review and improve challenge for all through NACE’s Challenge Development Programme. Working together will promote a consistency in approach, while allowing the flexibility for each school to work at their own pace and in line with their own context. Groups of schools working on the programme can also benefit from shared consultancy and/or CPD to support this process.

NACE Challenge Ambassador schools

Following the launch of our Challenge Ambassador Programme this time last year, I am delighted to welcome Toot Hill School, Southend High School for Boys and Ysgol Glan Gele as NACE’s first Challenge Ambassador schools. A reminder that if you have already been accredited with the Challenge Award on two or more occasions you will have the opportunity to apply to be a NACE Challenge Ambassador School during your next accreditation. To do this, you must meet the Ambassador School requirements, and we look forward to more schools joining this prestigious group in future years when their next accreditation is due.

I wish you all well for the new academic year. As always, please do get in touch if we can support you in any way.

Rebecca Cartwright, midway through her PGCE progamme in primary education with EXCEED Academy Trust, shares her experience of using critical incident analysis to develop her provision for more able learners, with additional input from NACE Associate Dr Jonathan Doherty.

As part of my School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) provided through an apprenticeship route into teaching, I’ve had access to schools and experts involved in the EXCEED Academy Trust in Bradford. Schools regard inclusion as a high priority and it is a recurring feature in training days and embedded into all aspects of the SCITT curriculum. 

Through my experiences on the course and in the classroom, I’ve become particularly intrigued by inclusion and what it looks like for more able learners. I’ve seen more able learning promoted through higher-order questioning, adaptive teaching and teaching for creativity. This has been an area I’ve reflected upon during my own teaching practice, where I wondered about effective strategies, the superficiality of some techniques employed, and how they could be made more effective without increasing workload.

The PGCE programme, in conjunction with Leeds Trinity University and EXCEED Academy Trust, encourages student teachers to critically examine research and other evidence and reflect on their own professional practice in relation to a specific learning need faced by pupils in school. Master’s Level study in the PGCE programme comprises two assignments each contributing 30 credits; these are professionally focused and are taught by blog co-author Dr Jonathan Doherty. The assignments build upon the strong thread of reflection in teaching, drawing together observations in schools and understanding from taught sessions at the university and in-school CPD. 

Inclusion remains high on education policy agendas. Inclusive education is based on the belief that all members of society have the right to participate in and have access to education on an equal basis. Inclusion is a fundamental right for all learners – not just those who are deemed ‘vulnerable’ or those having special education needs. The module and first assignment, ‘Supporting Individual Needs’, is intended to develop thinking around this theme and challenge values to enable effective inclusive teaching that are culturally and individually responsive so that all children can succeed.

This assignment uses reflection and critical incident theory to support meeting a specific need for a child. Becoming an effective teacher involves considerably more than accumulating skills and strategies. It involves critical reflection. The more teachers explore, the more they discover (Larrivee, 2000). 

What is critical incident analysis, and why use it?

Critical incident analysis (CIA) is an approach to understanding and dealing with challenges in everyday professional practice. The term ‘critical incident’ refers to an event or situation which marks a significant turning point or change for someone. Incidents that teachers deal with in everyday teaching become critical through reflection and then analysis. An incident becomes a critical incident as a result of 1) reflecting about it; 2) thinking critically about it; and then 3) applying an analysis framework to it. Critical reflection has several benefits for teachers: it informs future practice and informs appropriate action in similar future situations. 

How does it work in practice?

A number of models exist to support critical reflection, but I used McAteer et al. (2010) to explore an incident with a more able pupil that occurred in my classroom. The incident related to a more able Year 2 pupil working at greater depth and a far higher level than his peers. The lesson was teaching to include emotions in diary writing in English. He displayed classic signs of a high ability learner by finishing set work easily and then appearing to disengage in the lesson. Individual follow-up activities for him did not engage him either and his behaviour began to quickly deteriorate. He started chatting and I observed a snowball effect, disrupting other children.

In my analysis of this short classroom episode and applying the CIA framework, my immediate thoughts were of frustration that I had not met the boy’s individual needs. Later, through deeper reflection, conversations with my teacher and class-based mentor and my knowledge of more able learning, I was able to explore other perspectives with regard to the incident and consider ways to provide appropriate challenge for this boy in future. 

This included looking again at teacher assessment frameworks for writing, to understand in more detail what targets and requirements were needed for greater depth learners; annotating planning with a next step for any child who had met the success criteria of the lesson, which I, or any support staff could access to further their learning. I investigated teaching for creativity and methods such as teaching children that it is acceptable to make mistakes, working backwards and looking at gaps in knowledge. I reflected on the importance of taking time to identify the pupil’s learning on his writing journey and looking at greater depth and potentially higher year frameworks to support his learning. 

NACE’s guidance on cognitive load theory (available to members here) affirmed some of my assumptions and suggested that more able learners may not need to spend as much time on retrieval practices. I will now allocate more time to providing opportunities for independent learning activities which are rich in cognitive challenge. Reading research has made me consider the impact of providing more able children with advanced content and making it accessible in different ways, enabling better engagement. 

The experience has taught me much about teaching and extended my knowledge of more able learners. Going forward I will be better informed to identify where children are on their individual learning journeys and so quickly gauge next steps. The experience has also made me realise where I myself am on my own learning journey. I am not the finished article but have many positive aspects of my practice which I need to continually reflect upon. There are many sources to draw on for information and specific reflection that will allow other aspects of my teaching to fall into place. By being proactive in learning, such honest critical reflection will support me to gauge the needs of the children to further their journeys.

References

• Larrivee, B. (2000) Transforming Teaching Practice: Becoming the critically reflective teacher. Reflective Practice, 1:3, pp. 293-307
• McAteer, M., Hallett F. & Murtagh, L. (2010) Achieving your Masters in Teaching and Learning. Exeter: Learning Matters. 
  

NACE Associate Dr Jonathan Doherty shares key takeaways from our recent NACE member meetup on this theme.

The recent NACE meetup in Didcot brought together member schools to explore the theme of oracy for high achievement. This ties in with NACE’s current research into the role of oracy within cognitively challenging learning. 

The context

Oracy is at the centre of good classroom practice, since it is through quality communication and the use of talk and language that thinking, knowledge and understanding are developed. There is increased awareness of the importance of high-quality oracy education and its significance across academic, professional, cognitive, social and emotional spheres. While the case for oracy is strong, schools are still coping with the impact of Covid-19 and lockdown. Many young people experience isolation, and the past few years of limited exposure to conversations, everyday interactions and in-person classroom exchanges, have deprived many of opportunities for rich talk and spoken language development. Vulnerable students and those from economically deprived backgrounds have been most affected and this has brought fresh urgency to the issue, as schools move on from the pandemic and seek to address current challenges of closing achievement gaps and taking oracy education to the next level.

Summary of the day

Ahead of the member meetup, colleagues were invited to submit oracy-based questions that would be explored during the course of the day. Examples of these were:

• How can teachers implement effective strategies for oracy without dramatically increasing workload?
• How can we best develop oracy for the most able in mixed ability classrooms?
• What are interesting activities to help pupils improve their confidence when public speaking, among their peers and people they don't know?
• What approaches are most effective in promoting oracy in group work so that it is productive and benefits all learners? 

I opened the day with an overview of the research context for oracy. Oracy is certainly not a new issue (with its beginnings going back to 1965), but despite its recognition since then, the status of oracy in the architecture of our education system does not fully reflect its value and importance to young people’s outcomes in school and life. We looked at the case for oracy with reference to research literature in language, education and neuroscience, before explaining how the needs of more able learners can be met through inclusive oracy education and cognitive challenge. 

Haili Hughes, Head of Education at IRIS Connect and Principal Lecturer at the University of Sunderland, took up the theme of oracy and confidence-building in her presentation. She developed this with reference to oracy and metacognition and mental schema and showed, as one example, how the approach of dialogic teaching promotes oracy and academic self-concept. Her explanation of knowledge and cultural capital was very interesting and relevant. 

Rebecca Earnshaw, CEO of leading oracy education charity Voice 21, shared her organisation’s commitment to providing a high-quality oracy education for every child and the vision to empower young people to use their voice for success. She made links to mental health, oracy being a process and a product of learning, and drew upon a range of research – including the Education Endowment Foundation findings that showed that students taking part in language interventions make five months additional progress over a year and this rises to six months for disadvantaged students – to further substantiate the importance of quality oracy education in schools. The audience was treated to several practical activities on ways to embed oracy in the curriculum. 

An important part of member meetups are the school case studies. The final speaker of the morning was Chloe Bateman, ECF Lead Facilitator and History, Religion and Philosophy Teacher at Maiden Erlegh School, who shared the story of how the school has established a whole-school culture of oracy. You can read Chloe’s summary here.

Following a networking lunch, where colleagues certainly put their speaking and listening skills to good use, the afternoon was given over to speed-sharing, the part of the day which provides an opportunity for colleagues to share their experiences and ideas with peers. These important discussions provided a knowledge exchange forum for classroom strategies to develop oracy that have been effective. Some examples of the brilliant ideas shared in the speed-sharing were:

• Focus on language in discussions and how to build it up (Tina Stinson at Thornton College)
• Explicit teaching of oracy benchmarks and ways to achieve them (Michelle Ginty and Viviana Young at Salusbury Primary School)
• Frayer Model of teaching Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary (Olivia Cornwell at Central Foundation Girls’ School)
• Displaying key terms for the lesson on the board, teaching their meaning explicitly using call-and-response to aid pronunciation, and directing students to use them during ‘turn and talk’ activities (Amy Lloyd at Haybridge High School)
• Vocabulary Bullseye (Beckie New at BrookField School)

You can read more about the ideas shared on the day here.

Key takeaways from the day

• Addressing the needs of more able learners can raise achievement for a much wider group of learners in a school by increasing challenge for all. Considering the needs of more able disadvantaged learners is crucial to ensuring an inclusive and fair curriculum. (See NACE core principles.)
• There is strong research evidence for the importance of high-quality oracy education. This is supported by education, psychology, language studies and neuroscience research. The significant impact of oracy is across academic, personal and life outcomes.
• Self-confidence through purposeful practice of discussions about current affairs and wider issues builds cultural capital and confidence. A focus on oracy helps students express their thoughts and feelings in a more structured and approachable manner that will also build academic self-concept.
• Embedding oracy into school culture with deliberate and explicit teaching of speaking and listening supports student progress and achievement. Every school is different and it is essential to identify your school’s oracy needs. Providing for more able learners is about creating a curriculum which gives opportunities for all children to flourish. (See NACE core principles.)

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 in this blog 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 are interesting activities to help students improve their confidence when public speaking, among their peers and people they don't know?
• 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?

View the slides from the day:

• Dr Jonathan Doherty
• Haili Hughes
• Chloe Bateman
• Membership updates

Read more:

• 6 ideas to develop oracy in your school
• 7 steps to establishing a whole-school oracy culture 
  

NACE CEO Rob Lightfoot outlines NACE’s core research themes for 2022-23, and opportunities to get involved next term.

It’s been a difficult time for everyone as we moved out of Covid restrictions this academic year. The spring term was one of the most challenging for schools since the start of the pandemic, and we can only hope that – after a well-deserved summer break! – we can now really begin to refocus our energies on planning to meet the needs of learners going forward.

NACE research themes for 2022-23

It is early days as we begin to unpick the impact of the last two years for learners and school staff alike, but we have chosen to focus our research next year on two areas:

1. Oracy for high achievement: this strand will explore whole-school oracy strategies in the context of cognitive challenge, in addition to effective oracy practices for high-achieving classrooms.

2. Rethinking assessment: this strand continues our investigation of effective assessment practices in the classroom, across all phases of teaching, including assessment through questioning, dialogic discourse and improved oracy.

Get involved…

If the themes above sound of interest, you can sign up to participate in the 2022-23 NACE R&D Hubs programme. This will comprise a Hub on the two themes above, along with a third Hub focusing on cognitive challenge within the new curriculum for Wales. To learn more, register for the online launch event, taking place on Tuesday 27 September. Sign up here. 

Registrations are also open for our first member meetup of the new academic year, “Speaking Up – Developing Oracy for High Achievement”, which will take place in Didcot on Tuesday 18 October. Sign up here.

And finally, next term will also see the launch of our new Challenge Award Ambassador Schools programme, which will be open to all schools who have been accredited with the NACE Challenge Award on two or more occasions. Further details coming soon!

I wish you all a relaxing and enjoyable summer break and I hope you get the chance to recharge your batteries ready for the new academic year.