The context

10 recommendations to maintain consistency of provision for more able learners in a cluster

1. Secure support at leadership level in all partner schools.
   
   
2. Engage colleagues and encourage sharing of personal experiences. Many will have unique stories to tell. Involve colleagues in pupil nominations so they have a vested interest in the growth of their learners.
   
   
3. Take the child, their family and their class teacher on the journey with you. Find the most important ‘cogs in the wheel’ for your individuals. As well as parents, we have taken grandmothers and aunties to universities for the first time as part of our work with The Brilliant Club’s Scholars Programme (see below for more details). All parties can learn from the experience, and each is important.
   
   
4. Know your individual pupils and families. Link with pastoral teams and teaching colleagues to learn about individual circumstances and the bigger ‘picture’ – gaining a wealth of intelligence that will support success.
   
   
5. Prioritise communication to all partners, especially hard to reach families. Some may prefer the traditional written form or telephone call, while others prefer the convenience of electronic communication.
   
   
6. Raise the profile of your provision – promote and publicise around the school community and online using social media. Regular updates and photographs are popular.
   
   
7. Be flexible and resilient. Our provisions have run continually throughout the two-year Covid pandemic, utilising the developments in online learning and online communications. Our high pupil expectations should not waver.
   
   
8. Seek honest feedback and prepare to refine your offer. Some partners prefer an anonymous electronic survey, whilst others welcome a face-to-face conversation.
   
   
9. Identify local role models, be it past pupils or local personalities, who have succeeded from your area. Being able to relate is a powerful motivator.
   
   
10. Identify an individual’s worries and overcome those barriers. We have adapted our provision to increase the focus on issues such a student finance and self-esteem, which our children and families commonly raised.

Example: a cluster-wide programme for more able learners in Years 5 and 6

• Challenging courses on subjects beyond the curriculum, taught by a PhD researcher.
• Opportunity to engage with new and challenging topics and ideas – from “Mathematics: Lying with Statistics” to “Anthropology and Archaeology: Making a Museum” or “Business, Brewing and Brawls: the Role of Women in Medieval Towns”.
• Experience of university-style learning in small group tutorials.
• Two visits to competitive universities. So far our pupils, their families and class teachers have visited Oxford, Bath, Cardiff Universities. Our PhD tutors have also provided insights on Nottingham, Swansea and Bangor Universities.
• Develop key university-readiness skills, including self-efficacy, critical thinking and metacognition.
• Cited as an effective use of Pupil Premium/Pupil Development Grant by Ofsted/Estyn.
• Supports the school to meet Gatsby Benchmarks 3 and 7; embedded into wider careers programme.
• Supports KS2-3 transition.

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• Developing a whole-school approach to more able: roles and responsibilities
• How to collaborate in a cluster to develop provision for more able
• 10 ways to support more able learners in KS2-3 transition

Earlier this year, NACE member and Challenge Award holder The Broxbourne School was named one of nine schools to become national language hubs, supporting England’s new Centre of Excellence for Modern Languages. In this blog post, Deputy Headteacher Peter Clift reflects on the school’s journey to becoming a national language hub, and what it hopes to achieve in this role.
 
We are delighted to have been selected as a national language hub. It is an affirmation of all the hard work of the outstanding practitioners we have in our modern foreign language (MFL) department and the enthusiasm they have engendered in our young people to learn a language.
 
We are constantly looking for ways in which to further develop our practice as a school and we believe this will enable us to further enhance the effectiveness of our pedagogy, not just in languages. We are also excited at the prospect of working with other schools to develop their practice; we are confident that as well as having a considerable body of expertise and resources to share, we will also learn an immense amount from the MFL colleagues we work with in other schools. Our lead practitioners are also looking forward to the training they will receive from the Centre of Excellence that will be an integral component of the MFL hub programme.

A whole-school commitment to language learning

We are committed to offering a broad and balanced curriculum to all our students and particularly our disadvantaged pupils, whose attainment exceeds those of non-disadvantaged pupils nationally. Modern languages are central to this curriculum offer. In the past year our curriculum pathways ensured that over 52% of our pupils obtained the EBacc at 4+. In the previous two years this led to the Schools Minister writing to congratulate us for being in the top 100 schools in the country for our EBacc outcomes.
 
In recent years we have given learners a freer choice of languages, which has helped to keep the numbers choosing a language at a very high level, despite a national decline in language numbers. We are keen that the whole school community embrace languages, and this is clear when you walk round our site and see signage in the three languages the school offers.
 
A good part of our success comes down to a considered approach to pedagogy – one of the reasons for our selection as a hub school was the extent to which our daily practice already exemplified the best practice outlined in the Teaching Schools Council (TSC)’s review of MFL provision and practice, which I would urge interested parties to read.

As an economics teacher, I am more than aware of the increasingly global nature of trade (despite certain challenges!) and that our young people are increasingly being asked to compete in a global marketplace for jobs. Facility in a modern foreign language can enable them to compete successfully. More broadly I believe that learning a language and the doors this opens into other cultures can engender empathy and fellow-feeling amongst people around the world at a time when a narrow nationalism seems to be increasingly and worryingly prevalent.

Developing as a national language hub

On a simple level we hope to improve the outcomes and improve the uptake of languages at our school and those of our immediate hub partners. We are looking to ensure a widespread implementation of the pedagogical approach outlined in the TSC review. We would be particularly proud if our work led to an uptake amongst disadvantaged learners, given the cultural capital that access to a modern language can facilitate.
 
Initially it is planned that language hub schools will work with other schools in their immediate geographical area. We are also planning a wider offer of training activities and conferences, and will certainly be welcoming as many colleagues as we can from other schools.
 
Another cohort we think will particularly benefit, and of relevance to our work as a NACE member and Challenge Award school, is our more able language learners. We will be looking to developing a role for them as MFL ambassadors, and from work they have done in the schools as MFL prefects we know they will excel in this.

Peter Clift is Deputy Headteacher at The Broxbourne School, a NACE member and Challenge Award-accredited secondary school and sixth form in Hertfordshire. He has been a teacher for 20 years and a senior leader for more than 10. He leads on pupil progress, able, gifted and talented provision and is the SLT lead for The Broxbourne School’s new MFL hub. 

Welcome back to a new academic year – I hope you feel refreshed for the coming term.

Like NACE, I am sure many of you spent much of the summer preparing for the new academic year – reflecting on policy and development, results and the new challenges that lie ahead.

In my first blog post of the year, I want to share with you some of NACE’s developments – and how NACE members will benefit in the coming weeks and term.

Responding to member views

At the end of last year NACE undertook its first member survey – and the results have informed much of the work we have been focused on over the summer. You told us that online resources and subject-specific materials were some of the most useful ways NACE could support you, so this term will see key resources added to the members’ section of our site; log in to see the latest additions.

Later this term, we’ll be sharing new primary maths resources, and links to partner materials, with a focus on English to follow. We’re also investing in the technology to make these more accessible to busy teachers, with a relaunch of the NACE website planned for later in the year.

NACE Insight, our termly member newsletter, has had a summer “facelift”. With a refreshed and extended format, it will offer some new regular features, including updates from Ofsted, Estyn and partners, a focus on NACE members in the news, recommended resources and your views on the key issues affecting schools.

NACE members are our strength – you are involved in testing, reviewing and developing practice for more able learners. We see in our 400+ Challenge Award schools some of the best practice in the country, representing a unique repository of excellence in teaching and learning for high achievement. Later this term we will be inviting some of you to work with us to interrogate and disseminate good practice, offering supported research opportunities.

National and international developments

As part of its role, NACE not only monitors and reviews more able policy and practice, but also seeks to inform development and debate – both at home and further afield. Here are just a few of the areas we are currently focused on:

• Ofsted updates. This month marks the 25th anniversary of the formation of Ofsted, and we await with interest the first set of findings from its curriculum survey. Once Ofsted has the initial evidence, it will look at whether it needs to place a greater focus on curriculum during inspection; this will feed into the new inspection framework being developed for September 2019.
• Developments in Wales. NACE is closely monitoring the curriculum and professional standard changes in Wales, and it is against this backdrop that we have been asked to work closely with regional consortia partners to support the development of regional MAT policy and practice.
• International support. Further afield, NACE’s international membership continues to grow. Spanning 18 countries including Cyprus, China, Kenya, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Spain and Nigeria, there is a wide mix of primary, secondary, international, British and MoD schools. Over the past 18 months NACE has supported a number of these schools with CPD, and we’ve been delighted to welcome schools from as far afield as China, Italy and Malta to our UK conferences.
• National publications. Our senior team is regularly asked to contribute to publications in the more able field. Currently our education adviser Hilary Lowe sits on the Advisory Editorial Board for The SAGE Handbook of Gifted and Talented Education, and is author of the chapter on The Education of the Highly Able in England and Wales. We will share more on this later in the year.
  

Updates to the NACE Challenge Framework

It is against this backdrop of constant review and development that next month NACE will announce an important update to the NACE Challenge Framework. Over the past decade, the NACE Challenge Framework has become an established and respected tool for whole-school review and improvement in provision for more able learners. The update reflects current policy and thinking and will make the framework more accessible to schools, at any stage in their more able journey. The next issue of Insight, due to arrive in schools in October, will provide more detail.

I hope you will agree that this is an exciting start to NACE’s year – and to the opportunities we can provide our growing community of member schools. I look forward to sharing developments with you as we move through the year, and invite you to contact me directly in the meantime if you want to learn more, or feel you can contribute to our developments.