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We are a stand alone Academy in Bournemouth in an area of disadvantage with higher than average numbers of SEND and free school meal/pupil premium students. We have students from year 7-13 as we have a sixth form college too.
Overall impact
The challenge days have been a real highlight the students have enjoyed the project based and practical nature of the tasks. The common language has given us a clear structure we can use in our community with primary schools, employers and stakeholders as well as our students and staff. I would also like to thank Sarah Barron for her support and understanding of how schools work she has been great at offering and delivering our CPD and really clear in helping us identify and work towards our next goals. Also it is lovely to get her thanks and appreciation for all the efforts we have put in. I am really excited as we have been able to update our school improvement plan to include developing essential skills this is approved by our senior leadership team and governors and we have been able to put this in our career plan and web page, which again has been ratified by governors so I am confident it will go from strength to strength across the Academy.
Keep it simple
We have posters of the skills builder 8 skills in every classroom and learning space. We consistently use the language across teaching and learning through regular CPD sessions with staff and in our assemblies and tutor time with students. We value the skills and use the certificates to award students for achieving these through work experience and participating in challenge days. Skills Builder also features on our school plan, careers plan and website to ensure that it will continually remain a priority. We also run regular houose assemblies about the essential skills and their importance.
Start early, keep going
We have written to parents and given them all access to skills builder and encouraged them to support the development of the skills at home. We have found the lower school students have loved the challenge days: we ran Operation Moon Base, Start Up Success, A Day in the Life of Politics and Bid to Build with really positive feedback from staff and students. We also subscribe to the unifrog platform which is used across the Academy both in the curriculum and in tutor time which also uses the skills builder icons and essential skills language. Our entire tutor time package in sixth form is based on the Unifrog platform which further enhances and supports our aim to develop the essential skills development of our learners. We also deliver assemblies to our feeder primary schools and have introduced the skills builder icons in our assemblies and transition days to year 6 students.
Measure it
All students have an essential skills self-assessment tool in their planners. Students use this resource to reflect on their essential skills targets and areas for development. In addition, many tutors have been using the Hub group-level assessment tool to identify resources to use with their classes. Next year we would like to make this assessment cycle more consistent. We underook a through evaluation of our first challenge day, by sending a survey out to staff and students. This helped us to monitor the impact of the Challenge Day; we used the feedback to improve future Challenge Days. A large majority of students enjoyed the day, many (between 50% and 39%) rating it 'very good' or 'fantastic'. Different year group learnt different things about their skills, but encouragingly all year groups gave a high rating for learning 'how to improve their skills' For all three groups the opening sessions were not as popular with the latter sessions. This may be because these were new challenges for them which took time for them to understand. Most Year 7s & 9s enjoyed all the sessions (never less than 60%, for Year 8s it was never less than 50%) Comments on how to improve the day were most commonly about being more practical and active across the Year groups
Focus tightly
All students in Year 7-9 have received regular tutor time sessions on Skills Builder. Tutors have used Hub resources to build specific steps of Speaking and Listening. All students have also participated in at least one Challenge Day this year. We have also been running an Aiming High intervention with our 'Bourne Scholars', focusing on Aiming High. All of our staff have received three Inset training sessions on Skills Builder. We ran a Skills Builder day where all our lessons explicitly focused on developing the 8 essential skills as part of National Careers Week and this will be an annual event. Our sicth form tudents have been using Unifrog once a week to reflect ont he essential skills they have developed through work experience and extracurricular activities. Next year we plan to build Skills Builder slots into the tutor time schedule for all year groups, to allow students to have more regular learning opportunities.
Keep practising
Our ACE clubs extra curricular after school have now been mapped across the skills builder icons and all contribute to developing the skills of our students. Across the curriculum, each topic starts with a 'careers profile' which highlights a career that the topic links to, and the essential skills that will be important in that topic. Skills Buildelr posters are in every classroom, so staff can reference these within the wider curriculum. Our teachers have had the training, support and most importantly time to reflect on Skills Builder delivery both in their role as a teacher and in their subject area and in their role as tutors.
Bring it to life
We work with numerous employers and when we brief them for their talks and presentation and for work experience we share the skills builder icons and ask them to refer to this in their interactions with our students. This common language can be really helpful in making these employer encounters meaningful. We have had our employers reflect on their company values and ethos and map these across the skills builder icons too. Again we use these in work experience which takes place in year 10 and 12 as we use the Unifrog careers platform to facilitate this.
What's next
Further embed across tutor groups with more time and create a more formal approach for teaching staff to use formative assessments. This needs to be more consistent and come from the Directors of Learning and Seniro Leadership Team but I am very confident now that we are pushing towards Gold award as we are definitely there in many sections now.
