School showcase: Ridgeway School – The Wirral
4 areas of focus:
Personalisation
Curriculum flexibility
Blended learning
Beyond the classroom
What does personalisation mean?
Meeting more needs of more students to a fuller extent!
Ridgeway school spoke about the long and winding road from ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’ to make the step up we had to do something radical. You get tied up in the personal needs of the students to the need to achieve for the performance tables.
One of the main context and barriers was LITERACY
Asked subjects to explain to students why their subject would make a difference to the students lives? Each department has a mission statement displayed in the corridor.
They said to the Maths department you are no longer allowed to use a textbooks and this created a shift in the way students would learn.
Ridgeway school is following a thematic approach to learning across all subjects which has helped improve results along ‘The C’s’ from the Scottish Enterprise system. Allowing more subjects to make links and so students could make links within their own learning much easier.
Listening to this talk from Ridgeway I could hear many similarities between our own school and what is happening and the situation we are facing, interesting to hear another viewpoint.
Ridgeway say that you have to commit to take time away from other subjects until students make improvements in their literacy and numeracy, if they can’t read how can they access your subject anyway?
A good tip was to get all subject areas to actually getting students to complete extended writing projects or assessments no matter what they subject is, not just for English.
I also loved the visual representation of the School Improvement Plan (SIP) which was in the staff room and in say a main area of the school so all could see what the school was working towards.
Parental engagement – how it helps with raising attainment – we ask our parents one question – are you satisfied with your students work? They get a 99% return and any dissatisfied returns they follow this up.
I also liked that the teachers all got a complete personalised planner with the student data in it for the beginning of the year, really interesting idea.
I enjoyed listening to the journey of Ridgeway school and think there are some good ideas mentioned here that schools could take on board, if you have any comments or ideas from reading this then please get in touch.