Collaboration with a School / Schools
Collins with Wilmington Grammar
Adapt from Collins is a learning platform launched in January 2022 that delivers highly impactful adaptive learning journeys, by harnessing student metacognition data alongside traditional attainment data; and providing detailed reports and insights into student understanding and metacognitive skills.
Wilmington Grammar is located in Dartford, Kent, within the Endeavour MAT and with a strong focus on engineering, maths and physics.
Working closely with the science department Collins gathered extensive feedback, data and advice from November 2021 to October 2022.
Key outcomes for Adapt were in gaining authentic feedback from real users – both teachers and students, and in identifying and specifying new functionalities that made the platform more effective including a new homework setting functionality.
Wilmington gained insights into barriers to learning and attainment within the school community, a reduction in teacher workload related to homework and better understanding of the benefits of reflection and metacognition, leading to greater levels of resilience and a move towards independent working in students’ revision at GCSE. They also fully utilised the reporting in Adapt to understand what learning objectives were mastered by each student and where students needed extra support.
CREATE Education Project with 52 Lancashire Secondary Schools
Launched in October 2021 #InspiringLancashire is a unique collaboration delivered by CREATE Education, funded by BAE Systems. Working with 52 Lancashire Secondary Schools, the programme aims to inspire young people about digital and tech careers and to help build Lancashire’s future digital workforce.
Through #InspiringLancashire, CREATE Education are collaborating with 52 schools providing:
a 3D Printer for each school with software and materials;
technical and curriculum CPD training for over 100 teachers;
curriculum, careers and professional development resources;
school workshop days for up to 3000 students focussing on skills development and careers;
a design challenge project for students to consolidate their knowledge and digital skills;
free lifetime technical and curriculum support;
a 3D printing excellence framework to assess and measure the impact of the program and inform school development planning.
The collaboration develops skills and helps schools to deliver the Gatsby benchmarks by educating staff and students on careers within the rapidly developing additive manufacturing and advanced engineering sector and providing employer and employee encounters.
Impact so far:
103 teachers attended a day of CPD;
2368 students attended a workshop day;
3807 additional students have been able to access 3D printing technology that wouldn’t have done so without the collaboration.
Dream Tree Creations with two Dublin, DEIS Schools
Honeydew Kingdom is a digital literacy programme for beginning and struggling readers that encompasses all the key competencies for reading development and fosters connections between STEM and literacy beginning at school-entry level. The consequences for children who fail to learn to read are enormous.
The well-documented gap between the reading scores of children from literacy-rich backgrounds and those of their literacy-impoverished peers will continue to grow unless the foundational skills and content knowledge vital for future academic achievement form the bedrock of their early years’ programme. Dream Tree Creations Ltd has collaborated with two Dublin, Deis schools on a transformative literacy initiative which immerses children in a literacy-rich environment and exposes them to the key foundational skills and high-quality language opportunities that underpin future success. Honeydew Kingdom and its empowering Home/School Partnership component, translate evident-based research into the instructional practices that teachers and parents require to support all students, regardless of background, to become motivated readers and writers.
This is a programme that that has yielded significant results in terms of reading performance with both beginning and struggling readers and one that gives children from low-income areas a passport that will open doors for them for the rest of life.
eduthing with South Farnham Educational Trust (SFET)
The South Farnham Educational Trust (SFET) has been a driving force in delivering initial training across Hampshire, Berkshire, Surrey, Sussex and the London boroughs of Hillingdon, Richmond, Kingston, Sutton and Croydon. To develop further they created a School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) organisation.
To support growth, Sir Andrew Carter, CEO of SFET and Ann-Marie Bahaire, Director of Initial Teacher Training commented that they needed:
“….an industry leading, intuitive product that would support our vision of ‘everything in one place.’ A platform that could track progress against the curriculum, guide the school-based curriculum by taking our highly valued handbooks and training plans online, whilst ensuring all stakeholders had the ability to see progress in real-time….”
Working with their IT partner, eduthing, the SCITT has taken a set of manual and paper-based processes and developed a digital platform to ensure that the administration of the programme is delivered as efficiently as possible for the least possible cost.
This unique partnership has bought together the power of an IT partner with a leading-edge delivery of Initial Teacher Training (ITT), using the skills and knowledge of each organisation to ensure that the programme can scale with an intuitive digital platform.
Fiction Express is an award-winning literacy resource designed to improve all areas of literacy: reading; writing; spelling, punctuation & grammar; and speaking & listening. The resource improves poor reading habits by getting children excited about reading through the power of a deeply engaging experience of co-creation between pupils and authors.
In cooperation with the government of El Salvador, Fiction Express has developed a programme to supports its new educational policies to significantly improve their pupils’ learning outcomes.
The programme shows clear evidence of impact and learning outcomes. Already in the first year, Fiction Express is improving the life and learning outcomes of 380,000 pupils in more than 5,000 schools, increasing both reading and writing skills across all pupils by one grade.
Lyfta Education with Three Bridges Primary School
Lyfta is a teaching and learning platform comprised of interactive 360° spaces and soundscapes of real homes, workplaces and environments from around the world, featuring an array of human stories. Students are invited to explore new places, unlock rich media content, and get to know a diverse range of real people through powerful and inspiring short films. This combination of place, people and pedagogy are unique to the Lyfta experience.
The platform provides an impactful, captivating way for students to experience, and connect with, human diversity, and for educators to nurture the vital skills and values children will need to thrive in our changing world.
Recognising that human stories are a powerful tool to nurture empathy and experience other perspectives, and to increase the chances of seeing the range of students’ communities and cultures represented, Three Bridges introduced Lyfta as an innovative approach to bringing the world into the classroom.
Pearson with the Greenshaw Trust
In December of 2021, the Greenshaw Trust approached Pearson with an assessment-related problem. June 2022 was to be the first exam series in three years. Teachers were working furiously towards preparing their students. During this time, senior leaders identified a need for confidence-building in the following areas: knowledge of the mark scheme, application of the mark scheme and moderation of colleagues’ marking.
With moderation of marking specifically, Greenshaw were concerned about creating an ‘echo-chamber’ delivering the same message repeatedly, as well as the impact this would have on learner progression.
At Pearson, we were able to access a huge range of assessment expertise within the business and our wider examining community. In working through this question with Greenshaw, we were able to tap into our experts to craft a solution that could tangibly help support this group of schools.
The Trust were clear, they didn’t want Pearson to mark their mock exams, as they got a huge amount of value and insight from this. What we could help them with was breaking the echo chamber of moderating students’ papers. We therefore worked closely together to create a support package to meet these needs, and bring our Moderation Service to life.
Reading Solutions UK with Derby Research School and Spencer Academies Trust
Reading Plus is an online reading development programme aimed at pupils in KS2 to KS4 for use in school and at home. It works by building upon the foundational phonics and phonemic awareness skills to develop fluency, stamina, and comprehension.
With a readability range from Y2 to beyond GCSE, the Reading Plus experience is personalised to each pupil’s interests and academic strengths—and builds cross-curricular content-area knowledge.
Reading Plus develops pupils’ stamina and fluency using a Guided Window system, which guides the reader’s eyes across a page of text. This is done at a bespoke speed for each pupil. With this practice, pupils overcome non-fluent reading behaviours often seen in emergent readers, such as habitual re-reading and decoding words they already know. This scaffold changes how pupils approach the text while gradually and effectively increasing the rate at which they can read it with good comprehension. Once pupils demonstrate mastery, the scaffold is removed.
Pupils read independently while teachers can easily support and monitor their progress; baseline and benchmark assessments inform teachers of pupils’ growth. Aligned with the National Curriculum, Reading Plus is attributed to the long-term attainment and success at assessments and nurturing a love for reading.
