Case studies

Success Through Accelerated Learning

Melcombe Primary School

Janet Moffatt

Janet Moffat has been Headteacher of Melcombe Primary, an inner city London school, for eleven years. As a Head, she concentrates on actions which are most likely to lead to improvement and will not be sidetracked by less important issues.

Janet is passionate about learning and considers it her primary role to instil this passion in her children. Her enthusiasm is summed up in the school's equation for success, which is displayed throughout school – Vision + Action + Passion = Success – as she wants all her children to be stakeholders in their own learning and future. Another of her main roles is to motivate and energise staff. She firmly believes that one of the key ways of developing teachers is to model good practices for them and then to coach them on the job.

Melcombe was awarded Beacon Status in January 2001 and, for the last four years, Janet has been embedding the Accelerated Learning Model into the school's learning and teaching practices, using the beacon funding to disseminate these practices with partnership schools.

Janet is a very experienced course facilitator and has delivered a range of in-service training to Headteachers, senior managers, subject co-ordinators, class teachers and students on a whole range of subjects. She is currently working in several London Boroughs and giving regular talks to teachers at conferences on Accelerated Learning practices. In June 2004 she was awarded Headteacher of the Year for London by the Teaching Awards after being nominated by an ex-pupil.

When I took on the headship of Melcombe in 1994, it was a school in decline. It had been badly led and managed, staff and pupil expectations were low, the quality of learning and teaching was very variable and the overall attitude and behaviour of the children towards learning was very poor. By 1999 Ofsted deemed Melcombe Primary to be a good school and there was much to celebrate. However, it was at this point that I decided that, if I was going to take Melcombe through a new cycle of development, as the Head I needed to further develop my knowledge and understanding of how children learn best. This was the moment when Melcombe began to change from a good school to a great school.

Melcombe Primary has always had its challenges. Situated in Hammersmith, we currently have 62% of our pupils eligible for free school dinners, 52% with English as a second language, 58% on the SEN Register and mobility at 30%. The school is part of a small Educational Zone with one secondary school and two other primary schools. In 1999 we had been judged a good school. I had played safe for four years, dutifully implementing DfES initiatives like the Literacy and Numeracy Hour, but these had not impacted significantly on standards of attainment at Melcombe and there was a huge cohort of children whose potential I knew we had not unlocked. The staff and I had already begun to successfully tackle the barriers to learning through developing a challenging and highly stimulating environment, which actively promotes and supports the learning process for every individual in the school. But I knew we had to go further, so when I had the opportunity to take part in a course that would challenge my thinking and make me really look at the nature of learning and where and when it happens, I knew I had to grasp it.

As a result of the course, I began to experiment with my own teaching and I began to focus on the children more when observing others' lessons, especially during the teaching inputs. There was good teaching going on, but not all the children were actively engaged in their learning. They weren't misbehaving, but some EAL children were clearly struggling to understand what their teacher was saying, a few children were fidgeting on and off throughout the input, and it was often the same small group of children who responded to the teacher's questions. The children could tell me what they were learning, but only some could really explain why and how this learning related to prior and future learning.

Working with my SENCO and Year 1 teacher, we embarked in the summer term of 2000 on a small project, which was aimed at making the teaching of phonics more visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (VAK) and getting all the children actively involved throughout the whole lesson. Brain breaks, opportunities for physical reprieve, were introduced to the children and resources were made which visualised everything we said to allow access for the EAL learners. It was the birth of ANTS ON APPLES, which is now a whole school approach to teaching letter names and sounds. So began Melcombe's journey down the road of Brain Based Learning.

In the academic year 2000-2001 I began to talk to staff and children in assemblies about how our brain works. I took the whole staff away in March 2001 to Birmingham for two days so they could visit schools which were using aspects of brain-based learning. On our return I asked them to take risks, fly kites, and do things differently. Some decided to introduce mind mapping, some tried brain breaks and others examined how they could make their teaching inputs more VAK. Staff meetings became an opportunity for teachers to share their practices and children's learning outcomes and to say what had worked well and why.

In the autumn term of 2001 the teachers were introduced to Alistair Smith's Accelerated Learning Model and extensive training and support was given to empower staff to begin to implement it. As part of this, the children were made aware of his BASICS model to further develop the their self-esteem and belief that they can be successful. At Melcombe we believe that in order for children to be successful learners they need to believe in themselves. They must see the value in their learning and that they are capable of learning it. That is why building and maintaining positive self-esteem in the learner is central to everything we do at Melcombe. Personal Goal Mapping was introduced to the children at the beginning of the academic year as a tool that would help them see where they wanted to go, how they would get there and that they could achieve it. Everyone was encouraged to:

• Identify and visualise a main goal for the year
• Identify the key targets needed to achieve this goal
• Break the targets down into small achievable steps
• Make the goal map visual for easy reference
• Check progress by reviewing the goal map on a regular basis
• Modify the targets if necessary, but never change the goal

   

By the end of this academic year ‘Big Pictures' for each half term were beginning to appear in teacher's classrooms and children were being let into the secret of what they were learning, why they were learning it and what they could do with this learning.

The last three years have been spent cementing, refining, and developing practices which help make us a ‘Learning to Learn School .' A massive amount of work has been undertaken with staff and children on developing emotional intelligence and creating an emotionally supportive learning environment, on fostering higher order thinking skills and on devising a curriculum which is supportive of the learning process. We have given the children ownership of their learning by constantly discussing what effective learning means to them and giving them plenty of opportunity to think about and discuss how best they learn and how they feel about their learning.

When visitors, especially Headteacher's and inspectors, ask me what my specific role has been in the development of the School's Model for Learning my answer is to teach to it. I am absolutely passionate about learning and I totally and utterly subscribe to a brain based approach to learning and teaching. As the Head I have seen it as my role to lead from the front, which means I teach, model it for other staff and coach staff on the job. By teaching I have been able to refine aspects of our Learning Model; it has helped me further refine and develop teachers' practices and it has given me a first hand experience of finding out how children respond to this model of learning. If you are passionate about something and staff can see that you are able to implement what you are asking them to do then they are more likely to have a go themselves, especially if they know they will be supported and allowed to make mistakes.

So what does Melcombe School look like now, five years on? Click here to read about some of the most significant differences between school practices in 1999 and in 2005.

An Ofsted report in 2005 deemed Melcombe to be a “highly effective inclusive school that provided very good value for money.” They acknowledged that all the teachers were thoroughly committed to ensuring that children learn to the best of their ability and recognised that the Accelerated Learning Model ensured that individual pupil's learning needs and preferences were taken into account and acted upon. They commented on the fact that “teachers and pupils understand how they learn best.”

Melcombe is a “learning to learn school” and we are proud of our achievements. However, we are not complacent about our successes and there is still much we can do in our pursuit to unlock the learning potential of every child in our school so that they leave us as successful learners who have a belief in themselves and enjoy learning.

We continue to refine and develop our practices and are currently working on embedding thinking skills practices across the foundation subjects so that children are making meaningful links between their learning and can confidently transfer skills taught in one subject area into another. We work very closely with another primary school that has very similar practices and have had three very successful residential conferences with them in addition to a number of one-day training sessions on brain based learning.

Staff continue to develop their own personal understanding of how children best learn by keeping updated on current research and literature and eight staff to date have completed a three-day dyslexia course, which has really helped us tackle some of the problems we have had accessing some of our learners who are on the SEN register.

I consider myself very lucky to work with such a committed staff, who have walked my vision of the school and have been, and continue to be, prepared to take on changes that will give every child every possible chance of success.