Case studies

Case Study for Eastover CP School, Bridgwater, Somerset.

Despite being in the rural county of Somerset, Bridgwater is a town with the kinds of problems that one would expect to find in the inner city. High unemployment, poverty, a high crime rate, one of the highest incidences of child abuse in the country and a serious drug problem.

Eastover, a school of 420 children, lies in the very centre of the town with no playing field and bounded on three sides by roads and on the forth a railway siding where nuclear waste from Hinckley Point power Station is stored prior to being sent to Sellafield for treatment.

Having taken over as Headteacher in 1995 a number of key issues became apparent:

• The low self-esteem felt by many Bridgwater people was reflected in the children at the school.
• SATs results were low
• The expert and highly professional staff were ready to commit themselves fully to the many changes and initiatives coming into school as long as they had real impact on teaching and learning in the school.
• WE ALL WANTED OUR CHILDREN TO BECOME LEARNERS AND NOT SIMPLY ‘KNOWERS’.

These key points offered huge challenges, our problem was how to do something about them.

Often the most significant things in our lives come about through chance and coincidence, enter stage right Alistair Smith and Accelerated Learning.

Following a successful OFSTED report in 1997 and knowing how ‘flat’ staff can feel after the experience I was keen to give them a ‘lift’ with an interesting and entertaining INSET day. A friend had been to one of Alistair’s sessions and I duly booked him for our INSET.

I can only describe the day as inspirational and a revelation!

We came away, as a staff, fired with enthusiasm with a number of staff saying to me that the day had reminded them why they had come into teaching in the first place!

Like all good INSET days it also provided answers, but for me it provided something else; questions. Some of them uncomfortable.

For example:-
Could it really be true that, because I had little or no knowledge of preferred learning styles or Multiple Intelligences, I had excluded huge numbers of children from a worthwhile learning experience in my 23 years of teaching?

As it turned out I was not alone in this and at a staff meeting the week after our INSET it became apparent that we all felt that we had been given an insight into a way of working that could transform our teaching and our school.

It was important to me that the whole school community should understand what we wanted to do and why we wanted it so I embarked on a series of workshops that parents could attend with their children to find out more.

We also looked carefully at the way our working day was organized and built ‘break states’ and ‘brain gym’ exercises into our day.

Even the school tuck shop came under scrutiny with the traditional crisps gradually giving way to fruit bars and flapjacks!!

Music was introduced into the classrooms as a key-learning tool.

These are all fairly low key changes but ones that did make a real and observable impact on the attitudes and behaviour of the children. Our real challenge however was the adoption of the ALPs method in our teaching.

One of the beauties of the method is that so much of it simply reinforces or explains many of the good things that are happening in our classes already. But what we wanted to do was to give a commitment to the whole process and not just those elements that we were using here and now.

After a series of planning meetings between key stage coordinators, year groups and the whole staff our lessons quickly reflected ALPs cycle and the impact was immediate.

• The classroom environment was transformed in many cases.
• Learning was connected so that children could see where they had come from.
• The class could see where the learning was going.
• Children could recognize when goals had been reached.
• A wide variety of teaching inputs [VAK] were used.
• There was greater interaction between the children with each member of the class, including the teacher, being seen as a learner and teacher.
• Plenary sessions that often ‘dropped off the end’ of lessons were prized and valued
• The quality of teaching and learning rose.

As a result a new vigour was introduced into the school, which became evident in improved attitudes, behaviour and test results [moving in our KS2 SAT’s from low 60’s {%} to between 85 and 92% in the three key subjects] all of which were monitored to ensure that we were getting a ‘pay back’ for all our hard work.

There were also other benefits that we couldn’t foresee in 1997. The introduction of the Literacy and Numeracy Hour, that was a difficult experience for many schools, fitted easily into our way of working.

We also began to see the important part self-esteem played in the life and learning of our children. So important in fact that I established a post of “Teacher with Responsibility for Self Esteem” in the school and set aside one day a week for that teacher to work with children for whom self-esteem was a problem. That teacher is also responsible for promoting the use of circle time throughout the school and this too has had a significant impact on the life of the school.

There is still a lot for us to do, and many more improvements to be made but the impact of ALP’s has been great. Not only has it given us measurable successes in the classroom it has also reminded us all that we can and should enjoy teaching and learning. We have become a learning community with our individual goals achieved through shared experiences and a common purpose.