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Narrowing the gap between higher and lower achievers
Start date: Sep 1, 2016, End date: Aug 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Our project is driven by one thing, to improve our ability as educators to help our disadvantaged students who are not progressing as well as our more socioeconomically better off counterparts. We are aiming to narrow the gap between these learners and have identified our partner school in Galicia as an ideal school to work with. We are aiming to un-pick what it is that they do to ensure that all students progress as well as each other and that being labeled by 'Ofsted' as a disadvantaged student does not mean they can not reach their potential. We are aiming to look at five subject areas (MFL, Science, Maths, Art and Music) where we have identified certain individual students who are not reaching their potential. We have in conjunction with our Spanish school selected 6 members of staff from 5 subject areas all who will be each looking at a strand of teaching and learning we feel directly contributes to our disadvantaged students under performance. We have selected a broad spectrum of subjects to see if there is any differentiation between the progress of these students in less academic subjects versus a practical approach to teaching. Our project will be to work as a team to visit our partner school and look at how they have managed to narrow the gap so effectively over the past 3 years and look for the reasons why St. John's has such an issue with the progress of our disadvantaged students and why it has been part of our learning improvement plan for the past three years and we still haven't made any progress towards finding out a way to narrow the gap between the achievement of the aforementioned learners? We will use our students as a case study to take to Spain and shadow similar students in our Spanish partner school who are out performing ours, what do they do that helps them to progress well?, what teaching and learning techniques are used to ensure they improve?, how do staff differentiate to allow these students to fly?, are there cultural aspects that allow students to progress better than our students? and does the Spanish curriculum in practice have anything to offer that we could implement in our school. Is their anything that more practical subjects offer our disadvantaged students that helps them to improve? This coupled with each member of the working party focusing on one key strand we hope will allow us to effect change on the school as a whole.We as a working party of six members of staff have been chosen to tackle this extremely challenging task that as a school we have prioritised. We envisage that the methodology and approaches that we will learn in Spain will allow us to help our students to improve, the long term benefits will be rolled out to the whole school via CPD sessions ran by the working party taking part in the project. The overall aim is to reduce the aforementioned gap of 23% between our disadvantaged learners and those who come to us from a more privileged background. Our creating of baseline assessments will allow us to monitor the progress of students throughout the progress which links directly to annual appraisal and performance reviews of staff, we will also take on regular feedback from students to see what impact our new approaches have on their learning.Our aim to travel together we feel optimises the opportunity for group reflection, allow lessons learned via job-shadowing to be implemented at the same time and across the full range of subjects and teaching and learning strands we have identified. We also feel it will have a bigger impact on staff allowing them to engage in the project as a team member. The aim will be to follow up this project with further ones to tackle issues that we as a school identify moving forward.We would aim to share and disseminate our results at a school level but we feel that such is the issue of disadvantaged students underachieving that we would also aim to relay our findings at a regional and even national level. This would take the form of CPD sessions ran by the staff and we would create a guide to be shared via etwinning at EU level. We need to effect change, we need to improve the life chances for disadvantaged students and all staff involved in this innovative yet difficult project are passionate about the opportunities that receiving Erasmus+ funding could have on our careers as educators but also those students who are just not getting what they deserve under the current system of teaching and learning in the UK. We aim to bring about transformational change, supporting new practices in 5 key subject areas in an attempt to narrow the attainment gap as a result of this project we will also see the improvement of staff MFL skills, development of confidence and project management skills and the prospect of future cross-curricular project with Spain.
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