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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 socioeconomic better off counterparts, despite the best efforts of staff.We are aiming to narrow/bridge the gap between these learners and have identified our partner school in the UK as an ideal school to work with.We are aiming to un-pick what it is that they do to ensure that all the students progress as well as each other and that being labelled as a disadvantaged student does not mean they can not reach their potential.We are aiming to look at the 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 English school selected 6 members of staff from 5 subject areas all who will be 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 Cristo Rey´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, 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 learners?. We will use our students as a case study to take to England and shadow similar students in our English 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 English 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 England 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 lower ability learners and those who come to us at a higher starting point.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 Spain
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