At Easter I became assistant headteacher of a brand new free school. I had never expected to join a start-up – still less one with a French specialism. La Fontaine Academy is an English-French bilingual school set up by a parents group committed to creating an outstanding school for their children.
The headteacher, Sebastien Chapleau, is a member of the same professional network as me, Future Leaders, and with a passion for educational equality, he was well-placed to make the parents’ vision a reality.
The students in the initial intake were from a variety of backgrounds, many from aspirational families who had supported the opening of the school, and some from less wealthy backgrounds. The numbers of free school meal and SEN students were below average – an easy ride on paper – but this changed over the course of the school’s first year as numbers increased, and the constant arrival of new students gave staff on-going challenges.
The main challenges with a new school are that, unlike other schools, there are no existing systems in place. This on the surface sounds like a wonderful situation; you don’t inherit any failing systems and can design them yourself. But in practical terms, there is little time to build them because everyone is so stretched.
As a new free school, we had Department for Education (DfE) monitoring visits in September and they found that teaching was strong, behaviour was excellent and the systems were there to develop teaching further. We were told our next goal was to support children to become active in the learning process rather than passive recipients.
My role was to implement and embed a “mastery” teaching approach in order for pupils to learn to redraft and improve their own work, equipping them with a deep understanding of their learning.
My aim was for all teachers to be able to plan and deliver mastery skills teaching sessions regularly. I planned to accomplish this by training staff, ensuring consistency, and involving students. One of the main challenges was making this a staff priority in a school with so little time and resources.
Training staff
If mastery was to be central to our curriculum, staff had to explicitly teach skills that emphasised depth of learning. They needed to provide lesson time for students to act on the feedback they received and allow them to “master” their learning before leaving the site that day.
I introduced the method to our teachers gradually, beginning with a series of CPD sessions on the mastery of writing. Sharing the reasoning behind the approach, as well as impact data, helped to ensure swift staff buy-in.
In these sessions we covered how the use of explicit feedback can support children to make small changes to each draft of a piece of work and improve it each time. Children should be taught both how to give feedback and how to act upon it. We put together Five Steps of Feedback as a guide for how the feedback process should work:
- Step 1: Adult feedback.
- Step 2: Peer feedback.
- Step 3: Different adult feedback.
- Step 4: Different peer feedback.
- Step 5: Teacher verbal feedback on next step.
We launched this approach in the classroom through children and staff completing an art piece based upon Austin’s Butterfly. This is the story, of how feedback and redrafting helped Austin, a first-grader in the US, radically improve his drawing of a Tiger Swallowtail butterfly in only six drafts (you can find the clip easily online).
The approach of drafting, focused feedback and acting on that feedback was then applied to writing in school.
By including the children in the introduction, we showed staff the potential impact of the new approach. I modelled the process myself, and then supported and offered feedback to them in their first attempt. This was really successful and teachers reported feeling supported in the development of the new approach.
But it was not all plain sailing. The first issue I encountered was having enough time to support individual teachers. I was in class full-time, so had to schedule after-school meetings to fulfil my leadership responsibilities. In order to make more time, I booked team meetings for mastery every half-term so that training and planning were completed together. This also removed the risk of “poetic licence” when teachers went away and planned independently.
Ensuring consistency
Mastery means children must be able to understand how to improve their work, so staff need to ask clear questions in a way the students understand. To support this, I felt that 100 per cent of written and verbal feedback should be communicated using a shared language.
During term one lesson observations, learning walks and book scrutiny identified a large variation in feedback language. The agreed marking policy was being used effectively but the wide variety of language used to explain the next steps was having a direct impact on children’s work.
We worked as a team to design 10 feedback phrases that followed our school value of growth mindset. These included:
- “Let’s think about how we can improve this section/paragraph/sentence/word choice...”
- “You can do it – it’s tough but you can. Let’s break it down into steps.”
The words “finished” and “final” were banned because they do not reflect the on-going journey of learning.
We shared these 10 phrases with students and in an assembly we made some school-wide rules on how to give really good feedback. The children decided that feedback needed to be “honest but kind”, “focused on changing one element” and “clear and highly descriptive”.
These three rules were then implemented to all feedback in class: “Feedback should be honest and give clear direction to change only one element.” Within half a term this could be seen in learning walks, book scrutiny, pupil interviews, and in planning.
Student mastery
I wanted to ensure that 80 per cent of children had the understanding and skills required to critique, feedback and respond in order to improve a draft.
At the start of the year, children didn’t know what mastery meant or how to critique their own or others’ work. Students now know the Five Steps of Feedback, they listen to feedback and use it to improve their next draft. Further to this, they are able to self-assess and suggest how they can make improvements to their own work.
Based on parent and student surveys, 94 per cent of students are aware of the feedback process and can talk about this confidently. Parents are aware of the process and the work has been shared with them during parents’ evening sessions so that they see its purpose.
The impact
By the end of 2014/15, the results for English, where most of mastery practice had occurred, were very positive. Our key stage 1 results saw 91.3 per cent of children making expected progress or above, compared to a national average of 88 per cent. Compared to the 2014 national average, we also had above an average proportion of children achieving at Level 3 in writing.
Furthermore, 100 per cent of teachers are now planning mastery within English or International Primary Curriculum sessions on a three weekly cycle, while also taking opportunities to teach mastery in intervention time ensuring that children have mastered the morning lessons before moving onto the next skill.
Parents, children and staff are clear about our use of mastery and why we do it. A learning support assistant said: “At first I was unsure about making four-year-olds redraft the same piece of work over and over, but now I can see the impact. The confidence the children have and their writing ability have really improved.”
One classroom teacher added: “The children show grit – one of our school values – in this approach and now have a positive approach to mastery as they can see the impact it has had on their writing in a short period of time.”
Best of all are the words of a year 2 student: “We need to keep trying and trying and trying and trying so that we get better.”
Next year my work on mastery will expand into the whole curriculum. I will need to train our new intake and new staff. As a school we have also signed up to the Maths Mastery programme, supporting the depth before breadth approach. Mastery is central to what we do at La Fontaine and it is evident in all lessons. I feel this demonstrates the impact of this change beyond results.
- Jenna Crittenden is assistant headteacher at La Fontaine Academy in south London.
Future Leaders
Future Leaders is a leadership development programme for aspiring headteachers of challenging schools. To apply or nominate, visit www.future-leaders.org.uk. The Future Leaders Trust is also recruiting for Talented Leaders, a programme to place exceptional school leaders into headship roles in the areas that need them most.