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Skegness Junior Academy is a large three-form entry school, with 30 pupils in each class. Our school sits in an area with high deprivation with many of our pupils? parents either unemployed or working in low-paid seasonal jobs. Therefore, our pupils may not be given the exposure to broaden their horizons and develop the essential skills at home. We chose to use the accelerator programme to develop pupils excitement about the wider world, rather than their immediate world of Skegness and raise their aspirations for the future. We felt that the introduction of the skills would provide the tools for the children to succeed and achieve their goals in life. Our curriculum is heavily designed to provide the children with the skills and knowledge to be resilient, independent learners therefore, we knew that the introduction of skills builder would sit hand in hand with our curriculum intent and support our staff in really embedding these essential skills into all aspects of school life.
Overall impact
The impact of the accelerator programme has been fantastic at Skegness Junior Academy. The programme has been very easy to follow, easy to implement and easy to embed into our everyday practice. Our staff have all been complimentary of the programme, understanding the importance of developing our pupils? skillsets and all found navigating the hub for assessments and lessons very straightforward. Skills builder has created a real buzz at our school. The pupils have thoroughly enjoyed learning about what each skill means, how they develop their own skills and understand how each of the skills can link to their current learning and eventually their futures beyond the junior school. They particularly enjoyed the crime scene investigation challenge day. Our goal for the programme was to raise aspirations and develop resilience, and this is exactly what this programme has offered us.
Keep it simple
As the skills are so closely aligned with our school values, they have been very quickly embedded into our school and now underpin the culture of the academy. Every classroom has the skills logos displayed in a central location, so they are easily referred to during classroom discussions ensuring that the language is prevalent in all rooms. All staff (including non-teaching staff) are regularly using the language of the essential skills and reward pupils with dojo points following our behaviour policy. Teachers use this information to nominate a pupil who has demonstrated excellent use or progress of a skill to receive a certificate in a celebration assembly at the end of the term. Each term, we hold assemblies where we launch one or two of the skills to the pupils and teachers use this to identify where they can incorporate the skills into their planning and daily practice. As a result of this, pupils have become very familiar with the language used both inside and outside of lessons.
Start early, keep going
We include all learners in the skills builder programme and all year groups have regular and planned opportunities to be taught the skills, with everyone focussing on the same skill at the same time. At Skegness Junior Academy, we believe that the eight essential skills are fundamental to the pupil?s learning and are inter-woven into our day-to-day life. Therefore, the skills have been embedded into our planning documents, policies and our academy improvement plan. Many opportunities are provided for the pupils to practice and implement the essential skills both explicitly and through a cross-curricular approach and the school?s focus on developing oracy has also raised the pupils' ability to articulate their understanding. Recently, we made the decision to invite parents to use the homezone at home by including this on our school newsletter to encourage increased parental engagement and involvement and to ensure that pupils are given plentiful opportunities to continue practising the
Measure it
All staff consistently use the Hub to inform their teaching of essential skills. This involves assessing before the start of each half term. This helps to capture the children's starting point and inform the teachers on the steps to prioritise in their explicit skill-based lessons. This ensures each class skills builder lessons are tailored to the needs of its pupils and are effective in developing each child's knowledge and application of the essential skills. For us, the use of the hub has been really useful in helping teachers/leaders to identify pupil strengths and weaknesses. For example, through monitoring the hub we recognised a weakness in finding solutions to problems. This has already helped to shape the direction of the programme coverage next year, making this a skill we shall be focussing more on to help our children become more resilient and develop their growth mindset.
Focus tightly
We ensure that building essential skills is explicitly taught, through rich discussion during assembly time, sharing stories, and by using planned lessons on the hub. Every class has regularly timetabled sessions for explicitly teaching the essential skills which they are signposted to after they complete the assessments on the hub. These sessions are closely monitored by the skills leader. This practice allows us to introduce different steps at a stage suitable for the class needs, ensuring the pupils can develop their understanding of the various steps of the skills and make adequate progress. We also map out the skills across all areas of the curriculum so that staff know the opportunities that can easily be used to pick out the skills in the existing learning.
Keep practising
As a school, we prioritise making skills builder a successful supplementary programme to what already exciting opportunities we offer our pupils. Therefore, we adopt a cross-curricular approach to teach the skills. The eight essential skills are built into all aspects of our curriculum. Daily, the pupils are encouraged to show the skills in all that they do - whether that be in formal lessons, PE lessons and play times with all staff encouraging the use of this language. For example, in PE, the pupils are regularly asked what good teamwork looks like and if they are not demonstrating this, they are reminded of why it is important in the hope they will show good sportsmanship in the future. We also offer several clubs which enable pupils to practice the essential skills such as teamwork in cooking, creativity in dancing and problem solving in Tagtiv8. In addition to this, we run Smart School council meaning that every child has a voice and is expected to play a role, alongside a school
Bring it to life
The pupils are provided with lots of opportunities to see the essential skills in wider life. For example, all year groups have visitors in school such as authors, musicians, policemen and many children also get to visit the local college and participate in workshops linked to further education courses. During these visits, all these professionals reference the skills with the children helping them to see the link with the wider world beyond Skegness Junior Academy. Our challenge days and enterprise challenges have allowed the children to practice and develop the skills with activities that are closely matched to wider life in the community or their future aspiring careers. Further opportunities such as sporting competitions and Bike-ability have allowed the children to see and use the eight essential skills, demonstrating teamwork, aiming high and staying positive to name a few.
What's next
Following the success of this year, we are continuing to work with Skills Builder. We are continuing our membership as we have found the resources to be invaluable in developing our pupils? skills. We are looking forward to using different challenge days to continue to excite and inspire our pupils and enrich the learning of the essential skills.
