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The Ecclesbourne School is a large 11-18 secondary school located in Duffield, a large village in South Derbyshire. The school has a large catchment area and serves students from rural and more urban areas. We are proud of our student attainment and achievement and want to ensure that students are resilient, self-assured and challenging learners, both to themselves and within any other cultural context. We wanted to use Skills Builder to formalise and celebrate the skills that students need and develop, to support their work within the curriculum and to prepare them for their future careers.
Overall impact
We have embedded Skills Builder lessons within our KS3 PDC programme. This is delivered by form tutors and supported through assemblies. The impact of this has been students and teachers are beginning to recognize when essential skills are being used and have a framework to develop them. This has been most apparent on our Skills Builder Days where students have been able to demonstrate their essential skills in a really enjoyable way.
Keep it simple
We have begun our work with Skills Builder in KS3. Form tutors have delivered lesson within the PDC programme of work and Heads of Year have delivered assemblies. We selected essential skills that we felt students would most benefit from after Covid-19, speaking, listening and staying positive. KS3 form rooms display the essential skills posters to highlight their importance and remind students and teachers that they underpin work in the classroom and beyond. We have introduced a Skills Builder Challenge Day into each KS3 year group.
Start early, keep going
We will continue to use Skills Builder within KS3 next year. We focus on the same skill with each year group at one time. This helps teachers to begin to refer to the essential skills within their teaching. We have written home to parents to encourage them to use the Skills Builder home learning hub.
Measure it
For the first year the starting point for each year group was chosen by myself. This was adjusted as we went through the year based on feedback from tutors. One focus next year will be to support students to review their own essential skills.
Focus tightly
We decided to focus on one essential skill with all KS3 year groups at one time. This helped embed the programme and was supported by our assembly programme. The Skills Builder Challenge Days have proved very successful at allowing the students to demonstrate their essential skills as well as being very enjoyable and engaging. We are planning on introducing the Year 7 Challenge Day earlier in the next academic year, as it will be a great opportunity for form tutors to get to know their new tutees.
Keep practising
Ecclesbourne School has a large range of extra curricula activities that students participate in. An area for development next year is to encourage students to recognise where they are using and developing, essential skills within these activities.
Bring it to life
Students are encouraged to reflect on their use of essential skills in form time, lessons and when taking part in Challenge Days. This is helped by the display of the Essential Skills posters in classrooms. Next year we will aim to bring the language of essential skills into other areas of the school such as the Year 8 Take Your Child To Work Day, Year 9 Enterprise Day and Outward Bound trips.
What's next
We will continue to further embed Skills Builder within KS3; ensuring that students are able to recognise and reflect on their own development and use of the essential skills and develop teacher's confidence in referring to the essential skills during their teaching and celebrating student success.
