Effective Papers For learning

Identifying where learning comes from is an inexact science, and despite the over-confident title of this post, we can’t say with full certainty what works. We especially can’t dictate what will work in other schools with contexts, challenges and opportunities that are unknown to us and different to our own. However, and with that caveat in mind, this post considers aspects of teaching at our school which seem to make the most difference in promoting achievement. English Literature GCSE results in particular make for an interesting case study. Our school is placed in the first percentile for progress according to FFT, and disadvantaged students make more progress than the average for the cohort. Last year, 120 /225 students outperformed FFT5 estimates. Something's going very right here - but what? Last week, we tried conducting a post-mortem on a successful former Year 11 GCSE student’s book, by photographing every page and analysing it to identify its key features. What did the te...