Ensuring all students who attend Broadway Academy, achieve exceptional results (the top 15% nationally) in English.
A Case Study: English and Literacy success at Broadway Academy
At Broadway Academy, the English results have gone from strength to strength. This year, students in English achieved a Progress 8 score of +0.45. This result would place us in the top 15% of English departments nationally for student progress. This is no fluke; student progress has been increasing year-on-year, driven by our ambition and dogged determination to ensure that every child – regardless of their context or starting point – receives an excellent education.
Reflecting upon the success of our students, it has become clear that four vital principles have created the conditions for ongoing growth and improvement:
- A collaborative, ambitious and committed team of teachers driven by a sense of moral purpose.
- A challenging, coherent and effectively-sequenced curriculum, including intensive literacy support for students who need it.
- An approach to teaching and learning that is guided by a fusion of research-informed principles and creativity.
- A whole school approach to Literacy including all students sitting the The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art Exams (LAMDA) https://www.lamda.ac.uk/our-exams we also have a well-stocked Library and an Academic Librarian- Mr Dolby.
The English team at Broadway Academy are phenomenal. At the heart of the team is a belief that every child can, and must, succeed. We work collaboratively at all times, co-constructing curriculum resources, sharing creative approaches to teaching and learning, and supporting one another with behaviour so that we maintain our high expectations of attitudes to learning at all times.
Our curriculum is challenging, coherent, and always improving. It is a sculpture that, as a team, we have been carving and chiselling over a number of years, ensuring that every child has access to an ambitious body of knowledge and skill that is carefully sequenced across every key stage. Our sculpture will always remain incomplete. It has clear shape, but it is not a monolith: as a team, we reflect on our curriculum continuously, interrogating what works and what needs improving.
At the core of our curriculum is a workbook for every unit, constructed by us for our students. All of our teachers deliver from these workbooks to ensure that there is equity to the knowledge and skills encountered by every student, regardless of their prior attainment. Our teachers then adapt and supplement the workbooks so that they are tailored to their students. Our workbooks borrow from Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, embedding systematic opportunities to revisit and recall prior learning, introducing new learning in small steps, and then guiding students to apply their learning with increasing independence.
As a department, we also champion the importance of explicitly teaching Tier 3 vocabulary in an effort to begin closing the vocabulary deficit of many disadvantaged students. For every unit, we collaboratively develop a Guide to Genius – our version of a knowledge organiser that places particular emphasis on vocabulary. The teaching of these words is then supported by our workbooks, ensuring a consistent body of knowledge is acquired by every child. Our emphasis on vocabulary means that now our students describe Priestley’s Arthur Birling as hubristic, and can then also apply it when discussing Macbeth’s hamartia.
The retention of this knowledge is then supported by our departmental homework policy, where students are taught to revise independently from their Guides to Genius from Year 7. We recognise the vital importance of teaching students how to study effectively, and so our homework centres around this activity. Students are then quizzed in class, where success breeds motivation and helps to crystallise the value of independent study. This policy has also significantly reduced workload; it means that we can focus on teaching great lessons, rather than chasing high-effort but sometimes low-impact homework tasks that can breed frustration.
Where our students require significant literacy support, we do adapt our curriculum in key stage 3. We do this because we believe it is our moral responsibility to move mountains so that every child can eventually access the broad richness of our subject and reap its benefits. In year 7, our weakest readers are supported to catch-up through Ruth Miskin’s Fresh Start, “a successful intervention programme developed to rescue pupils age 9 and above who are below age-related expectations.” Some of our students require even more support, and thus in consultation with their parents, receive an additional hour of literacy where they would have studied a modern foreign language. This additional intervention has been delivered through Lexia, a programme that “addresses the development of oral language, reading, spelling, and writing skills for students who are learning English”, and Expressive Writing, a Direct Instruction programme that focuses on the foundational skills of writing with accuracy and clarity.
Teaching and learning pedagogy and practice in our department is determined by both innovative creativity, and an appreciation of research-informed approaches. We seek out research on what works, ensuring that we are using the most effective strategies to support student learning. This has led our systematic emphasis on recall and retrieval, as well as our approach to vocabulary instruction which builds on the ideas of Isabel Beck’s Bringing Words to Life and Alex Quigley’s Closing the Vocabulary Gap. We have also embraced Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion as a text for establishing unity, but not uniformity, across the department. As a team, we then complement our understanding of research with regular discussions about creative approaches to the curriculum, seeking to build on firm foundations with innovative approaches.
We firmly believe it is these four strands – our team work, our curriculum, our approach to teaching and learning and our whole school emphasis on Literacy – that is supporting our ongoing growth and improvement. However, we recognise that our work is not yet done, and so we continue to reflect and adapt to ensure that all of our students make excellent progress, ready for a life of success and opportunity.
Our Children, Our Community, Believe it can be done.