High Ability
At Kingswood Academy we are passionate about ensuring that all students are challenged and make rapid progress. Our high ability students make outstanding progress well above that of the national average. Our high ability students made progress of +0.7 in 2019, +0.72 in 2020 and +0.7 in 2022. Please find below some of our strategies to ensure our students make accelerated progress.
High Quality Teaching and Learning
At Kingswood Academy, we use baselining in all lessons to accelerate progress. Students are assessed at the start of each lesson using hinge questions that link directly to the learning outcomes. This determines the differentiated pathway that students start on in order to accelerate progress and challenge every single student. Our high ability students are then able to demonstrate knowledge of concepts during the baseline task and progress on to more challenging content and application of knowledge tasks much quicker. These tasks are often from a later part of the curriculum, for example tasks that later year groups would cover, in order to deepen knowledge and understanding. Students participate in flipped learning, particularly through homework, that provides them with the knowledge that is required to accelerate their progress within lessons.
Marking and Feedback
Students receive personalised feedback in every subject. This feedback sets new personal targets to ensure students are clear on where they can make further progress. This feedback cycle focuses on the development of subject specific content, as well as a focus on the development of literacy in all subjects. For more able students, this personalised feedback further stretches and challenges students' knowledge and understanding of the curriculum, enabling them to make accelerated progress.
Revision and Guidance
To enable effective revision and support around Pre-Public Examinations (PPEs) Kingswood Academy delivers support to all students, including higher ability students. Students in Key Stage 3 (Years 7, 8 and 9) receive bespoke revision packs developed by subject leaders. These are differentiated so that more able students have more challenging content to revise. Students in Key Stage 4 (Year 10 and Year 11) use resource packs including subject specific revision guides, post-it notes, flash cards, highlighters and revision cards to support their home learning. These resources support high ability learners to accelerate their progress by revising or learning new content at home.
“Helping your Child to Revise” Annual Evenings
Parents of students in Key Stage 3 are invited to attend annual " Helping Your Child to Revise" evenings specific to their child's year group. These evenings focus on supporting parents to be able to support their child's Pre-Public Exam revision. This evening includes tips and ideas from subject Heads of Department to ensure students are well prepared for their exams.
Careers and Performance Coach
Careers lessons help to ensure students gain knowledge of the careers they may choose to go on to after their GCSE years. To support parents with their child's next steps, our in-house Careers Advisors meets with all Year 10 and Year 11 students to conduct a careers interview, to ensure students are clear on their options after Kingswood Academy.
Throughout their time at Kingswood Academy, students have half-termly motivational sessions with Kevin Mincher which links to the Character Development programme completed in Academic Mentor sessions. The sessions, which focus on a variety of focuses such as mental wellbeing, revision techniques and dealing with stress.
PPEs and Learning Cycles
Throughout the academic year, students in Year 7-9 will complete 2 Pre-Public Exams (PPE) and Year 10-11 will complete 3 sets of Pre-Public Exams. Following the completion of each PPE cycle, students are told how they performed and are given a breakdown of their results, to identify on a question by question basis, where they can improve. Assessment response weeks following PPEs focus on closing the gaps on any areas of weakness shown from their results.
Potential Barriers to Learning for High Ability Pupils
Research suggests that high ability students can exhibit traits of perfectionism in their school work. Perfectionism is often defined as the need to be or appear to be perfect, or even to believe that it’s possible to achieve perfection. Some of the common traits of perfectionism include fear of failure, procrastination, focus on results not effort, unrealistic standards and being highly critical of oneself.
At Kingswood Academy we aim to harness these traits by promoting the desire for success in a positive way:
Encouraging students strive to attain their individual target grades, not accepting anything less.
Setting, and expecting students to set the highest expectations of themselves and their work
Openly discussing that high targets and high expectations shouldn't come easy.
Encouraging students to be motivated by challenging outcomes.
Teaching students to see mistakes as learning opportunities, promoting a "growth mindset" approach.
Explaining that students should have high aspirations in terms of what they can achieve at Kingswood Academy and beyond.
Allowing and promoting the chance to practise and make mistakes on mini whiteboards before recording work in exercise books.
Adopting a 'baselining' approach to provide accurate starting points in lessons, resulting in students beginning a task knowing exactly what they can already do, and what the next steps in learning are.