'Unity City Academy has been recognised as a high performing school in recent awards'

Student, parents and teachers at Unity City Academy are celebrating. It has demonstrated a world class quality of education throughout the school and become accredited as a High Performance Learning High Performing School.

The award is a globally recognised quality mark for self-improving schools and provides the framework and structure to help achieve a step-change in levels of student performance. Unity City Academy now joins global community of schools from Dubai to Mexico who routinely share best practice and support each other.

Professor Deborah Eyre, Chair at High Performance Learning (the accreditation body) says:

“Truly world-class schools understand that while grades are important, producing students who are intellectually and socially confident, work-place and life-ready with a global outlook and concern for others is our true aim.” Unity City Academy has worked hard to strengthen its practice and to move closer to that vision of every child becoming a high performer.”

Staff and students at Unity City Academy completed a rigorous and demanding two-year journey, which was supported by HPL, to encourage all children to achieve success academically and throughout their lives.

Our academy is unique and the HPL framework allows us to develop in a way that builds on our success in working to support and develop our pupils.

HPL is underpinned by the following principles:

• High performance is attainable for most pupils.

• HPL offers opportunities to build the skills needed to be a success in life.

• HPL produces pupils who are confident, able to think for themselves, with a concern for others. They are ready for college, the workplace and life, in general.

• Ours staff are trained to teach the 20 Advanced Cognitive Performance Characteristics (thinking skills) and 10 Values, Attitudes and Attributes (learning behaviours) through their subjects and extra-curricular activities. Using this research-based HPL approach helps us to systematically build the thinking skills and learning behaviours that will mean that our pupils thrive in school and in later life.

Room at the top for more high performers

The potential of our pupils at Unity City Academy is limitless! The research that underpins HPL shows us that there is no fixed level of ability amongst our pupils. The brain is more flexible and malleable that we thought. HPL provides a style of learning that removes barriers to achievement, by giving each pupil an opportunity to ‘grow their brain’ in their own time. This reflects our long-held belief that there is ‘room at the top’ for more pupils than traditional approaches suggest.

Nurturing skills and attributes

At Unity City Academy we strive to develop both intellectual and social confidence, encouraging our pupils to show concern for others, and to prepare for life’s challenges. For us, success is not limited to exam results. It is also about achieving academic success alongside a much wider set of values and attitudes. This sits at the heart of our academy ethos. Our pupils follow a character development programme which focuses on the development of nine ‘character traits’. These are further supported by HPL which identifies key characteristics and attributes that prepare young people to succeed in learning and in life. As noted above, they are categorised into Advanced Cognitive Performance characteristics (ACPs) and Values, Attitudes and Attributes (VAAs).

We are seeking to build the confidence and aspirations of our pupils. Here our pupils are ‘taught’ how to think through the ACPs and how to behave through VAAs, not so that they can be passive recipients of information or instructions, but so that they can access a ‘toolkit’ of learning skills that will serve them for life. In the employment market it is more important than ever to be able to collaborate effectively, and confidently understand and demonstrate skills like adaptability, reflection and resourcefulness.