Broadclyst commuinity Primary School
Broadclyst Community Primary School (BCPS), rated Outstanding by Ofsted, was founded in 1810 to serve the children of the local community. Still a community school, now with its own 40-place nursery, it has developed a local, national and international reputation for its innovative use of IT and digital media.
What is the Broadclyst EdTech Strategy?
'All we've ever done is harness the latest technology of the day and give it to children to let them experiment with it. Now, that experiment wasn't random. We were using them not as guinea pigs, but we were educating these children with the tools of the day for the age that they lived in.'
Jonathan Bishop
CEO - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
The Year 6 Lecture Hall
'Our lecture theatre at BroadClyst was designed to fit the available space. A long hall originally converted into this lecture theatre classroom enabled a different teaching style. This style of teaching needed to be enhanced and made possible through technology. The teachers deliver their lessons through Microsoft OneNote, which enables children to access a range of resources matched to their needs. The children can choose which elements of OneNote they need to go to with the correct help to enable them to achieve the highest possible outcome.'
David James
Head of Education - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
How do you manage the change required to be successful with technology adoption?
'Embedding an ed tech strategy can be described as a marathon more than a sprint. And that's very important that you have a long-term view of how you intend to embed the technology within your teaching and learning at your school. Now, there are lots of quick wins within that process. It doesn't have to be onerous or difficult to start and not necessarily expensive. What we're looking for is to start with a long-term strategy and view and then to embed it and unroll it at a pace that is appropriate to not just the needs of your learners and the comfort of your staff, but enables them to embed that practice, make it their own, and then work to move forward with that themselves.'
Anthony Lees
Deputy Head of School - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
'If we're preparing our learners for the future job market and for the world they're going to be growing up into, it's really important that we make these things contextualized and that we make them real world. So that when learners go out of school, they use those same safe behaviours and habits because they understand that what they're learning in school through the use of technology is the same. And the technology they use in school and the technology they access in the real world at home is the same. And the only way to do that is to provide real-world projects, real-world situations and contexts with real world audiences. That requires a different approach to having some devices and a learning platform.'
Anthony Lees
Deputy Head of School - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
'To get meaningful data is a really big challenge that faces schools. We all collect and store posts of data. However, turning that data into something that is useful and empowering to a teacher requires that data be brought together and presented in a way that enables teachers to make accurate judgments and assessments on what is right for a child. It's often called insights, giving the teacher insights into the pupil. And we're collecting those insights or providing those insights to teachers in a variety of ways.'
Jonathan Bishop
CEO - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
How do you manage the change required to be successful with technology adoption?
'If you look at our digital curriculum, you begin in the very early stages of the early years in reception, looking at really key skills of talking in front of a camera, presenting in front of a PowerPoint screen about an animal, for example, a butterfly they've seen. Once you get up to our older years that are fully embedded, working the camera, looking at the scripting, decoding, coding, debugging, and analytics, all across our digital curriculum.'
Katie Lawson
Deputy Head of BCPS - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
'I decided we'd give a digital device in their hand with a digital pen, which meant that they faced their students rather than looked, as we've done for 200 years, with your back to your students writing on a whiteboard. So we weren't looking at digital whiteboards. We were looking at digital screens that enabled mobility around the room. You'd use the digital because it brings a monumental difference. Why on earth would you use the traditional whiteboard? Give them a one-to-one device, and get the teachers to create engaging, interactive, relevant learning resources for the desktop or tablet of every child. So how have we taken teachers on this journey? We've immersed them in the technology.'
Jonathan Bishop
CEO - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
How do you use technology to remove barriers to learning?
'We're looking to use the technology to really enhance the offer for learners and give them opportunities to access the curriculum irrespective of needs and context. And that frees up the teacher to have much more higher-order conversations with learners, much more targeted adaptive teaching than can be done when the teacher is running around firefighting situations that in this day and age don't need to be the case within our adapted curriculum for all learners and all needs.'
Anthony Lees
Deputy Head of School - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
How do you support staff to maximise the potential of the technology available?
'Team teaching is not two teachers teaching next door to each other, sharing the planning. One does English, one does maths. No, this is two teachers teaching together. And actually, you can break out a group. You could break out a group digitally, put your headphones on, have a live lesson digitally. You could break out physically, pick up your device, take the inking that was done into Microsoft OneNote and take it with you and go to a breakout space. And there is the notes, the resources, the assignments on the desktop of the child. And you can also take a traditional pen and a traditional book, and you can carry on with your work in a more targeted way.'
Jonathan Bishop
CEO - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
What challenges have their been along the way?
'The biggest challenge for us on this journey has been the choice of device. There are so many devices out there, so which do you go for? Do you go for the cheapest which allows children to be able to access the internet and documents and the office suite or do you want to really utilize a device for its full purpose? So then there's touchscreens, so then there's the iPad. And the tablet route we went for was a Microsoft Surface, a tablet environment combined with the desktop environment.'
David James
Head of Education - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
The role of mentoring, coaching and teaching
'They're subtly different. Coaching, mentoring, tutoring and actually, you need all three. And a good, skilled teacher, by nature, does all 3 in a class, though. It's pretty hard work. Bring the digital tools in, and you can start to bring the AI tools and the power of tech to bring those insights into who really takes away the labour-intensive parts for the teacher and frees them up to be what should be - a great teacher'
Jonathan Bishop
CEO - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
How have you used Technology to support and evolve the role of the teacher to be more effective?
'We're very interested in workload reduction and how we can support teachers. And as part of that it's about enabling teachers to be available for learners in ways that they weren't previously. So, a lot of the jobs now that we can do through the use of a learning platform, through access to a device, especially in a one-to-one setting, where learners are able to be more independent and more self-sufficient. Driven with how they approach their learning and which aspects of their learning they focus on. That frees up teachers to do the things that a teacher as a professional is key for and less of the things that now you can do in other ways that don't require that professional judgment and that very personal knowledge between a student and a teacher. That means that the teacher can be very targeted in what they ask the student to do, which is very different from some of the things that teachers would do historically.'
Anthony Lees
Deputy Head of School - The Cornerstone Academy Trust
How do you use data to effectively support pupils?
'Your attitude will massively change and impact the outcomes that you achieve as a student. So if we're taking that progress data, that reading data that attitudinal data and merging it together, we're getting what I believe is going to be a pupil on a page. So many schools are collecting data at the moment that is really of two types. One is about attendance data. Are they coming to school? Secondly is behaviour data. Are they getting punished, the number of sanctions or rewards they're getting? And then combine that data with teacher judgments or exam results. They're trying to build a picture with that data to say, are we on track to get great outcomes? And that data is not wrong, but it only tells a small part of the story.'
Jonathan Bishop
CEO - The Cornerstone Academy Trust