PROGRESS Stories

One school’s experience of the PROGRESS Programme…

Staff perspective

Antidote's survey yielded surprising results about children's learning experience: Year 7 children didn't feel listened to in lessons. In fact, none of the years did, but staff were most distressed by the year 7 results.

They prided themselves on an excellent transition process. Much thought and effort went into careful differentiation in every subject so that every child could access the learning. And the current cohort of support staff was particularly talented and skilled. How could it be that the children didn't feel listened to?

More to the point, what else could they do about it? Everything they could think of was already in place; so how on earth could they find another way to solve the problem?

At the most recent meeting of the year 7 team, colleagues had been inclined to explain away the data. What do year 7 know about secondary classroom practice? Was it that they were making a comparison with the cosy security of a primary class where one teacher looked after all the children for the majority of the week? No secondary school could emulate or replicate that. Furthermore, they wouldn't want to. Wasn't secondary education about growing up and taking greater responsibility? Surely coping with more adults, a broader curriculum and a larger set of buildings was all part of the secondary experience.

Anyway, most children really rose to the challenge and enjoyed the stimulation of specialist subject areas, a widening group of adults and a greater sense of freedom in the larger space.


Student perspective

Karen in year 7 was once again feeling fed up and patronised. She had just emerged from the geography room where Mr Bates had been teaching the fourth lesson in a series on the tropical rainforest. She had put up her hand during the very first lesson to point out that she had done the rainforest in primary school. Mr Bates had gently and firmly overruled her objection. He'd said that not everyone would have covered the topic, that there was plenty more to learn and that he taught it differently anyway as she was in secondary school now, not primary.

Karen had been willing to go along with this rationale until about half way through the second lesson when it became patently obvious that not much new subject matter was forthcoming.

She loved geography and had taken a passionate interest in the topic in year 6. She had done extensive research on the internet, and had borrowed beautiful, colourful books from the library. She had even become interested in the politics of rainforest clearance and asked her mum to help her join Greenpeace so that she could receive the latest information about the exploitation of Amazonia.

She remembered that the whole class had done a project on the vegetation, wildlife and commercial products of the tropical forest areas of the world. They had turned the classroom into a forest and for several weeks lived in a jungle with huge paper banana leaves and lianas hanging from the ceiling. They'd looked at the medicines that came from the forest and the wonderful ways in which the indigenous people lived in harmony with their environment. They'd even visited the topical area of the Eden Project in Cornwall and inhaled the hot, steamy, sweet-smelling air. She was bored in Mr Bates lessons. It wasn't that he didn't have some good activities and it was obvious that he was passionate about his subject. It was just that she had done so much of this work before.

The same kind of thing had happened last week in history. The difference was that Mr Baxendale didn't assume they were blank sheets of paper on which he could write his history lesson, or empty boxes to fill with historical facts. He seemed to understand that some of them were half-filled boxes and most of them had some writing on their history pages. They were about to start the Victorians and instead of beginning with information, he had given them a whole lesson to say what they already knew.

They had started with groups of three producing mind maps of the things they knew about Victorian Britain. Some children seemed to know loads and others very little but it didn't matter because they worked together and pooled their knowledge. Then he asked them to link the Victorian era to anything they knew of what went before it and what came after it.

He then produced a huge mind map on the interactive whiteboard by pooling all their information. Once they could see what they already knew, they highlighted the things everyone knew and the things that only some people knew and decided what areas needed more work. They went back to their group of three to decide what questions they would like to answers to in order to understand the Victorians better. He even set up a suggestion box in the classroom for any other ideas that occurred to them between the first lesson and the next and asked if there was any topic that a group of children would like to teach using their primary school knowledge.

Karen felt warm and pleased as she remembered that first lesson. They came away having agreed what they already knew, what they wanted to learn and the order in which they would learn it. They were thinking about who might teach some of it and had gone back to their primary lesson books to refresh their memories as homework. Somehow she felt much more engaged and excited about doing the Victorians again than she now felt about repeating the tropical rainforest. She hadn't felt patronised once by Mr Baxendale. She had felt pleased with herself for what she knew and excited about discovering things she didn't know yet. She felt satisfied and heard as if she was a real person with a history of her own rather than a pupil in a room whose job it was to listen to a teacher spouting out information for her to copy into her book.


PROGRESS Stories