Making teaching and learning even better

Oxpool Academy was getting a lot of things right. Its new building had been designed to help students get to know staff as real people. An extended day enabled students to experience the school as a low-stress environment in which they worked smarter rather than harder.

When we compared the survey results at this school with the average for all the other schools where we worked, Oxpool did markedly better in the extent to which students felt:

• The adults in the school really believed in them and wanted them to do well
• They could explore different ways of being themselves, rather than simply complying with others’ expectations
• And had a distinctive and valued role to play within the school community

But students didn’t feel significantly safer or more listened to.

Students told us that they didn’t have enough opportunities to unwind after lessons that they found stressful. They also experienced inconsistency from teachers. For those who lacked deep resilience, this was hard to tolerate. And when the students were stressed, they were not only nasty to each other, they made life very difficult for the teachers.

So we came up with a plan that included:

• more structured opportunities for students to unwind
• a whole-school strategy for releasing stress in lessons
• a ‘students as researchers’ project on how to improve peer relationships
• much more student involvement in the activities of school council

This was accompanied by developing ways to help staff work more as a team and share ideas across faculties so that they could offer students a much more consistent experience.





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