As we head into GCSE exam season, schools across the country are pulling out all the stops to help students feel ready and confident.
For students close to certain grade boundaries, in particular, schools are keen to do everything they can to give them the knowledge, skills and confidence to achieve that higher grade.
At E-ACT this is something we are really focusing on this year. Using data analytics to help us identify the students across our schools who are close to certain grade boundaries in certain subjects, we are bringing them together for conferences designed to hone their revision.
This analysis includes data points such as current progress data, previous mock exam data and teacher feedback.
GCSE exam workshops
From this, 2,500 students across 15 academies have been invited to take part in the conferences featuring intensive and energising workshops led by our top teachers. These events are being hosted at external venues chosen to be exciting for students, such as the football stadiums of Aston Villa and MK Dons.
Since the topics and knowledge that students need to learn and revise are carefully prioritised at the conferences, these sessions are highly beneficial in preparing for the GCSE exams.
Academies have prioritised the conferences in their calendars a year in advance and make appropriate arrangements to release key teachers to support them, recognising the importance and proven impact that these events have in terms of outcomes.
Parents have bought into what we are trying to do and the value of these conferences - as have staff - so it has been easy selling the rationale for these events “interrupting’ regular school timetables.
Dedicated exam support
These are not just general revision days going over old topics - although some basics are reiterated, of course. They are about helping to provide the students we have identified with dedicated support on areas we know they need to improve on.
For example, we have looked at algebra for maths students, poetic structure for English students and probability for those studying statistics.
As well as having internal speakers, we have also used the scale of these events to bring in external speakers relevant to the curriculum.
Nowhere was this clearer than at our recent poetry festival, where GCSE students heard live readings and interpretations from poets on the GCSE syllabus including Grace Nichols, John Agard and Imtiaz Dharker.
This provided the opportunity to hear poems delivered by the poets themselves, and to ask questions about inspiration, language and meaning.
One student described the experience of hearing Dharker explore the fragility and humanity of her poem Tissue as “a beautifully written lecture” that brought clarity to a text with which they had struggled to connect. Others left the day “buzzing”, inspired by high-profile speakers and better prepared to face the unseen poetry exam with a new-found confidence.
While the idea behind this is to boost exam outcomes, there has been a clear sense that these events have done something more profound by helping students to recognise that they are part of a huge community of learners and part of something bigger than themselves or their school.
Promising progress
The key question about all of this though is, is it working?
Early indicators suggest it is, with data from mock exams showing promising gains in both progress and confidence among attendees.
We’ve seen core knowledge gaps close and exam technique sharpen and, crucially, many students who attended the conferences are now on track for higher GCSE outcomes than previously predicted.
While at present we have focused this work on English and maths as cornerstone subjects, and statistics as it is often a newer subject for which students require extra support, we have plans to expand this further in the future with more subjects and improved data analysis.
This will help even more students to benefit from this approach and drive the best outcomes possible.
Michelle Scott is director of education at E-ACT
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