Narrowing the Pupil Premium performance gap

This resource is designed to meet cries for help from schools as they combat a growing challenge of widening attainment gaps between some groups of students, most notably disadvantaged and looked after children (Pupil Premium), and other students.

Our approach to building better learners, explored in this resource, is commonly applied in primary schools as a whole school strategy. However, the whole school approach has proved to be trickier to achieve in secondary schools where teachers meet students much less frequently and for far less time.

The resource helps individual teachers to:

• analyse their students’ current development of learning power behaviours;
• introduce their students to their learning dispositions and skills;
• amend their own teaching to better cultivate the skill and strength of students’ learning behaviours;
• monitor and evaluate how their practice is changing and how the growth in students’ learning behaviours…

. . . in order to narrow the achievement gap, avoid students falling further behind and enable their students to become lifelong learners.

The approach to learning advocated here comes from the vision of twenty-first century education and the new sciences of learning that underpin it. It starts from first principles; that we now know an individual’s ability isn’t fixed; that the brain is like a muscle; that its intelligence grows with exercise. Selling this idea to learners brings, in itself, far more enthusiasm for engaging with the potential delights of learning, helping students to become more independent, more reflective, and better able to plan and evaluate their own learning. This, as John Hattie’s research has shown, is a better way of boosting students’ attainment than more drilling in the subject-matter.

The great strength of this approach is that there is already a wealth of tried and tested strategies that teachers can introduce immediately to begin to transform the learning experience of their students, and give them a language with which to think about the process of learning. You can boost the development of students’ confidence, capacity and appetite for learning itself.

This resource offers teachers;

• the basic tools and techniques of an approach that aims to raise students’ awareness of how they can begin to take control of their learning behaviours.
• ways of looking at students’ behaviour in order to understand which teaching approaches might be needed to strengthen them
• a way of explaining and estimating the students’ growth in learning behaviours and how to move forward.

Section structure…

Each section deals with a key aspect of understanding, introducing and testing the approach:

• • Section 1 Why learning power makes a difference...introduces you to the meaning and attributes of learning power
  • Section 2 Up close and personal with learning…invites you to look at students through the lens of learning behaviours and hints at the sort of change in practice you are aiming for
  • Section 3 Finding the gaps…offers serious considerations about gathering evidence with regard to the gap in learning you are trying to narrow
  • Section 4 Changing expectations...offers practical ideas about how your practice is likely to have to shift to start things off
  • Section 5 Starting with the key basics...offers suggestions for how to first introduce the approach to your students
  • Section 6 Catalogue of ideas for cultivating learning behaviours...offers practical suggestions for blending aspects of any of the 12 behaviours into your teaching
  • Section 7 What is the Impact. . . invites you to assess the impact of your interventions on your own classroom culture; on the learning behaviours of your students; and on the attainment of your students.