Alcester Academy and North Bromsgrove High School

Background

Christian Seager, Extended Leadership at Alcester Academy in Warwickshire, and Mel Muldowney, Maths Teacher at North Bromsgrove High School & Sixth Form, are both highly established Maths teachers with a long-standing working relationship cemented by their love of maths. Mel and Chris have worked together on many projects and explain how they have used Access to Scripts to support team-wide CPD, develop their teaching practices to implement new strategies and maximise students’ achievements.

Real-life examples boost student engagement

We ask students for permission to use their scripts when they come to collect their results. We take this a step further and also ask them for permission to use the scripts in our teaching as we use them quite a lot. This allows us to use real-life examples and say to students “Remember Esther from last year?”, and then we go into the specific example which makes it more tangible for them. We also edit the scripts by overlaying any misconceptions and share these with the students. They see real scripts with actual exam questions - the students really engage with because they can see where Esther lost a mark or marks, and where she did well.

Review of students’ exam performance helps inform and improve teaching practices

We find Access to Scripts such an important resource in supporting teachers’ CPD and our teaching in general. Traditionally, Exams Officers have only given access to heads of departments but we strongly believe it really is something all staff should have. One of the first things we did after the exams results were out was to review the scripts that we had permission to access. We then stripped out the marks and sent the blank scripts to all the team members for marking. We used a particular paper where we expected major discrepancies. When the team had completed the marking, we re-grouped and compared the marks - the range was nine marks which is huge. This was a great exercise to help us streamline our marking and help with our forecasts. We appreciate that teachers may not want to feel that they are scrutinising their peers’ marking, but it really helps with achieving a consistent baseline. We feel this process is about identifying marking consistency across the department which ultimately benefits students through consistent teaching. We also review the exam board’s marking, the same way as we moderate the team’s marking to gain as many insights as we can. It may also come into its own for instances where there may be grounds for an appeal.

Data and scripts support CPD and encourages exchange of information and ideas

We also use ResultsPlus to download our cohort data which is invaluable, especially when used in conjunction with scripts. Schools’ SMTs often ask department heads to provide data to identify, for example, the cohort’s top five topics and bottom five topics. Mel explains how she had to do just that at a previous school and circle theorems (tested from first principles) really stuck out. “We looked at the students’ performance data, and I was asked by the Headteacher why the cohort were so bad at answering questions on circle theorems. I looked at the data and scripts to understand what was happening as I wasn’t teaching that ability set at the time. I saw there was a dip in performance in Sets One and Sets Two and went to the teachers to find out what had happened. It transpires both sets of teachers had never taught the topic from first principles, this meant we had a case of two sets bringing down the overall average. Investigating what happened at this level enabled us to identify gaps in our teaching.”

The outcome – scripts give insights to support high quality teaching

We feel that schools should give their staff access to Edexcel Online so they can access the scripts. This goes far beyond sitting in meetings and discussing which students should move sets. This is about identifying and understanding why students make mistakes and using this insight to refine and develop our teaching. The curriculum has changed and as teachers we almost have to recalibrate what a Grade 4 student looks and feels like. We knew what a Grade C student was, and the same with a Grade B student, but we don’t quite know what a Grade 4 and a Grade 5 look like yet. This shows us where the mistakes have come from and even if that’s the only thing we take away from this information, then it’s worth it.