Shire Oak Academy

Background

Shire Oak is an 11 to 18 comprehensive academy with over 1,450 students on roll. As a specialist science college, Shire Oak has set challenging academic targets for students in the sciences and mathematics. The academy works in partnership with 10 primary schools to develop maths and science teaching projects. Marc Swann, Subject Leader in Statistics and IT Development Manager in Mathematics, talks about how they use scripts to help students address their weaknesses and provide CPD for staff to help deliver great teaching.

Scripts help reassure students of their capabilities

We use the Access to Scripts service for students who have given us permission to see their GCSE maths papers. It doesn’t take long to download these papers which I then share with students who stay with us to do their A Levels. We find some students are surprised at how they answered, while others were more interested in any silly mistakes they made and how they can rectify these in the future. Students are generally interested in how they did because they believe they had answered certain questions incorrectly. It helps build their confidence because they look at their scripts and automatically focus on what they got right rather than think “oh I didn’t know what one”.

We have students who move on to college and who inform them they have access to their scripts. If the college wants to see the script, and the student has given permission, we share it via the student. This is a great foundation for the student’s continued education and a really useful insight for new teachers who will not have taught that student before.

Students gain confidence and teachers gain useful insights to close the gaps

We never used to share scripts with our students and had issues with students not turning up for exams. However, this has changed now we share the scripts - this year we haven’t had this problem which we believe is because students have been able to see their papers. This has translated into students being more determined to turn up and sit the exams which shows real gumption on their part.

We also use scripts with our GCSE resit students. For the first couple of lessons we go through them and find where students have gone wrong and focus on these areas. The students find this very useful because they can see “Oh, I wrote a wrong number” and we can then explore why they did that. We can address the problem and change the students’ way of thinking at the same time. It’s interesting that students themselves were more focused on what they got right in a particular area when they thought they got it wrong. It seems to have the opposite effect, but it works out as the students seem to gain confidence from their strengths, but as teachers, we can identify the gaps which helps inform our teaching and address their weaknesses.

Seeing how papers are marked benefits students and teachers

As a teaching group, we use the scripts to help with post-results analysis. One thing we have done as a department is to look through the scripts and use them for our own CPD with regards to our marking. I edited the scripts and erased all the marks that were given by the examiner, and then asked the staff to mark the papers and then we compared them. We wanted to start an initiative to better engage students, so we essentially trained ourselves to be better markers for mock and exam papers. We wanted the students to follow a similar process so we let them see the exam questions, then the answers, and then the marks scheme. This way students could gauge how many marks they could get and if they could improve on the answer.