Home Learning

A student’s first day or two of being educated remotely might look different from our standard approach, while we take all necessary actions to prepare for a longer period of remote teaching.

If we return to post-lockdown schooling and we have students who are then sent home to isolate, we will ensure that they will be sent home with a reading book. This will allow staff time to get resources and activities online.

We teach the same curriculum remotely as we do in school.

We have established ‘Principles for Remote Learning’ which will be adhered to.

Key Stage 3 / 4

We expect all students to follow their timetable which is 5 sessions a day lasting 40-45 minutes each. Additionally we have an online extra-curricular activity programme for students to engage with individually or with their families. The curriculum pages of the academy website have a wider reading area for each subject. This is for students to access who have a particular interest in a subject.

We use Google Classroom as a way to communicate with students and set work for classes.

We also use Mathswatch and Educake for assessing within Maths, Science and Geography.

Google stream will be used by teaching staff to communicate with classes.

We recognise that some students may not have suitable online access at home. We take the following approaches to support those students to access remote education:

We will provide devices and internet access to families who do not have them. All enquiries should go to Mrs Fraser-Kelly at the academy.

We use a combination of the following approaches to teach students remotely:

• live teaching (online lessons)
• online presence from teaching staff every lesson for KS4 students
• recorded teaching
• reading books students have at home
• commercially available websites supporting the teaching of specific subjects or areas, including video clips or sequences
• work which is created by staff at the academy and set for classes online

• We expect all students to follow their timetable each day and attempt the work set for them to complete. Students should contact their teaching staff if they are stuck or need help or support.
• We would encourage families to engage with their child’s home learning. We would encourage them to talk to their child about their learning and we have sent home questions to support this.

• We celebrate student success in a variety of ways: AIR points are issued and we send Edulink messages out praising good work. Each week we have subject specific “Remote Learning Stars” and Heads of Year nominate their “Stars of the Week”. There are whole school and departmental “Shout Out” videos on social media every week to recognise the achievements and efforts of our students.
• Class teachers will monitor lesson by lesson who is submitting work. Any concerns will be raised with the child’s family.
• If a child is not engaging with any online learning, concerns will be referred to the Head of Year.

Feedback can take many forms and may not always mean extensive written comments for individual children. For example, whole-class feedback or quizzes marked automatically via digital platforms are also valid and effective methods, amongst many others. Our approach to feeding back on student work is as follows:

We will use a variety of methods to assess, as we would within a classroom. These methods include:

• Live marking during a Google Meet
• Comments on classwork in Google Classroom
• Questioning using a variety of software eg menti / whiteboard.fi / kahoot
• Questioning using chat
• Allowing all students to edit the same document in Google Drive
• Reading / looking through complete work
• Google forms
• Subject specific websites – eg Mathswatch and Educake

We recognise that some students, for example some students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), may not be able to access remote education without support from adults at home. We acknowledge the difficulties this may place on families, and we will work with parents and carers to support those students in the following ways:

• 1-1 support from a member of the SEND team
• SEND support for students in school
• SEND support for students in Google Meets
• Regular phone contact to support as needed
• Differentiated work and materials
• IT support for families as needed
• Regular welfare calls and access to SENDCo throughout the week if needed