Charter schools leading innovation
March 22, 2023
Jemima Rhys-Evans
Based at Charles Dickens Nursery and Primary School, the Research School is one of thirty schools accredited and funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), an independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement. The Research School supports teachers and school leaders to understand research evidence, and to use it to inform decision-making.
Building knowledge through innovation:
Our track record
Our Trust schools have a strong track record in leading practice through innovation. Pioneering work on teacher workload, social and emotional learning and curriculum have helped keep our academic outcomes strong, our pupil wellbeing high and have helped our schools to recruit and retain our fantastic teachers. Much of this work has been shared through articles in national publications, advisory work for the Department for Education and through the many visits from teachers and school leaders from across the country as well as further afield.
Our commitment to continuous improvement
In 2016-17, our secondary schools led the Workload Challenge, a national research project which explored ways of reducing teacher workload whilst maintaining high outcomes for pupils. The Science Department at The Charter School North Dulwich deepened this work in the Department for Education’s Workload Toolkit research project of 2019-2020. Both these projects found that reducing written marking and replacing it with, amongst other things, live feedback during the lesson, reduced teacher workload without any loss of standards. In fact, in several cases, pupil outcomes improved. The work of our schools has fed back into the system and helped to inform national policy.
Innovation: our latest project
Last year, the Research School bid for, and won, funding to develop a programme supporting the explicit teaching and practise of reading fluency at Key Stage 2. The subsequent programme, Fluency Focus, was trialled in ten primary schools in the East Midlands. We wanted to find out the answers to three questions:
- Is the programme feasible - can the lessons be taught as intended?
- Is the programme acceptable - do the teachers think that the lessons are worthwhile and important?
- What impact does Fluency Focus have on children’s fluency, comprehension and attitudes to reading?
What is Fluency?
When someone reads fluently they express the meaning of the text in a clear and engaging way. When it comes to teaching children to read the EEF describe fluency as made of three key elements:
- reading with accuracy (reading words correctly),
- reading with automaticity (reading words at an appropriate speed without great effort)
- reading with prosody (appropriate stress and intonation
Fluency is very important for children to practise as it helps them understand the text they are reading. If a child can read without struggling to sound out the words, they can focus more on the content they are reading. As the link between understanding and fluency is so well established, we decided to create a series of reading lessons built on fluency strategies. Whereas normally children approach a text through discussion and answering questions, in the fluency method the text is approached firstly through learning to read it fluently. This then makes understanding it easier as well as keeping reading lessons lively and enjoyable.
Fluency Focus: the results
The trial was a success: teachers found the programme easy to deliver and were able to use the fluency strategies as intended. Not only that, both teachers and children reported that they enjoyed the lessons. When rating how much they liked learning this way, one child added an extra number on the scale as a top score of 5 simply wasn’t enough! Initial findings suggest that children’s comprehension improved too, although we need to confirm this by gathering more test data.
What next for Fluency Focus?
Following the success of the initial trial, we were delighted to discover that the programme has been approved to scale up to a formal pilot with twenty schools in South London, which means that all of our Trust primary schools will have the opportunity to be involved. And if the pilot goes well, we are hopeful that Fluency Focus will be approved for a full national trial with 100+ schools across England.
This is evidence of how the Trust and its schools are leading the way nationally to pioneer and evaluate approaches with the potential to improve achievement for our children.
To find out more about the Research School visit:
researchschool.org.uk/charlesdickens/news
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Jemima Rhys-Evans,
The Charter Schools Educational Trust
& Charles Dickens Research School
Nicola Jacobs and David Windle,
Charles Dickens Primary School
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charter schools leading innovation
March 22, 2023
Jemima Rhys-Evans
Based at Charles Dickens Nursery and Primary School, the Research School is one of thirty schools accredited and funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), an independent charity dedicated to breaking the link between family income and educational achievement. The Research School supports teachers and school leaders to understand research evidence, and to use it to inform decision-making.
Building knowledge through innovation:
Our track record
Our Trust schools have a strong track record in leading practice through innovation. Pioneering work on teacher workload, social and emotional learning and curriculum have helped keep our academic outcomes strong, our pupil wellbeing high and have helped our schools to recruit and retain our fantastic teachers. Much of this work has been shared through articles in national publications, advisory work for the Department for Education and through the many visits from teachers and school leaders from across the country as well as further afield.
Our commitment to continuous improvement
In 2016-17, our secondary schools led the Workload Challenge, a national research project which explored ways of reducing teacher workload whilst maintaining high outcomes for pupils. The Science Department at The Charter School North Dulwich deepened this work in the Department for Education’s Workload Toolkit research project of 2019-2020. Both these projects found that reducing written marking and replacing it with, amongst other things, live feedback during the lesson, reduced teacher workload without any loss of standards. In fact, in several cases, pupil outcomes improved. The work of our schools has fed back into the system and helped to inform national policy.
Innovation: our latest project
Last year, the Research School bid for, and won, funding to develop a programme supporting the explicit teaching and practise of reading fluency at Key Stage 2. The subsequent programme, Fluency Focus, was trialled in ten primary schools in the East Midlands. We wanted to find out the answers to three questions:
- Is the programme feasible - can the lessons be taught as intended?
- Is the programme acceptable - do the teachers think that the lessons are worthwhile and important?
- What impact does Fluency Focus have on children’s fluency, comprehension and attitudes to reading?
What is Fluency?
When someone reads fluently they express the meaning of the text in a clear and engaging way. When it comes to teaching children to read the EEF describe fluency as made of three key elements:
- reading with accuracy (reading words correctly),
- reading with automaticity (reading words at an appropriate speed without great effort)
- reading with prosody (appropriate stress and intonation
Fluency is very important for children to practise as it helps them understand the text they are reading. If a child can read without struggling to sound out the words, they can focus more on the content they are reading. As the link between understanding and fluency is so well established, we decided to create a series of reading lessons built on fluency strategies. Whereas normally children approach a text through discussion and answering questions, in the fluency method the text is approached firstly through learning to read it fluently. This then makes understanding it easier as well as keeping reading lessons lively and enjoyable.
Fluency Focus: the results
The trial was a success: teachers found the programme easy to deliver and were able to use the fluency strategies as intended. Not only that, both teachers and children reported that they enjoyed the lessons. When rating how much they liked learning this way, one child added an extra number on the scale as a top score of 5 simply wasn’t enough! Initial findings suggest that children’s comprehension improved too, although we need to confirm this by gathering more test data.
What next for Fluency Focus?
Following the success of the initial trial, we were delighted to discover that the programme has been approved to scale up to a formal pilot with twenty schools in South London, which means that all of our Trust primary schools will have the opportunity to be involved. And if the pilot goes well, we are hopeful that Fluency Focus will be approved for a full national trial with 100+ schools across England.
This is evidence of how the Trust and its schools are leading the way nationally to pioneer and evaluate approaches with the potential to improve achievement for our children.
To find out more about the Research School visit:
researchschool.org.uk/charlesdickens/news
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jemima Rhys-Evans,
The Charter Schools Educational Trust
& Charles Dickens Research School
Nicola Jacobs and David Windle,
Charles Dickens Primary School
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