Higher Prior Attaining Students
Pupils, particularly the most able, respond with energy and eagerness. They are keen to respond to teachers' questions, to make contributions to lessons and to put their all into the tasks that face them.
- Ofsted, June 2019
Through high quality teaching and learning, we empower our HPA students with the knowledge needed to reach their next steps.
Through wider opportunities and high quality careers support, we intend to make our students think beyond their context and find inspiration.
Our strategy for higher prior attaining students is:
1. Teachers knowing what gets GCSE grades 7+, and knowing the strengths of their students through regular assessment – this can be checking for understanding within lessons as well as longer assessments.
Teachers teach high quality lessons to the top, and use challenging questions targeted at HPA. They check for understanding & adjust.
2. We supplement this with intervention e.g. Prep for HPA, Maths Y9 booster & opportunities e.g. trips / talks / competitions, and parental contact. Where possible, we prioritise disadvantaged students for opportunities and activities, including careers advice.
Our 2019 Ofsted visit pointed out that:
All teaching that we observed was pacey, demanding and high powered.
Teachers expect much of their pupils, both in terms of work rate and in intellectual demands
Questioning is used highly effectively by teachers, not only to provide feedback on how well pupils have understood a topic, but to deepen pupils' knowledge and enable them to make links with what they have learned earlier. This is significantly boosting the learning of the most able pupils.
...in top set Year 10 mathematics lesson ... sharp incisive questions by the teacher helped pupils to master the problems of quadratic equations and move on to deeper AS-level work in the topic.
Teachers model the demanding work presented to the most able pupils with considerable skill. They build up pupils' knowledge of a topic in small steps and make sure that pupils are able to make links and see the connections in their learning.
The most able pupils grow in confidence and quickly develop a deep understanding of their work. We saw this in a range of English lessons where effective teaching was spurring on the most able pupils to make great gains in their vocabulary and oracy skills. It was also apparent in physics, where, for example, Year 11 pupils were gripped by a revision lesson on forces and electricity.
