Pilots and Trials

Key Stage 3 Regional Pilot

St Patrick’s Grammar School, Armagh

The following information is a transcript of an interview conducted with the pilot school at the end of the first year of the pilot.

 

In this school the planning for this pilot involved two teams, a team to coordinate Learning for Life & Work and a team to direct the work for Assessment for Learning.

Learning for Life & Work

Although the school had been involved in Citizenship Pilot at Key Stage 4, the remaining strands of Learning for Life & Work were relatively new concepts to this school. A team meeting was held to discuss and share ideas on the way forward for the implementation of Learning for Life & Work. The team decided to conduct an audit of subject areas in the school at Key Stage 3.

 

Using the results of the audit, the team decided the three strands of Home Economics, Citizenship and Employability would be discretely delivered on a modular basis. The area of Personal Development would be taught in the pupils' form class. In the future, another audit will be conducted to evaluate the opportunity for infusion through the different subject areas.

 

The team planned collaboratively to deliver the strands of Learning for Life and Work themselves, thus there was no training needs for the whole staff in the initial year. The main obstacle encountered by the team was the lack of resources for Home Economics, as this is an all boys' school in which the strand had never before been delivered. Additional external support has been brought in to help with the delivery of this subject area. In the first year no practical element will be included in the class due to lack of resources.

 

As a team, schemes of work were created for each of the four strands using the resources provided by CCEA. These will be taught solely by the team initially in the first year. Other members of staff will be approached to be involved in the second year of delivery.

 

Other issues were identified by the team; these included a common time for the whole team to plan, evaluation and training of staff in the delivery of Home Economics.

Assessment for Learning

Similar to the area of Learning for Life & Work, a team was chosen by the Vice Principal to coordinate the implementation of AfL. The interviewee indicated there was a sharing of good practice scheme already in place in the school.

 

The team discussed the planning process as a group and collaboratively planned their approach. A questionnaire was constructed by the team and disseminated to the whole staff to evaluate their understanding and practical experience of the different elements of Assessment for Learning. The results were disseminated to the staff. Findings indicated a lot of 'good practice' was already being put in place in the classroom, especially at Key Stage 4. The main aim of the team at this point of the planning process was to raise awareness of such practices at Key Stage 3.

 

The next part of the process that the team has planned was to produce a policy for Assessment for Learning to use within each department. This will include the information on the different areas of Assessment for Learning. Initially the focus will be on learning intentions and success criteria and departments will be asked to amend their existing schemes of work to include these items. This will include the head of each department and related teachers.

 

The team have begun to plan an evaluation process of the progress of the work carried out by each department. This will include examination of pupils notebooks amongst others and possible visits to the classroom.