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Building each other up A multi-academy trust with three small village schools shows that you don’t have to be big, shiny and new to embrace a revolutionary approach to learning. Suzanne Kyle reports. Nestled in the leafy Home Counties in the south of England, the three schools of the Ashley Hill Multi Academy Trust enjoy idyllic locations: Bisham C of E Academy borders the majestic River Thames and has a sixteenth-century church next door; White Waltham C of E Academy sits in a conservation area replete with historical buildings; and the Knowl Hill C of E Academy is perched moments from the village common. So far so traditional. Look inside their classrooms, however, and you’ll see half the class under direct instruction from their teacher while the other half work independently. You’ll notice children sitting at tables, standing at huge whiteboards, lying on the floor, sitting on a mat with a ZigZag table or plugged into a tablet with headphones on. Supervised they may be, but no one’s telling them what to do and they all look busy, engaged and focused. Child empowerment It wasn’t always like this. Four years ago, the trust began to recognise the negative impact that streaming by ability was having on some pupils. The leadership team knew things needed to change and was unafraid to grasp the
nettle. Isabel Cooke, CEO and Executive Principal of Ashley Hill Multi Academy Trust, explains: “Like most schools we used to stream children according to ability. The lower-ability children were given huge amounts of support and direction but we came to realise that this was leaving them disempowered. They would wait to be told what to do and lacked the independent learning skills they would need when moving from a small setting into a secondary school cohort. We also came to recognise that identifying yourself as ‘low ability’ can be really damaging to a child’s self-esteem – it can take a long time to recover from that label. “What’s also interesting is that some high-ability children were good at grammar and at getting things down on paper – skills that so-called ‘less able’ children may have found harder – but they weren’t necessarily highly skilled when it came to their imagination. Also, we saw higher-ability children who instinctively knew an answer but struggled to show their reasoning, which is something they have to be able to do to demonstrate embedded skills and knowledge. We knew we had to change.”
