Mark Cross Church of England Primary School

In order to fulfil the school’s vision that all children exceed expectations, the school’s teaching and learning is founded upon the principles of personalised learning.  The teaching and learning at Mark Cross is therefore characterised by ambitious objectives, challenging personal targets, rapid intervention to keep pupils on trajectory and rigorous assessment to check and maintain pupil progress.

High Quality Teaching and Learning

We work hard to ensure ‘quality first’ teaching takes place in all our classes and all lessons build on the pupils’ prior learning and / or individual next steps in learning.  Teachers carefully plan learning activities that are differentiated by levelled learning outcomes.  Prior formative assessment information is then used to ensure each child is appropriately challenged at his / her own level within every lesson.

Lessons at Mark Cross CE Aided Primary School have:

• Sharp learning objectives;
• High demands of pupil involvement and engagement with their learning;
• High levels of interaction between pupils’
• Emphasis on learning through dialogue, with regular opportunities for pupils to talk both individually and in groups;
• An expectation that pupils will accept responsibility for their own learning and work independently.

Teachers ensure children know what they are learning (learning objective), why (bigger picture) and what they need to do in order to be successful (success criteria / steps to success).  Children are encouraged to become independent learners who are able to assess and evaluate their own learning.

At regular intervals, teachers review every child’s achievements by looking at a range of work to see if they have consolidated what they have been taught and are able to apply their learning with a degree of independence.  Teachers use the ‘Assessing Pupils Progress’ approach to personalise assessment by identifying strengths and weaknesses for individual pupils.

Intervention

The great majority of pupils at Mark Cross CE Aided Primary School succeed through quality first teaching.  For some pupils however, this approach is not sufficient and they may benefit, at key moments, from additional small group or one-to-one interventions to enable them to make the progress needed to achieve their full potential. 

Following rigorous termly Pupil Progress Meetings and scrutiny of every child’s progress in the core subjects, additional time-limited interventions may be designed to meet the personalised needs of some pupils.  This personalised approach enables us to identify and intervene quickly where pupils are not progressing as they should. 

Grouping

In lessons, groupings are flexible.  The organisation of pupil groups is carefully planned by teachers, appropriate to the task in hand and informed by previous teacher assessment information.  Children may therefore be organised in different ways for different lessons e.g.  ability, friendship groups, mixed-ability or gender. 

Groupings are flexible based on children’s knowledge and understanding at that time.  An individual child may perform better in different attainment targets or areas of learning within the same subject.  A child may for example, be a high achiever in some aspects of Mathematics (e.g. 2D shape) but below in others (e.g. 3D shape).  Teachers continually assess within lessons and when marking, to determine differentiation in future lessons.  This is called ‘formative assessment’ and key to a personalised learning approach.