Outstanding schools: Nayland Primary

Children at Nayland Primary School know how to persevere; they can collaborate, question, manage their distractions and cook a meal with the sun’s rays, too. It’s all thanks to Building Learning Power, as Jacob Stow explains...

It’s not often you can legitimately call an ‘outstanding’ educational institution work-shy but at Nayland Primary School, teachers can’t abide the ‘W’ word. It has been expunged from mission statements and policy documents alike, stricken from the records like a repeat order for Turkey Twizzlers. Which is not to say that everyone at Nayland is slumped in the staffroom reading the papers and trusting in divine providence every time the SATs come round, but that they much prefer to ‘learn’ instead. Are they quibbling over semantics? Not in the opinion of headteacher – sorry, head learner – Raegan Delaney.

Nayland is a small but growing school in rural Suffolk, one year into its transition from first school to primary. The creation of a Year 5, with a Year 6 appearing on the horizon, has brought about changes – not least two new classrooms and a swelling of the ranks of teaching staff – but the school’s pedagogy and ‘outstanding’ practice are long established. Excellence and an aversion to ‘work’ are, in this case at least, related; both stem from Nayland’s adoption of Professor Guy Claxton’s Building Learning Power, an educational approach that seeks to help children to become confident and creative lifelong learners, readying them for everything the world has to throw at them.

Raegan’s 13 years as head and passion for BLP have brought two glowing inspection reports, and even a few hours spent listening to staff and students reveals the enthusiasm there is for the revolution over which she has presided. What is also clear is the impact it is having on even the youngest children’s understanding of what going to school is all about…

1 In the beginning…

For Raegan, life at Nayland began in September 1999 following time spent as a deputy head in an infant school in Essex and, prior to that, spells teaching abroad. “When I arrived it was already a good school,” she reflects as we start the tale of Nayland’s involvement with Building Learning Power at the beginning, “but I felt it was resting on its laurels. Standards rose, but they rose because teachers were teaching really well. Children were sitting like little birds in a nest with their mouths open, and teachers were running around frantically feeding them learning worms. What they weren’t doing is what little birds have to do – fledge. We needed them to get out there and find their own worms.

“At the time we were part of a learning partnership sponsored by the NCSL and I was one of the co-leaders. In order to get the next year’s funding, you had to go up to London to an audit conference and take a ‘gift of learning’ with you to present to others. We were in a group with Network Learning Bath, completely by chance, and the focus for their network was BLP – I just thought, crikey, that’s common sense!

“I came back and shared my excitement with the other heads and we decided that we would go and visit the schools that were putting it into practice. Another local head and I went to Bath and we visited two really different kinds of schools. One was in the middle of a housing estate – the very definition of a sink estate – but it was fantastic. It was tiny and open plan, there were people shoe-horned in everywhere; it could have been a nightmare, but it wasn’t.

“I sat talking to a little chap called Aaron, who explained BLP to me in a nutshell. We were in a strange ‘L’ shaped classroom and the teacher had to come round the corner to be seen by everyone while she was teaching. Aaron said, ‘Imagine a teacher is over there and she’s teaching science and she’s doing an absolutely brilliant lesson. And him over there, he’s mucking about doing something stupid, and I’m watching him. It doesn’t matter how well my teacher teaches, I am not going to learn anything because I haven’t learned how to be a good learner. I am not managing my distractions.’

“I wanted to pick Aaron up and carry him back to Nayland. He couldn’t have put it better.

He was saying you can do anything you like, but you’ll never have a lasting effect on me unless I learn how to be a learner.”

2 Creating a culture

As put so eloquently by Aaron, the idea of developing good learners is central to Building Learning Power, but how do you go about making that a reality? According to Raegan, it requires a change of mindset: “If you think about the way a school is perceived,” she says, “it’s seen as a place where teachers teach and children learn. But take learning to walk as a baby; no one teaches you how to do that.

You watch someone else, then you have a need to learn how to do it. So you begin crawling, then your legs develop and you begin to stand up, which leads to walking.

“No one thinks ‘I am going to teach my child to walk’. You encourage them, and cheer them on. So why can’t we do the same kind of thing in school? With a lot of what children are learning they only need you to facilitate and give them space. You’ve got to keep encouraging them, giving them the thumbs up and making a big fuss about the fact that they’re learners.

“Learning isn’t just an outcome,” she continues, “it’s a process. Imagine you have a child in Year 4 who is having a go at some very difficult maths. They’re starting to get there, but they haven’t quite got it. It’s good to be able to assess that and say, ‘Well done for persevering. You’re getting there, even if you’re not there yet’. With children, you have to celebrate the struggle – and if it’s not a struggle then they’re not learning.”

As you’ll have guessed by the fuss made over the ‘W’ word, choice of language is a key part of this shift in thinking: “We think in words,” Raegan says, “so if we change the words we use, we change our thought processes. It isn’t the only thing you have to do, but it’s a good start – I say to everyone who joins the school, don’t start by worrying about your displays, think about what you are saying!”Raegan says, “so if we change the words we use, we change our thought processes. It isn’t the only thing you have to do, but it’s a good start – I say to everyone who joins the school, don’t start by worrying about your displays, think about what you are saying!”

3 Starting early

The change of mindset Raegan identifies is visible throughout Nayland – from the signs around the school highlighting the ‘L’ word (‘Learnish spoken here’, ‘Learnaphobes keep out’) to the language spoken by staff.

Nowhere is this more evident during our visit than in the nursery and Reception class, where the consistent use of the term ‘powerful learners’ catches the ear. Despite the relative complexity of some of the language and concepts BLP brings to the table, Raegan is clear about the benefits of catching children early. “So often we hear that children in nursery are too young for BLP,” she says, “but that’s completely the wrong way round. I would ask whether they get to an age where they’re too old for it.”

Helping the youngest children get to grips with the school’s preferred terminology are a quartet of puppets, one for each of the four Rs, or ‘Dispositions’, of Building Learning Power: Resourcefulness, Reflectiveness, Reciprocity – “yes, the children can say that,” Raegan assures us – and Resilience. Each R comes with a number of associated terms, or ‘Capacities’ – from ‘perseverance’ to ‘metalearning’ – that expand its meaning. These are communicated to children as they get older through a ‘toolbox’ containing a tool for each Capacity, for example, a hammer representing ‘perseverance’ and a blindfold, which symbolises children’s ability to manage their distractions.

“Reflectiveness is the part of learning that involves planning, revising, thinking and distilling – looking back on your learning and tweaking it as necessary,” Raegan explains. “Reciprocity is the social and emotional; it’s about collaboration and listening and empathising with others.

Resourcefulness is how you find things out – about being a questioner and using your imagination. Resilience is about being up for a challenge, being able to manage your distractions and stick with your learning.

“We have children in our Reception class who talk about ‘making progress’,” she continues. “They know they come to school to learn, and they know learning means making progress. For a 3–4-year-old that’s fantastic. If you talk about collaboration, or perseverance, or ask the children what we learn by imitation, it becomes natural to them, but you have to catch them during nursery. From the moment they arrive, they’re learners. We identify those traits that are fantastic learning traits, we talk to them about being powerful learners, and that stays with them. The children in Year 5 have never been in a classroom where people haven’t been talking about being a ‘powerful learner’. You can see it in them. It makes a massive difference.”

4 Child-led learning

“Schools are like patchwork quilts,” Raegan says.

“They have lots of different things going on and you need to have something that ties them all together. For us, BLP is the thread that does that. You can’t always see it, but it provides a sense of cohesion and direction in everything we do.” Sure enough, while the difference Building Learning Power has made to the language teaching staff use with children is the most immediately obvious to visitors, the pedagogy’s influence can be found throughout the school – for example, in Nayland’s engaging thematic curriculum and the way in which the responsibility for learning has been subtly shifted to the children. “You have to let children learn instead of feeling you have to teach them,” Raegan says of the school’s philosophy. “So, at the end of every half term before the holiday, we say to the children, ‘This is what we’ve learned this half term, next half term our topic is this – what kinds of things do you want to learn? What do you want to find out about?’

“If you look in our Reception class they have a bed set up.

They knew their topic was Night and Day, and they told the teacher that when it’s night time you go to bed and you have a story: ‘So we’ll need a bed. And we can read lots of bedtime stories and that will be good because we’ll be practising our reading. And we’ll need a tape player so we can put stories on it. And a woodland so we can find out about animals that come out at night’. The teacher can take comments like this and think about how it can be matched up with everything we are supposed to cover in the Foundation Stage curriculum, but the children have ownership.”