Outstanding schools: Oxley Park Academy

“IF A CHILD LEARNS BEST LYING ON THE FLOOR AND YOU CAN ACCOMMODATE THAT, WHY SHOULDN’T YOU?”

It turns out there is an ‘I’ in team, and it stands for individual – at least at Oxley Park Academy, a primary school united in its determination to meet every child’s unique needs, says Jacob Stow…

“Dream. Believe. Achieve!” Rarely has Teach Primary been treated to a more spectacular rendition of a school’s mission statement. “Dream. Believe. Achieve!” The Oxley haka might be lacking the brute menace of the All Blacks’ version, from which it takes its inspiration, but there’s no denying the passion on show. “Dream. Believe. Achieve – Together!” With a shrill roar, 500 children and staff throw up their hands and complete their daily recital… for the third time today. As they filter from playground and balcony back inside, we’re left both impressed and vaguely embarrassed that we’ve brought an entire school to a brief but unscheduled standstill for the sake of catching the spectacle on camera.

The experience does, however, provide a fitting introduction to an exploration of Oxley Park Academy, a school in which the ‘togetherness’ of staff, school, governors and community is highly valued, and the all-pervading spirit of teamwork and inclusivity has led to national recognition in the form of an ‘Outstanding School Team of the Year’ Teaching Award.

As the hub of its local community – it was the first building completed as part of the Oxley Park housing development in Milton Keynes, opening with just 100 children in 2005 – this is a school with outreach written into its DNA. “It takes a whole village to raise a child,” is a favourite phrase of headteacher Cathy Higgins, and as her school has expanded she has overseen ongoing efforts to connect with parents and local businesses, unlocking opportunities for her children. At the same time, she has engendered a strong team ethos amongst staff and an approach to personalised learning that seeks to encourage those who excel and support those who struggle. It is proving an effective combination…

1 Building a team

“As Oxley Park was a new school, I felt it was important to establish a vision of how it would be run early on,” Cathy, who arrived in Milton Keynes with previous experience of primary and nursery school headships, explains. “Teamwork was a key part of my plan – I wanted everyone to come together to work towards a single brief, so I set about trying to create traditions straight away. The Oxley haka was introduced from day one, as something that was going to bond the children and staff together while reflecting our mission statement.

“We also wanted to be at the heart of the community,” she continues. “Because there was nothing else here when we opened, a lot of things used to happen in school. People move to Milton Keynes from all over the country and the world; they don’t know each other, and at that time there was no infrastructure in the community for anyone to meet. They couldn’t necessarily find out where the local doctors was, or where you went shopping, or what number bus you got. So we took on the role of being the hub of the community. It was lovely to have an open house and the space for people to drop in and be part of the school. Someone once said, ‘If I feel a little bit down, I go along to Oxley Park and it cheers me up,’ and I think people do see Oxley Park as being a focus of the community, which is lovely.

“As other elements of the community joined, we handed the reins over to them. The children’s centre next door started out as a toddler group that we ran for mums to get to know each other. When new facilities opened, we approached them. We started working with the MK Dons when they were new to the community, and we share an ethos and values, in terms of being part of Milton Keynes and proud of that.

“So, the team to us,” she stresses, “is the children – they know what they’ve got to do and what part they play in making their education successful; the parents; all of our staff members; the governing body, who attend all our strategic meetings; and the community.”

2 Getting personal

Whilst there is a strong emphasis on the team at Oxley, the individual has not been forgotten. Cathy favours the personalised learning approach and has set up her school to help put it into practice. Part of what is required, she explains, is being prepared to seek out good ideas from a range of sources and to weave them into a coherent and effective whole.

“I always magpie anything good that I see,” Cathy says. “I see that as my role – having that helicopter vision, looking for inspiration elsewhere and bringing it to the table to be discussed. That’s why personalised learning works for us; we want to find what works for our children. It’s not ‘one size fits all’ in education, it’s about finding the nuggets that work for that particular pupil, so we personalise different resources, we pick the bits we want out. So, for example, from Building Learning Power we use the ‘stuck board’ and the ‘being resilient’ element, but we’re not a BLP school. It’s part of the reason why we became and academy as well.”

Efforts are ongoing at the school to develop its personalised curriculum, though Cathy admits that the speed of Oxley Park’s expansion has presented a challenge in this regard. “We’ve been working with Chris Quigley over the last three years to develop it,” she explains. “Every year we tweak it and it gets better, and we vary it depending on the children we have coming through. But because we’ve had lots of new staff joining, it’s meant we haven’t been able to personalise it as much as we want to; producing a personalised curriculum straight away is too much for a newly appointed teacher to take on.

“But our curriculum is always evolving, as it’s based on what these individual children need,” she says. “ It’s based on their interests and what is going to motivate them.”

3 Individual learners

In order to help teachers plan personalised learning opportunities, Oxley Park holds induction weeks before the summer holidays, allowing them to become acquainted with those with whom they’ll soon be sharing a classroom – the goal being to find out what children want to learn about, and how best to let them do it. It is at this point of the year that the school’s system of onepage profiles, pioneered by Personalising Education (personalisingeducation.org), really comes into its own.

“We started using the profiles at Oxley Park just over a year ago,” Ross Griffin, Year 6 phase leader and the staff member charged with setting up the system across the school, explains. “Because we’re a child-centred school, we always begin by working out what the children need, and the onepage profiles help us to do that. For us they’re an aid to transition, whether children are moving from one year group to another, or from Y6 on to secondary school. In these situations a new teacher might not realise that Becky learns best when she sits at the front of the class, or that Edward only works well if he’s sitting by the window, or on his own, or that he struggles to concentrate after 2pm. These are pieces of information that are really important to the child’s education, but unless you’ve taught them for three months, you may not know about them, so we add them to the profile.”

The profiles, Ross tells us, are created in partnership with the children within lessons, and are designed to provide a convenient but valuable insight into their disposition. They are currently used in Years 4-6 and the plan is to introduce them throughout the school (staff, too, complete a profile, which is then used in one-to-one meetings with Cathy to guide professional development). Though still in development, with Personalising Education providing ongoing support, it is a system that staff are enthusiastic about: “It’s having an impact, but we can go further with it,” Amy McClaren, Year 2–3 phase leader, offers. “I think it will be a very useful tool once it has been established, as it does make you think about your own practice. What’s important is that it’s a process that we keep revisiting; it’s not done at the beginning of the year and then left until next year. What children’s needs are and how we can help them in September might be totally different in January.”

4 Sharing responsibility

At its senior levels, the staff team led by Cathy comprises a deputy, with responsibility for educational standards, and four phase leaders, covering the Foundation Stage and Year 1, Years 2–3 and 4–5, and Year 6. In keeping with the school’s teamworking and child-centred ethos, half-termly, day-long strategic planning meetings have been introduced to provide opportunities for them to conduct “forensic analyses” of every child’s work, informed by input from the entire teaching team.

“We come together with the head to look at the data, to look at who is a priority in terms of needing extra support,” Amy McClaren explains. “Here, it’s no longer about just focusing on your own class and which of your pupils are struggling, and we have a much clearer picture of all the children in the school as a result. Before we meet, we get the opinions of all of the staff in our phase, so we can discuss these with the entire leadership team. Then, rather than just sticking children into existing interventions, we’re able to work together to come up with solutions. We won’t put children into a particular intervention just because a member of staff is trained in that intervention technique,” she stresses, “we’ll start with the child and think about the specific intervention they need. It’s a different way of working to what I’ve experienced in other schools.

“Afterwards,” she continues, “we’ll feedback to our teams, so they can see the bigger picture – we’ll tell them about the systems we’re going to put in place for the children they have identified as having specific needs. The nice thing is that they’ve pointed out that the child needs support and we’ve done something about it, so they feel like their opinion is valued. Because Oxley is such a big school, good communication is really important. It helps everyone feel as though they’re part of the bigger picture.”

It’s not only children who require support to reach expected levels that benefit from the system, though. Those who are achieving beyond their teacher’s expectations are also discussed, and means of enhancing their learning planned. The school’s Academies of Talent are a high-profile example, offering extracurricular sessions for children of various ages to develop their natural aptitude for individual subjects. The younger Literacy Academy, we’re told, is working with a publisher to write a book about Oxley Park for the school’s library, while a group of children in Key-Stage 2 are learning Latin with a view to investigating the impact it has had on the English language.