Outstanding schools: The Flitch Green Academy

With a 21st century approach to learning and the technology to back it up, The Flitch Green Academy is a young school that is already making

In many respects The Flitch Green Academy is unlike other primary schools. On a purely superficial level it stands out from the crowd, more closely resembling the minimalist dwellings so beloved of Grand Designs than the archetypal school house. Not just a pretty face, the building also boasts impressive eco-friendly credentials, and plays host to enough Apple-manufactured ICT to equip several graphic design studios. When you add to the mix a unique, skills-based curriculum – and throw in an anthropomorphised trogon (all will be explained) – you’ll have the beginnings of an understanding as to why this school is different.

What really sets Flitch Green apart from its peers, though, is the manner in which its head and staff have woven all of the above into an ‘outstanding’ whole, a feat they have managed in the space of just five years.

Speaking to headteacher, Helen Johnson, it is quickly apparent that the opportunity to develop Flitch Green’s approach from scratch was one she relished. “Starting at a newly built school, with a blank canvas to work with, is very exciting and a bit daunting – because you’ve got nobody else to blame if something goes wrong!” she admits. “I started here in January, 2008 before we opened in September. The building itself had been designed, but because the project was a little bit behind, there were still decisions to be made about how it would be set up, so I was able to be really involved in that. So, for example, my vision was always to have different areas that children could go to discover learning, and this led to the creation of our Discovery Centre – it was also one of the reasons why we decided to introduce lots of mobile technology, rather than a discrete ICT suite. How the school feels and how it was kitted out was important to us all, so as a team we spent a long time making those kinds of decisions.”

More on that later. There were, of course, far more fundamental choices to be made than those concerning the deployment of resources, not least choosing a curriculum. Rather than opting for an off-the-shelf solution, Flitch Green decided to take matters into their own hands. “I’ve always been passionate about active learning and learning for a purpose,” says Helen. “I started in education when the National Curriculum had just been launched – and while I understand all of the good reasons why it was introduced, as it developed, and the various schemes of work were introduced, it felt to me like we had started to de-skill staff; that they had stopped thinking about the learning and lost sight of the reasons they were teaching.

“The new school gave me the opportunity to introduce active learning for everybody,” she continues. “Tracey [deputy head, Tracey Bratley] and I pooled our ideas about the curriculum. We very much wanted to ensure that ours was not only an active curriculum but one that developed children’s skills too. It was a way of teaching that was unfamiliar to all of our staff,” she admits. “We needed them to buy in to what we were doing, so they were all really involved in developing the curriculum.. Even so, we found quite quickly that teaching skills wasn’t as easy as we had thought.”

The school’s response to the challenges posed by skills-based learning was twofold. While the commitment to teaching skills across the curriculum remained, the decision was made to introduce Challenge Time – a daily, half-hour focus on teaching skills, during which children tackle various activities on their own or in small groups and teachers can assess their progress. “We planned Challenge Time as a staff,” explains Helen. “We sat down and looked at every year group from Reception through to Y6, looked at the skill-set we wanted to develop and how we wanted children to progress, and then thought about the best ways of achieving that.”

It’s a system that has proven successful, as a whistle-stop tour of Flitch Green’s classrooms during Challenge Time demonstrates – children engaged enthusiastically in tasks as diverse as choreographing a dance about gladiators, designing new Olympics kits for various nations and penning an alternative national anthem (the consensus seemed to be that it needed more rapping).

The second prong of the school’s approach to skills-based learning returns us to the aforementioned trogon – a bird native to the tropical forests of the world, in case you were wondering. “We’d come so far with our skills and Challenge Time, and just felt that we wanted to move the children on and be a bit tighter on the progression throughout the school,” explains Helen. “So we came up with Mr Trogon – he’s a character that children can hook on to, whose character traits are the five skills we aim to develop: so he’s a confident character, a cool collaborator, a critical thinker, a creative navigator and a challenge conqueror.

“Then, to ensure the progression, we introduced the concept of different Gears,” she continues. “The children are always developing the five character traits, but they will be working on one of four Gear-sets: levels aimed at different stages, from Foundation Stage and KS1 to lower KS2 and upper KS2. The children are always aware of what gear they’re on, and know what the next step is.

“It’s difficult to assess skills, but you can do it,” concludes Helen. “Teachers have to be really clear on what each skill ‘looks like’ at a particular level, and what each of the objectives we set really means, so we’ve done a lot of work together setting the system up to make sure it works.”

Away from Challenge Time, there is a strong focus on cross-curricular learning at Flitch Green, with the curriculum delivered in the form of ‘experiences’. “We keep it very simple,” says Helen. “We don’t use any schemes of work, we look at what facts the children need to learn and what subject and life skills they need. We pull those together, and ask ourselves, ‘For these children, at this time, at this school, how is it going to be best for them to learn them?’ From that we come up with our end product – what we call an ‘experience’. These could be about a whole host of different things, but whatever their theme, they pull in all the things the children need to learn. An experience might run for two weeks, three weeks or a whole half term – it just depends on how many skills and facts the children need to be introduced to.”

If Flitch Green’s unique curriculum is at the heart of its success, the school’s emphasis on the flexible use of ICT is perhaps the most immediately apparent point of difference that visitors will encounter. Helen is happy to admit that on starting at the school she had very little experience with ICT: “I probably had the typical experience of most heads running ICT suites,” she says. “You’d have classes allotted to it at set times, but only half of the PCs would be working because someone hadn’t shut them down properly – there were barriers to using them. It always bothered me that ICT sessions felt like a backwards step, that we were suddenly returning to a Victorian classroom with everyone in rows, doing the same thing.

“When we came to look for technology to support our curriculum, one adviser suggested looking at Apple’s products. I’d had positive experiences of them before, so I explored that avenue further, and the more I looked, the more it seemed the best answer to complement our curriculum; we could suddenly not worry about how the technology worked, just concentrate on what it could do, what we wanted the end product to be.”

To this end, there has been a significant investment in portable technology at the school. An initial, and extensive, complement of MacBooks has since been joined by iPod touches and, most recently, iPads – six for each class. Children and teachers alike speak enthusiastically about the projects and learning that has taken place with these resources, from the production of animated films, pieces of music and podcasts, to the use of software such as programming language Scratch, and specific apps aimed at improving literacy and numeracy.

Such is the extent of Flitch Green’s embracing of ICT that it has become an Apple Regional Training Centre and ‘lighthouse’ school, with ADE (Apple Distinguished Educator) Nathan Lowe – AKA inclusion manager and Y4/5 teacher – delivering practical training in the use of the company’s products to others keen to use them in the classroom, and educators from around the world visiting to see how the resources are used in practice. Not bad for an institution in only its fifth year of existence.

But despite the technology’s prevalence, Helen and her team are clear that they are using these resources as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. “To us, technology isn’t any different from any other area of our curriculum,” says Helen. “If we can use something to take children’s learning to a different level, we will. We give them the skills to make decisions about what resources they’re going to use, and that helps them think about their learning. The way we have used technology is a reflection of how it is used in the real world,” she concludes.

It would be easy to be distracted by the shiny classrooms and the shinier iPads at Flitch Green, but whilst both have played their part in the school’s success, the real story is the vision of the staff team that is putting them both to good use – and the considerable benefits the school’s children are reaping as a result.

1. Academy rewards

“We decided to become an academy because we wanted to be able to continue to develop our curriculum and look at flexible ways of working,” says Helen. “We were very conscious that we had ‘outstanding’ very early on, and that we needed to work hard to maintain that. We’ve also got lots of resources that we need to maintain and improve upon, and so we needed to look at funding streams. On top of that, while we had managed to create our own curriculum within the framework of the National Curriculum, there was a lot of uncertainty about what it would be like going forward, so we wanted to make sure we could take the school in the direction we believed in and were passionate about. So it seemed the natural progression for us.”

2. Green by nature

The Flitch Green Academy wasn’t only designed with the needs of its children and staff in mind –  Mother Nature was high on the agenda too, as Helen explains: “We have a wood-chip boiler for the heating, a rain water harvester, which supplies water to flush the toilets, photovoltaic cells, a recycling centre and windows that open automatically in the summer according to the temperature.
“They haven’t all worked all of the time,” she admits, “but the concept is really good and the local authority has learnt a few lessons from the experiences we’ve had here, so I think certain elements will be developed and implemented in other new schools in future.”

3. Unforgettable experiences

“All of our experiences are very life-like, so children have a real understanding of why they’re doing what they’re doing,” explains deputy head, Tracey Bratley.  “One of my favourites has been ‘the supermarket’, which I did with Reception. The children had to set up their own supermarket – so they made shopping lists, went to Tesco and bought the shopping – we then brought it back and priced it all up and invited parents in to do their shopping.”
“I enjoyed an experience I did a few years with Y1 about forces,” adds inclusion manager and Y4/5 teacher, Nathan Lowe. “We’d found a huge rock – it took two members of staff, to move – and the children had to work out how to move it five metres across the playground. It was too heavy to pick up, so they had to explore in D&T how to make wheels, or come up with other ideas. We went out for an afternoon at the end of the experience and they tested their methods. Some used tubes to roll it, some decided to put the rock in a tyre. They came up with lots of different solutions, and they all succeeded.”

4. New build

Flitch Green’s modern home was designed to provide a stimulating learning environment for children, its seven classrooms arranged about a central courtyard area and offering easy access to the outdoors. Open plan areas such as the aforementioned Discovery Centre, a large hall and landscaped outdoor spaces provide extra room, and with pupil numbers swelling, a new and high-tech ‘log cabin’ is on its way.
“We wanted to embrace the building and the environment, so it would reflect our curriculum,” says Helen. “The children are able to go anywhere, inside or out, to do their learning; you’ll find them, particularly in Challenge Time, working in the corridors, or in the cloakroom – all around the school, really.”