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Haywood Grove is an SEMH Primary school in Hertfordshire. We have 60 children in our school across 7 classes, ranging from the age of 5 to 11. All of the children in our school have an EHCP and many of them have experienced multiple suspensions from mainstream education. At Haywood Grove our children have experienced failure, have large gaps in their education and face an array of barriers to them reaching their full academic potential. Explicitly teaching our children the 8 Essential Skills, valuing them as an underpinning to our curriculum, noticing our children when they exhibit them and demonstrating how to apply them in daily living will allow our children the opportunity to seek out a positive future that might otherwise be denied to them by a society that seeks academic qualifications as a measure of worth.
Overall impact
The most outwardly evident impact of Skills Builder is the shift in language across the school. Children are subconsciously applying the skills, an example is - our SEMH students find communication challenging. In social situations they will ‘take over’ because control feels safe, this can cause conflict, we are seeing children able to use Leadership skills to lead rather than ‘take over’. Our whole school assemblies are an excellent area of progress. Until Skills Builder we have kept our assemblies in class, this has now all changed. We have introduced whole school virtual assemblies where children are encouraged to think about the eight essential skills. These have increased the children’s knowledge and the professional development of our staff as they are having to apply the essential skills themselves as they take turns in delivering these assemblies in a new way. We have included our support staff in all aspects of the development of Skills Builder, they are therefore confident to deliver and model these skills. The impact of this is that we have embedded Skills builder beyond the classroom for example to our interventions both on and off site, our extracurricular activities and most recently the transition work we are doing with our incoming children so they are learning about the essential skills before they arrive in September. Having the framework of the Skills Builder Programme has facilitated a deep dive into our curriculum where we have embedded the essential skills. This process has also highlighted other areas for development. At Haywood Grove our classes are determined by numerous factors, age only being part of this. Resulting in the children not moving through the school in a linear fashion, therefore having a spiral curriculum is paramount to us. We’ve found the Skills Builder Programme supports this, we have also noticed this spiral pattern in our professional development, enhancing our own essential skills as leaders while implementing the essential skills across the school.
Keep it simple
Skills Builder is a fundamental part of our school, and the essential skills are referenced in every classroom and learning areas through the use of displays and learning templates. All members of staff use the universal framework and the skills builder hub to record progress, access resources and give feedback across all areas of the curriculum. When children join Haywood Grove, they are presented with a skills builder passport to record their progress throughout their time with us. Progress is shared with families through a yearly newsletter, displaying the eight essential skills throughout the year.
Start early, keep going
At Haywood Grove, children engage in weekly essential skills lessons where they focus on a different skill each half term. The essential skills are also incorporated into weekly assemblies and all other areas of the curriculum. All curriculum learning references the essential skills using displays, PowerPoints and worksheets. Interventions and extra-curricular activities also refer to the eight essential skills, ensuring that these skills become part of the everyday life of our children. Our children are presented with their learner’s passport when they join Haywood Grove, this passport will stay with them until they finish in Year 6.
Measure it
Each half term, there is a whole school focus on a particular Essential Skill. Staff use the Skills Builder Hub and Learner’s Passports to record progress data for each student. During assembly at the end of each half-term, the essential skill for the following half-term is introduced to the children. The children can use their learner’s passports to record and track their own progress, the same learner’s passport will stay with a child as they move through the school to track and record all progress made throughout their time at Haywood Grove. The use of the learner's passports and the skills builder hub allows our educators to track the progress of the children and plan next steps accordingly. Our children also have the opportunity to collect skills stamps in a loyalty card style to monitor and track their own progress across all eight essential skills.
Focus tightly
Class teachers have access to the skills builder hub where they engage students in Essential Skills lessons once a week. Teachers carry out formative assessments on the Skills Builder Hub after each lesson and use this information to inform their next lessons. Haywood Grove have developed a personalised pupil passport which allows space for the children to reflect on and celebrate the progress in the essential skills, these documents will go through the school with the children, and they will receive a second level when they complete the first.
Keep practising
All areas of our school curriculum refer explicitly to the eight Essential Skills across all teaching and learning, using a common language and visual prompts. The eight Essential Skills have been mapped to the rest of the curriculum, highlighting links with other subjects and interventions we offer. This is demonstrated to the children using displays, to highlight when and where particular skills are being used and shown. This ensures that the essential skills language is embedded into our curriculum and into the language used across the school. As part of our transition for new children, we run Skills Builder Project Days to introduce the children to Skills Builder and the language used.
Bring it to life
One of the ways in which we bring the essential skills to life is through whole school assemblies and our global curriculum. We use Lyfta to explore different themes and countries around the world and relate these themes to our eight essential skills. Our children will also have the opportunity to collect skills stamps in a loyalty style to monitor and track their own progress across all eight essential skills. We run class enterprise stalls at our termly school fayres, this gives our children the opportunity to work together to plan and run a stall at the fayre whilst applying the skills they have developed through Skills Builder.
What's next
Moving forward, we will continue to embed the Skills Builder Programme into our curriculum and school life. Our children will continue to use their learner’s passports to track the progress they make in their Essential Skills lessons and continue to use and apply the skills inside and outside of the classroom. We are currently reviewing our appraisal process for our staff and plan to use the essential skills as part of this to set targets and outcomes as part of the process as we would like to bring our performance related pay policy more in line with the skills builder and their ethos. We are also looking forward to introducing a Skills Builder Project Day into our transition programme in the coming year.
