Improving outcomes

By Ben Parnell, Regional Director for Greenshaw Learning Trust

As Regional Director for Greenshaw Learning Trust, Ben Parnell is responsible for improving outcomes in schools across the West of England, including Five Acres High School in the Forest of Dean where he’s been Headteacher since September 2017. Ben identified Tassomai as an intervention tool for GCSE science and put strategies in place that made a big impact on grades and Progress 8 scores.  In his words “we cleaned up on the results”, here’s how they did it...

When I heard about Tassomai I looked at the results section on their website and the correlation between usage and output looked pretty good, that was what initially drew me in.  Five Acres and another school I’m responsible for - Yate Academy near Bristol - had weaknesses in science outcomes and I wanted to improve them. When Five Acres joined Greenshaw in September 2017 the school was in special measures, graded 4 across the board so we were looking for intervention strategies that were fast, effective and measurable.

One year on and we’ve seen a significant change in our Progress 8 measure, from -0.31 to +0.26, and in science, results have improved in both schools, from an average of C- to C+.  At Five acres High - 98% of kids got 2 sciences, 71% got 2 sciences at grade 4+, 51% got a strong pass (5 and above) in 2 sciences.

Tassomai’s been one of the intervention tools that I credit for this change; I really believe in the product and think that it works, but if you’re going to use Tassomai successfully you need a whole school system for running it. You need an SLT, including the headteacher that really cares if it’s happening or not.

When we took over Five Acres we had a number of challenges: the catchment area covers a market town and a number of small, ex mining communities, almost half of the students are on free school meals, and it’s not the easiest area for recruiting and retaining science teachers.

We set out our expectations - which was easy to do with Tassomai - anyone that wasn’t meeting our minimum expectations around usage was given a detention.  We also made it part of the routine in school, timetabling Tassomai for 20 minutes every morning and setting it as homework every evening.