Evaluation of the Two Year Key Stage 3 Project - Communities and ...

6.1 Overall viewsMost, though not all, of the interviewees were, on balance, positive about the value of the Two YearKey Stage 3 Project. It was frequently seen as facilitating a tightening up of Key Stage 3 schemes ofwork, improving attainment and improving motivation and engagement. As one headteacher put itsuccinctly:Fewer staff complain about Year 8 and 9 classes now.It is however important to note that this interviewee also emphasised that the Project was a smallcomponent in the overall work of the school and that it was difficult to disentangle the benefits of thetwo year programme from, for example, reorganising the school day, altering the pathways availablethrough Key Stage 4 and providing mentoring to pupils - among other innovations.Similar points were made by teachers at other schools:Specialist status, the numeracy strategy and Key Stage 3 programme of study all came inrecently so it’s hard to separate them and in a way the new schemes of work are just adevelopment of those. The process has just provided for a tighter programme. Objective-drivenlessons are now much more common than they were… Lessons have a faster pace and pupilsare pushed harder… It’s just a less boring approach. For example, if we’re studying number,instead of having a lesson on adding fractions, a lesson on subtracting fractions, a lesson onmultiplying fractions, we’d now spend 15 minutes on that and then look at the next curriculumarea, which is shape and space and so we’d do the area of circles. It cuts down on unnecessaryrepetition. [Mathematics teacher]Teachers frequently described the opportunities that the Project had provided for making improvementsin teaching and learning at the school. Teachers enthusiastically described lessons that aimed to capturethe imaginations of pupils by turning the classroom into a crime scene to study colour chromatography(as a forensic scientist), playing an outdoor wide game to understand tactics used during Romaninvasions and so on.Most often, the condensed programme was seen as particularly benefiting the most able pupils. OneEnglish teacher commented: ‘The top group feel special’; a mathematics teacher noted: ‘The top grouplike the pace’ and a science teacher said: ‘We’re not holding the pupils back’.However, some teachers did express concerns about pupils not keeping up with the pace of teaching.The second and third groups [also following a two year key stage in Year 7 and Year 8]sometimes find it too fast and don’t keep up. Consequently they’re losing some of the basics ofgrammar and sentence starters, for example. [English teacher]Year 7 is going well, but the Year 8/9 schemes of work in Year 8 seem a lot more difficult.[Mathematics teacher]This teacher’s concerns arose as the gap between the pupils’ chronological age and the ‘curriculum age’widened. This issue was perhaps also reflected in the mathematics results reported by another teacher:[Of those who took] maths SATs [Key Stage3 national tests] in Year 8 all got 5+. One got alevel 8, but there were not as many 7s as we would expect in year 9. And then they took a firstGCSE module in March of Year 9. [Mathematics teacher]34