Got it
By continuing to browse this web site, you are consenting to the use of cookies. See the Privacy/Cookies page for more about how we use cookies on this web site.
Home FAQs Self Review Account Creation News Forum Contact us|A+|A|A-
Name: Sara Ainsworth
Institution: Brookfields School (111516)
 

Settings

Assessment Number614/3
StatusSurvey Completed
Type Of AssessmentRenewal (full with visit)
Date Requested6 Mar, 2017
Head TeacherSara Ainsworth (head.brookfields@halton.gov.uk)
ContactSara Ainsworth
Order Noictmark0317
AssessorRoger Broadie
ModeratorNot Allocated
Focus Elements

There are several areas that I feel it would be good to explore in detail, as well as having general discussions about your use of ICT in the school. The aspects I would like to focus on are:
- How the school is enabling the children to capitalise on the opportunities technology offers the children to interact with other people while remaining safe.
- How technology is being used to engage parents and develop interaction with parents and their support of their childrens' learning.
- The use of technology for recording progress and for sharing this with pupils and parents.

Visit Agenda

My proposed agenda for the assessment is below. Please will you let me know if this is workable from your point of view. Please will you also let me know the names of the people that you arrange for me to meet and their roles.

I would like to stress that the assessment is not a paper chase and the only documentation I will need to see is the Vision and the ICT Action Plan. In looking round and in talking to everyone I meet I can get a good picture of the school. I will also be looking at the most recent Ofsted report and the school website.

These timings are indicative and will be adjusted when I know when your school day starts, in order to start the assessment shortly after the start of the school day.

8.40 - Arrive.


8.50 - Introductions and putting the school in context - head teacher and the senior leadership team ICT lead.



9.10 - Tour of the school with the head teacher and the ICT lead.



9.55 - Review of the evidence with the ICT team.



10.30 - Meet with 2/3 stakeholders including a parent and a governor who are not members of staff



10.50 - Talk with some students from different years as they are using technology as a normal part of their learning (accompanied)




11.10 - Meet with at least three teachers from KS1 and KS2, and note please not the ICT leader or ICT Coordinator.

 This is preferably a single session with all the teachers but could be two sessions, one for KS1 and one for KS2

11.40 - Time for the assessor to evaluate the evidence. I will need a private room where I can prepare the report back.



11.55 - Feedback to the headteacher and such other members of staff as you wish.




12.15 - Finish.


Assessment Date26 Apr, 2017
Commentary On Assessment
1. Vision, leadership and organisational management

The school leader, and the teachers, are well aware that technology is opening new levels of inclusion in society for the kind of children the school caters for. However they also clearly understand the esafety issues that this raises and work with both children and parents to develop esafety as strongly as possible.

The ICT coordinator works closely with the other teachers and there is good discussion on ideas for using technology to support learning in different subject areas. This has particularly happened during the meetings to introduce the new curriculum.

Governors are strongly involved in decisions about the use of technology in the school and are active in its development, with one governor and their child being part of a University of Hertfordshire project looking at the use of robots to develop communication and understanding of facial expression, a project the school leaders are watching closely.

Parental engagement is seen as a high priority, with the school running regular coffee mornings to discuss matters such as esafety or useful apps that the parents might like to try with their children. There is also work done with the childrens' siblings. The school leaders are keen to find out from parents what technology resources the children respond best to at home and make use of this where sensible. There is a strong parents' association that regularly raises money to increase the budget for ICT.

The school uses a range of ICT systems, such as B Squared and CPOMS to make assessment and collection of evidence more effective. As they have agreed with the secondary school to use similar systems the transmission of information at transition is now more effective.

2. Provision of ICT; quality and range

The school is continually looking for and evaluating new systems that might help individual children communicate more effectively. This includes devices at the leading edge of development such as voice to writing software and voice assistants as well as the more established PECS and LAMP systems. There is good awareness that use of tablets and smartphones, that are used by everyone, where these can replicate the functionality of specialised systems have the advantage that they do not mark the children out as different, which is powerful in helping them to feel more included in society.

There is a wide range of technology devices in the school ensuring access is easy as required. This includes, desktops, laptops, ipads and devices such as Beebots. All classrooms have interactive whiteboards which are very regularly used, with the teachers for example using cartoons to help the children read facial expressions better.

The school has effective internet access with good filtering, and makes use of online systems such as Kids YouTube. The school also takes advantage of social networking systems to communicate with parents. The school is investigating the use of skype and will soon explore how this works with the children.

3. Demonstrating impact on learning and teaching

The school has a strong focus on ensuring that the technology is used to develop learning, not just to keep pupils busy. This leads to clear understanding amongst the teachers of how to balance pupils' sometimes very strong desire to use online material with the broader range of activities it is important the children have. Technology is used at specific times to develop the rhythm of the school day, such as key songs and visuals to help the children recognise the different parts of the school day, and in specific ways with individual children that develop engagement and avoid addictive behaviours.

Technology is used to link activities out-of class and out-of-school with work back in the classroom, such as staff taking videos of school trips and photographs. Images are also well used to capture activity in the classroom to remind pupils during plenary discussions of what they have been doing.

In the knowledge that many of the children have iPads or other devices at home, the school ensures that there are online a systems available, such as Espresso and Education City, that the children can use to extend their learning at home.

Areas of strength/outstanding practice within the context of the self-review framework:

- There is very strong vision amongst the staff, led by the Head and Deputy but also evident in the conversations with the teachers, as to the importance of technology to the learning and life chances of the pupils. Given that the students have a range of disabilities and learning impairments this vision relates not just to the pupils' time at the school but also to the importance that technology will have for them throughout their lives. The staff are well aware that technology offers the possibility of much stronger inclusion and life and work interactions that will not be possible for these pupils without technology, but at the same time this connectedness creates dangers that some of the pupils will find difficult to manage due to their level of maturity. The school leaders approach this as a challenge not as a difficulty, with the over-riding aim being to achieve the best possible connectedness for each individual pupil.

- There is very good liaison with parents about their childrens' daily activities that has been extended from the home-school diaries into online methods that fit better with parents' lifestyles. The school provides regular opportunities to not only inform parents but to help them understand and use the technology systems their children use to communicate. As the school is forever seeking more effective tools to enable the children to communicate this parental liaison extends to individual work with parents to help them appreciate the possibilities that new and unfamiliar systems might offer, with patient persuasion over time enabling use of these communication devices to become effective in the home environment as well as in school. The school is also embracing the use of social media which has led to parents exchanging information and helping each other.

- The teachers and support staff work with the children not just in an educational sense but in the broader way of developing their whole mental health and emotional well being, which is progressively developed as the children make their way through the school. This, together with clear identification of, and work on, the specific communication difficulties each child has, is helping the children develop a willingness to engage in interactions with others, that gives them a the strength to be more adventurous and to achieve more. This is particularly being supported by the ways the school is looking to use smartphones and tablets wherever these can perform similarly to specialised communication devices, as this gives the children a feeling of belonging in mainstream society, and being able to interact with the world through devices commonly used by others.

The future:

- The growing use of touch-controlled devices could be further developed from the moment pupils arrive in the school. The school has noticed that the childrens' strong motivation to use these devices to access activities and games is helping them to develop beneficial behaviours. As this is also being worked on by other schools working with children who have difficulty linking cause and effect and communicating, it is possible that apps may become available that are specifically designed to stimulate and develop such behaviours. As development of apps is now becoming easier the school might even find developers able to create such apps. The devices might also be used to stimulate beneficial physical behaviours, for example through the way the construction of lego models can be much more explicitly guided and stimulated.

- The use of video could be extended. The school has already noticed how well pupils are able to take pictures of each other doing tasks, which can be a strong stimulus for conversation and discussion of the task to develop understanding. As it is clear the children are film-aware from the way they direct each other how to pose, it is likely that at least some of the children could take short videos of each other doing simple tasks. If the school develops the capability of the staff to handle and display video easily, this kind of work could be extended into use of green-screen to enable pupils to see themselves in real-life environments. More video could also be introduced into activities such as the forest school work, which could bring the excitement of this out-of-classroom work into activities in the classroom. In time the school might start their own YouTube channel, and even start sharing video with parents that demonstrate the childrens' achievements in both the home and school environments.

- The school has taken some first steps into the use of voice assistants of the like of Google Alexa and Apple Siri. The development of these systems is extremely rapid and their ability to interpret natural language and to turn this into search queries is being made possible by artificial intelligence systems that can take into account knowledge about the person making the request. It would be good for the school to open discussions with the secondary school to which pupils go and to jointly develop thinking about how best to use such systems with the children, as they progress towards adult life. By the time the children in the school reach age 18, perhaps 10 years hence, it is highly likely that these voice assistants would for example be able to intelligently respond to a questions such as "Find me someone to help me with ..........". The assistants are likely to be able to interpret such a request as "Find me (a person with specific handicaps/learning difficulties) someone (someone who is actively posting in online forums, who can reasonably be expected to be a useful and safe person to talk to) who can help me (will generate a response that will proactively be pushed to me) with.......... (some task that I need to undertake to interact with agencies, employers or friends). This kind of development could be a major enhancement of the childrens' ability to interact with the world.

Assessor's RecommendationThreshold Reached