This year’s primary school league tables have produced a flurry of news reports which the Whizz blog has pretty much ignored. But this piece in the UK’s Independent caught the God of Whizz’s eye:
‘A little fun can go a long way when it comes to learning‘.
We can’t argue with the sentiment, as it is one of the key principles that has informed Maths-Whizz development – if you do something you enjoy, you’ll do it well, even maths tutoring. It’s just up to the educator to help make the subject engaging. The Independent took a closer look at one of the country’s most ‘value added’ primary schools – Blue Bell Hill, in Nottingham – that seems to have taken this maxim to heart:
“We take them ice-skating or to a pantomime – or do dance and drama with them,” said headteacher Jo Bradley. It is not the usual recipe for ensuring good performance by 11-year-olds in national curriculum tests. But at a time when a growing number of schools are recording figures showing that more than half their pupils fail to reach the required standard in maths and English – 885 this year compared with 798 in 2008 – it is surprisingly effective.
Blue Bell Hill consistently outperformed expectations for a student body that is largely very poor, with many non-English-speakers. This is especially good, given that standards nationally seem to have slipped – with 79% of schools hitting expected targets, down from 80% last year.
Whilst the Independent’s headline attributes the high performance to simply having fun, it’s clear that the school’s consistent and dedicated leadership has played a large part in ensuring that standardised tests that receive so much scorn from teachers and parents alike needn’t necessarily be a roadblock, for even the most needy of students.
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