Smashing Year 6 ARE goals

“The improvement in their academic progress and confidence is just phenomenal.” Lindsay Grigg, Willow Wood Primary

A 30% + increase in ARE data for both reading and maths in only a few short months is the kind of progress that all schools dream of. That’s exactly what the fantastic pupils and staff at Willow Wood Primary in Wharton achieved.

We spoke with Assistant Head, Lindsay Grigg, and Grade 7 Teaching Assistant, Tracy Mackay, about the challenges that faced the staff and pupils at Willow Wood, their LbQ SATs journey, and what they put their remarkable success down to.

On the challenges currently facing Willow Wood

Lindsay: The location that we're in means that we face a lot of challenges. We're in quite a deprived area, so the children do come in with low entry points. We've also got high mobility, so we have a high proportion of pupils joining and leaving our school.

We have a challenge at the end of key stage 2, where our results are below national average. So we were on the lookout for an intervention tool to support pupils and plug post-Covid gaps.

On particular areas of focus at Willow Wood

Lindsay: If you walk around our school at the moment and you talk to any member of staff, any child, reading is a common thread throughout the whole of school. We believe strongly that you can't succeed in life unless you can read.

Tracy: I'm super passionate about reading. I always say it's the cornerstone of everything that we do because if you can't read, you can't go to high school and do history where they give you a paper and say, "Right, read that and answer the questions".

My passion is to make sure that all our children go to high school with the right level of reading, so that's one thing they don't have to think about when they start high school.

On first impressions of Learning by Questions

Lindsay: LbQ first came into my life when I was just sitting scrolling through Facebook. Straight away I wanted to go into the head and say, “this is a fantastic tool that can be used in our school to ensure that we are narrowing the gap with the national average by the end of key stage two".

Tracy: I knew that Lindsay was bringing LbQ on board but I didn't really know much about it. I then got to sit in on one of the virtual meetings and it just blew my mind. It just seemed amazing. It was something that was really going to help the children and make them more independent, as well as well as making them more aware of where their pitfalls were.

And I can't believe all the resources there are. I can't believe just how user friendly it is as well, both for the adults and for the children.

On the immediate impact on pupils

Lindsay: When the children were first introduced to LbQ they were just blown away. They just could not understand that this was a part of learning. They're so used to that pencil and paper or pen, and you try and make it as exciting as you can. They could not believe that they were learning using a laptop and seeing the progress that they made.

Tracy: We started using LbQ, and straight away their confidence grew immeasurably. It was absolutely brilliant.

On the SATs Springboard

Lindsay : As a result of LbQ we've seen a real increase in the pupils attainment. Since starting (the SATs Springboard) up till the beginning of May, we saw a 34% increase in children working at age related expectations in reading and 36% working at age related in maths. It's also been the highest arithmetic scores that we've had for years.

So LbQ, alongside other things that we've been doing, has had a real impact on the children's progress and that's because of the confidence that the children have now got from LbQ and their self-esteem being raised.

It's not just the academic progress that I've seen. It's been the impact that it's had on their mental health and wellbeing.

Tracy: I have what is called a Fresh Start group, and that is a group of children who have been identified, by me, to improve their reading skills. We decided that we were going to bring LbQ every day to that set of children. Since we've used it, most of that group have moved up at least one or two book bands within school.

Lindsay: We started using LbQ for reading but then it just escalated into our grammar, punctuation and spelling, and a resource for our maths as well.

On what the staff put the impact down to

Lindsay: LbQ has made my life a lot easier. I used to have to look on different sites, find different resources and pull questions together. On LbQ, the questions are already there. If I want to teach, say for example, about inference through reading, I can just look straight on LbQ, and the questions will be there.

It also enables me to see exactly how the children are performing in the moment, so I can address any misconceptions right there and then rather than having to go home and create a question level analysis. It's all there for me and the children who get that immediate feedback. For my wellbeing, that is just phenomenal because I don't then have to take work home at the end of the day and mark.

Having done that (SATs Springboard) trial, it’s changed me as a teacher. I’ve been teaching for over 20 years and I wish I’d found it earlier. Because it has such an impact in such a short space of time… everybody should be using it!

You can watch the staff at Willow Wood tell their story in this short video.

See the SATs Springboard in action now, and book a chat with us.