Our school, Wayfield Primary, is a school of 260 pupils aged three to 11 based in Chatham, Kent. The school’s motto ‘Proud to Achieve’ is reflected through the leadership team who work together to ensure that every pupil in every class reaches their full potential.
EdTech for ‘good’
In September 2016, when I joined Wayfield, we had been rated as inadequate in the recent Ofsted and my mission as IT lead, was to support the headteacher to turn the school around. Once we had sorted out the priorities, we looked at how technology could help. Our school sits in an area of the country which is mixed-income but has a fairly high level of deprivation and it was important to me that children at our school don’t miss out on future opportunities due to lack of technology.
Affordability
I wanted to use technology to support pupils learning both in the classroom and at home, but affordability was a key factor for us. We needed to look at how we could deliver technology for all, without parents going over budget. We came up with a £5 per month payment scheme, which was fund matched by the school for any children receiving pupil premium. This meant that every pupil had their own iPad to use in school but also to take home for extra learning outside the classroom.
Literacy matters
Writing is one of the key foundations in a child’s education, and Wayfield was on a mission to ensure that every child’s writing ability was assessed so that any pupil’s needing support got the interventions they needed sooner rather than later. We immediately looked to see what apps were available to help us improve outcomes for literacy.
Classroom apps
Once you have your tech in place, the next minefield is what apps to put on them. As a starting point, we looked to other schools to see what they’d been using and why. We also looked at apps to help with screen time usage as it’s imperative that we teach our children when and when not to, use technology.
Today, children need to have an element of independent learning. At Wayfield, pupils are given an apple pencil and have the freedom to go onto many approved apps on their iPads, such as sketches, Kaligo etc.
A few tools are available that can regulate screen time and downtime with individual apps and devices. For example, the ‘classroom’ app on the iPad can lock down all iPads in the classroom when the teacher does not want to use technology.
The apps we’ve found that add value in the classroom are Kaligo, which is an intuitive, self-improving and monitoring AI handwriting tool. Times Tables Rock Stars, which is brilliant for bringing pupils on with their timetables. We also use Literacy, spelling and maths Shed resources which provide creative and fun ideas for the classroom.
Transforming learning
We made a conscious decision to monitor the impact of any EdTech introduced, and we’re delighted that we can clearly see from our results that the impact has been a positive one. Increased collaboration using technology certainly engages the pupils more, and we’ve seen an improvement in results and homework completion has significantly improved.
But the most important impact has been that our pupil’s wellbeing has improved. They tell us that they aren’t as anxious about learning and are keen to take on new ideas.
During the COVID pandemic, we were able to maintain handwriting skills. As the quality of content on the Kaligo platform is so high, our teaching teams find it very helpful. But perhaps one of the best outcomes is that pupils get immediate intervention without adding to teacher workload. A teacher can easily see what progress every pupil is making and whether they are where they should be. We’ve already seen that as our pupils head back to the classroom, the lockdown has had little impact on handwriting and their writing is still on track. Technology isn’t just a gimmick and introducing iPads for every pupil and giving them full ownership has been worthwhile for learning.
Matthew Tragheim teaches at Wayfield Primary School in Chatham and is also Kent ICT Champion of the Year.
