VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
View from the classroom - Maltings Academy I
n this month’s ‘View from the classroom’ Education Today meets John Szynal, Executive Principal of The Maltings Academy in Essex, to hear how his own experience as a child entitled to free school meals (FSM) has shaped his approach to
improving the progress and attainment of his pupil premium students.
Tell us about your school
Maltings is a big, oversubscribed secondary academy in Witham, Essex. We work hard to give children the best possible teaching, especially in English and maths, and this year's results were very pleasing. In Science, 100% of the students who took Triple Science achieved three GCSE grades A*-C and 79% achieved A*-C for Science (Additional).
While numbers studying modern languages decline nationally, French is growing in popularity at our academy and this year 77% of students achieved A*-C GCSE.
People often see art, photography and music as strengths at Maltings and parents of KS3 students like our ‘extended enterprise learning’ options – known as EELs – that let students study additional courses, such as Ball Skills, Hairdressing, Performing Arts and Digital Applications and Finance. This gives them an opportunity to pursue their own interests as well as some idea of whether they want to follow a particular career path.
We did well in these subjects this year: Art & Design (82% A*-C), Photography (90% A*-C), Music (100% A*-C) and Hair & Beauty (93% A*- C) and there were also marked improvements in Computing, Catering and Media, where overall attainment was up by over 20%.
Why is there such a strong focus on pupil premium students at Maltings? Of our 1,120 students, 33% are entitled to the pupil premium funding. I was a free school meal (FSM) pupil myself back in the 1970s when I attended a fairly average comprehensive school in a working-class area of Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire.
As the son of a Polish father and Italian mother who moved to the UK after the Second World War, I would have attracted pupil premium funding had it been around then, so it’s perhaps not surprising that I feel a particular affinity with today’s FSM pupils and I’m determined to do my very best for them. A good education gave me choices in life and I want my students to have those same opportunities – if not more. Sadly, statistics show that FSM students don’t do as well as their peers throughout the UK – and that upsets me. Something in the system is failing. I’ve no sense of why, but I’m angry about it.
What was your starting point and strategy? When I arrived at The Maltings Academy in 2010 it was rated by Ofsted as ‘Requires Improvement’, with 38% of students achieving A*-C in their key English and maths GCSEs. It was undersubscribed as parents chose to send their children anywhere but here.
Our task has been to get our children to believe 16
www.education-today.co.uk November 2017
that they can, and will, achieve - especially those pupils entitled to free school meals and/or who have special educational needs and disabilities. We went to see what other establishments were doing, learnt from them and adapted it to meet Maltings' needs. We have built on this by involving staff, students and parents in decisions on how best to use pupil premium funding. We gather evidence of what works and we don't just
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