Approach

At Pearson School Improvement, we are not only looking to improve outcomes in schools, we also want to transform how students learn and make learning more engaging, exciting and relevant than before. We want to work with schools to help them develop and balance the skills students need if they are to become active citizens and contribute successfully in 21st century work and life.

Our research and findings
We’ve been researching and talking to educationalists, school leaders and teachers from across the country about how to develop, sustain and accelerate successful schools. We’ve been inspired by many people and organisations, but to us, McKinsey and the OECD stand out as thought leaders in this field. Their two key points are:

• Those students most likely to achieve success beyond school have both knowledge and also a range of thinking and application skills that contribute to their success.
• School systems can make significant gains in student performance no matter where they start from (‘poor’ or ‘excellent’).

We launched a paper explaining why we think this is the case at the Sunday Times Festival of Education in June 2011. It also sets out the building blocks of our approach to school improvement.

Three key components
We’ve boiled down our approach to three key components

• Mastering Learning
  The key range of skills and dispositions that students need to develop throughout their education to ensure they are successful in 21st century work, further and higher education and life.
• The Always Learning Gateway
  A comprehensive, student-facing, technology-enhanced curriculum accessible anytime, anywhere via the internet.
• School Effectiveness and School Transformation Programmes
  This is a flexible programme of School Improvement and Continuing Professional Development (CPD), tailored to the needs of your school.

In 2011-2012 we ran a pilot to find out how five schools in very different circumstances made use of some of the core components of our approach. The pilot helped to shape our approach to technology-enhanced teaching and learning and helped inform our understanding of the journey schools need to go on if they want to adopt this approach on a systematic, on-going basis.

Next steps
We are now running a second phase of the pilot with a selected group of research schools. Find out more about the pilot and about becoming a research school.