Eastern High School

[EduCativ]

We work closely with parents and students to create a caring and purposeful learning environment, where students enjoy coming to school and are proud to be here. We believe that every student can succeed with the right support and encouragement, ensuring we constantly review and improve our provision to ensure this happens.

We want our school’s future success to be measured not just in terms of good exam results, but also in terms of our ability to help young people develop the personal skills and talents they need to flourish in life and to make a positive contribution to society.

Our vision is very simple in short, we strive to ensure every student who joins our learning community will leave at the end of their time with us, with the knowledge, capabilities, and wherewithal to, to achieve this vision we believe in developing attributes and values in all our students that are sustainable throughout life. This ethos is embedded throughout every aspect of school life and manifests itself through four pillars of sustainable practice.

Our vision is underpinned by a set of core values and beliefs:

• A sense of belonging encourages confidence and growth.
• We accept that young people are still developing, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
• As educators, it is our responsibility to address the developmental needs of the whole child.
• In the 21st Century, a teacher’s expertise increasingly lies in their understanding of how young people learn rather than simply their subject knowledge.
• Collaboration fosters confidence, creativity, and reciprocity.

We ensure all our students can access the curriculum effectively, so we place a high emphasis on the development of literacy, numeracy, and the development of good habits about learning. This allows students the opportunity to develop flexible, adaptable, and independent learning skills, essential for the 21st Century. We operate a three-year Key Stage 4 where students make subject choices in Year 8, and begin their GCSE courses in Year 9. This gives them a longer period to study the subjects before their exams in Year 11.

In Year 7 all students study English/literacy for 10 lessons out of 30 per week. This is to ensure all students quickly develop the literacy skills necessary to access the wider curriculum. The English program is delivered through Project-Based Learning with the majority of the projects having a humanities (geography, history, RE) context. Humanities are therefore delivered through these projects. From Sept 2017 there will be a similar project-based curriculum for maths/numeracy, where science and technology provide a context for maths-related projects. This will also have a similar allocation of curriculum time.

In short, we aim to develop highly literate and numerate learners by ensuring a high proportion of curriculum time is devoted to English/literacy & maths/numeracy, without students realizing they are doing so much! Some pupils will continue studying this curriculum until we feel they are ready to access the full curriculum.

We emphasize Project-Based Learning as we believe this provides the best opportunities for students to develop independent learning skills and allows teachers to personalize learning more, enabling learners to progress at their rates.

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