HIGHgateway Maths Tutoring
Seven tutors who are graduates of Highgate or its partner schools have been identified to teach groups of three Year 11 pupils twice a week for 45-minute sessions for ten weeks in maths. The project was identified to minimise learning loss and support students most affected by the COVID-19 crisis.
Aims
• Add capacity to ABS Maths teaching in preparation for Y11 exams
• Pilot a tutoring scheme with commercial potential for Highgate School (the commercial scheme is designed to tutor international students and income generated from it will finance Highgate’s future partnership teaching and community work)
Identified need:
• National learning deficits as a result of COVID-19 lockdown
• Attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers, highlighted further during COVID-19 lockdowns and learning disruption
Critical success factors:
• Effective training of tutors
• Recruitment and attendance of pupils
• Cooperation between maths departments in both schools to identify curriculum
• Availability of Highgate teaching staff to train tutors
• Flexibility to adopt a remote/online format in case of further lockdowns
Immediate beneficiaries:
• 23 Y11 pupils of ABS and the 7 tutors who have been trained. Pupils to become more confident with core Maths concepts and tutors to become more competent in Mathematical and pedagogical concepts, following training by Highgate staff and support from the Acland Burghley Maths department.
Background
There has been a long-standing relationship between the schools for over a decade but this is a new project. Highgate was inspired by the National Tutoring Programme to design a project applicable to COVID-19 context. This pilot project followed the donation of funds to ABS for digital poverty during the COVID-19 lockdown, after the Head of Highgate School ran a marathon around the school field called Laps for Laptops which raised money for Y12s in the 6 secondary schools closest to Highgate School.
Discussions started between the Community Partnerships Director at Highgate and the Headteacher, Acland Burghley School, about how the schools might work collaboratively in the future. The Director of Learning and former Head of Maths at Acland Burghley was identified as the point person for the project and identified the pupils to be targeted and the specific need for the groups.
Resources
Having seven tutors who are competent enough and prepared to tutor maths at GCSE. When delivered in a remote format, ensuring that tutors and pupils have the required hardware to access remote teaching platforms.
Use of facilities:
The tutoring took place at ABS (in person at the outset) and with pupil attendance in school. The subsequent online variant took place at remotely with the pupils taking part in the sessions from home.
Staff engagement:
It uses 3 teaching staff (trainers) and 8 non-teaching staff (Project Lead and 7 tutors) from Highgate School and 2 teaching staff from ABS. Thirteen staff and 10 weeks of teaching and 4 additional weeks of planning and measuring impact for a total of 14 weeks
Financial contribution:
The scheme is free of charge for ABS, Highgate has designated staff for partnership work and special projects who are deployed towards this scheme. Three of the tutors are paid by Highgate for their work on the scheme on a casual basis as it falls outside of their regular contracted hours.
Impact
There was a baseline maths assessment at the start of the project and a mock exam in January 2021. These represent the beginning and end points of the project and marks obtained before and after the tutoring will be a very useful indicator as to whether pupils have successfully met the academic goals set out in the scheme.
Qualitative and quantitative assessments were carried out in January, which suggested the aims of the project had been met.
• 14 out of 23 pupils attained a higher GCSE grade than they had in their baseline assessment. Of the 9 pupils that did not, 7 of them were in the two lowest foundation groups.
• 70% of students wanted to continue with the sessions.
Pupils were also asked to give a score from 1 to 4 (4 being the highest) to indicate how much they agreed with certain statements.
• The average score for “whether the tuition helped me improve my maths knowledge?” was 3.3.
• The average for whether they “felt more confident that they will be a success in their Maths GCSE” was 3.2
• The average for whether “the topics in the sessions were the ones I needed help with” was 2.7, the lowest score.
Further assessments will be done with the online group.
Tutors meet weekly to debrief and train. Tutors have a mentor to meet weekly to debrief. Acland Burghley School and Highgate have a weekly debrief either by phone, email or in person and feedback from debrief sessions is shared across both schools weekly.
Evaluation:
Our data perhaps suggest that similar schemes have greater potential to raise the grades of pupils who aren’t in the lowest ability groups.
Topic selection was the greatest challenge of the pilot as bespoke tutoring to that degree is very difficult when tutoring in groups which are chosen by overall ability due to individual pupils struggling with different topics, but it is likely to be less of a challenge in the future commercial scheme which is geared toward individuals currently.
Another challenge was attendance. A scheme has been devised whereby one member of staff emails parents who’s pupils did not attend the now online sessions, but we are yet to have enough data to determine the impact of this intervention.
Pupil Involvement
Year 14s aged 18-19 (pupils who have graduated from Highgate but are staying on to work at the school) are tutors, and there are 21 pupils from Acland Burghley in year 11 aged 15-16. Tutors and pupils are a mix of gender.
Frequency
It is an on-going activity for 10 weeks, with two sessions per week, with the potential to be extended.
A further pilot of the scheme, with a remote tutoring format, will run for 8 weeks.