I am sure that there is a maths joke in that title somewhere! Anyway, I promised to post more information about the logistics of the one-to-one programme that we mentioned yesterday – I must remind you that this isn’t the model we’re adopting in our new school as we have no under-allocation (just in case anyone from work is reading this and about to have a hissy –fit!):

  • Under allocation ascertained for all staff
  • Each identified member of staff is asked if they would prefer to do English or Maths (NB: some teachers were allowed to do their own subject as agreed by SLT).
  • Students identified as requiring extra tuition in either English or Maths (or increasingly other subjects) by heads of department – different criteria for selection were used for different subjects i.e. it could be teacher judgement or those students that were underperforming with a specific focus on PP students.
  • The sessions for key stage 3 English or Maths students were done by non-subject specialists and all of the year 11 sessions were done by either Maths or English teachers.
  • Students were informed that they would be getting extra support and letters sent home to parents
  • Staff and students are matched up and a course of sessions planned.
    • This involved looking at teachers and students timetables (on some monstrous spread sheet!)
    • I would try not to “hit” the same subject every week so each teachers different frees/PPAs were used each week
    • In maths this would usually be about 10 sessions and in English (and other subjects) as long as is required and could be between 2 or 10 sessions (some students got more!)
    • The sessions were not always 1 student, 1 teacher – in fact they were more like 1 teacher 4 students. One-to-one meant that if a student was absent that session would be “wasted” and so with at least 2 or more the teacher isn’t sat with no-one in front of them. In maths we have found that more than 4 loses the effectiveness of the sessions.
    • Each teacher is provided with a half terms schedule and this fed into the weekly schedule that was published to the whole school.
  • The weekly schedule was made available to all staff on a Monday (changes sometimes made due to trips or absence etc.) and slips produced using a mail merge that were given to students (delivered on the day of their 121) by student receptionists along the lines of “Today period 2 you have extra “maths, please go to Mrs Muldowney, room 13”.

The whole school model developed over a couple of years and I wouldn’t advise anyone to go from nothing to that level of 121 all at once and the idea of one person doing the planning for all subjects stemmed from the need to make sure that the same subject wasn’t hit every week, but also that two subjects weren’t trying to take the same student at the same time. . Next week we’re starting on a very small-scale at Alcester Academy.

We’re just looking at our year 11 maths class in groups of three or 4 and we’ll be using the students RAG sheets from their last assessment and focus on some of the “Amber” topics in addition to the Top40.. It’ll be Seager, one other member of the department and I, doing them – I’m quite looking forward to getting back to doing them … it’ll feel like normal!

We don’t have the capacity to do 121 with all students in our “super-group” we’d want to in the first instance (they will get it in phase 2) and so those that aren’t phase 1 will come into my tutor group shortly (fingers crossed). This can be done, due to the school moving from “vertical” tutor groups back to “year group” tutor groups this year – with the idea that in year 11 the tutor groups  can be as fluid as they need to be (if needed) so that students are put into groups to focus on specific subjects and then moved as is required. I love the idea that my group will be made up of students that I’ll teach maths too.