Challenge for all

One of our Teaching and Learning priorities at Nova Hreod Academy is ‘Challenge for all.’ This is the notion that lessons should be planned and well-structured with high challenge content. As Assistant SENDCo at the Academy, I strongly believe in academic success for all; I teach English to students across the ability range and I teach the same high challenge content to all the classes I teach, with support in place to scaffold students’ learning. I truly believe that, with the right support, every SEND student is capable of achieving their potential, in school and beyond.

In Mary Myatt’s book High Challenge, Low Threat she suggests that we should aim for the top in our teaching and unpack through talk so that all students can access the demands of a challenging curriculum. It is well-known that poor readers become increasingly frustrated with the act of reading and often try to avoid reading altogether (known as ‘The Matthew Effect’). So it is incredibly important that we expose students to high challenge content in lessons to build their knowledge and vocabulary which they can then apply in their learning. In secondary school, students are introduced to an average of 3000 new words a year. Understanding of these new words requires an underlying knowledge of more basic vocabulary and concepts.

For example, when teaching Blood Brothers to my class of low prior attainment students in year 9, I have taught my students about politics and life in Liverpool in the 1960s-1970s to support their understanding of characterisation and the plot of the play. Students need to be taught this powerful knowledge explicitly so that they can consider the play in more depth. I feel that I would be doing students a disservice in their education if I simplified the content of lessons as they wouldn’t build their vocabulary and cultural capital. In an earlier blog this year, I shared my favourite quotation from Andy Tharby’s book Making Every English Lesson Count: ‘The opportunity to read challenging literature is an entitlement. If we deny students the opportunity then it encourages a kind of elitism that deems only a certain calibre of child worthy of reading a certain quality of text’.

Quality first teaching is the first stage of SEND support at school and our strategy of ‘Challenge for all’ enables students to access good quality teaching across the school, every single lesson. We use Wednesday morning meeting time to share best practice in teaching and learning across the school, such as advice for teaching staff about different types of SEND and how to best support students in class. Our message is very clear that the underlying principle is that good quality teaching every lesson through the ‘Challenge for all’ approach is the best opportunity we can give all our students to have better life chances.

By Sophie Unsworth (Assistant SENDCo)