%20Text%20(Violet).png)
Case Study: The Hinckley School
The story of The Hinckley School
The Hinckley School first subscribed to The EverLearner for Physical Education in March 2020 as they were looking for a way to gain a deeper understanding of students’ grasp of topics without adding to staff workload. They wished to help students achieve the best possible outcomes as well as to continually improve their own teaching practice. Shortly after, the Science department jumped aboard and they too fully engaged with the platform, using it to support their teaching and learning.
In November 2021, Adam Barnacle, Head of PE, invited The EverLearner team to The Hinckley School for an opportunity to see how the Physical Education department has fully embedded The EverLearner platform into their scheme of work and how, as a result, student engagement and performance has dramatically improved.
Why The Hinckley School chose The EverLeaner
The Hinckley School decided to subscribe to The EverLearner as they wished to personalise the learning experiences of their students, whilst not increasing their staff workload. They were looking for a system that would provide them with knowledge retrieval tasks and activities that could confirm that the previous knowledge had been understood by students. In addition to this, they also wanted to enable teachers to quickly and accurately identify students’ areas of strength and weakness and to be able to provide personalised support in response. They also wished to be able to accurately track student progress.
The timing of their subscription also coincided with the closing of schools to all but children of key workers across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adam explains how The EverLearner platform was quite simply invaluable during this time:
“The EverLearner has enabled students through an incredibly traumatic two year experience to have 24-7 access to high quality teaching and diagnostics which enable them to track their own progress and improve on identified areas of misconception, irrespective of the availability of face to face teaching.”
How The Hinckley School uses The EverLeaner
The Hinckley School have fully embedded The EverLearner into their PE scheme of work. The platform is used for flipped learning, with tutorials assigned to students before attending the lesson, which allows for the preloading of knowledge. This enables students to enter the classroom with an understanding of the concepts that are going to be taught in that lesson, allowing for the classroom teaching to then extend the learning further. Quizzing on the tutorial content is also assigned to students on The EverLearner platform before the lesson, which allows for the teacher to confirm the level of understanding of each individual student, before the student has even entered the classroom. This allows for students to achieve a greater depth of learning and for the teacher to spend more lesson time focussing on the application of the knowledge (AO2) and the analytical and evaluative skills of their courses (AO3). This is of great benefit because students spend more class time on the tougher skills of each course, namely the AO2 and AO3 skills.
The use of "Live Data" helps to immediately inform teachers where students' strengths and weaknesses lie.
Staff also use the tutorials to check on content that students have previously struggled with, setting these as a follow-up task to revisit the concepts and therefore allowing for fully personalised and individualised intervention plans.
Checkpoints provide the perfect way to monitor, record and promote progress throughout the course.
Students at The Hinckley School use the video lessons from TheEverLearner to produce extremely detailed notes.
Adam and his team also use ExamSimulator to set individual exam questions as homework tasks, which are then used in the following lessons as a starter activity. It also enables staff and students to work remotely, which has been invaluable during the Covid pandemic, with staff and students self-isolating. Adam explained that PE students at The Hinckley School have a “thirst” for exam questions and having access to hundreds of exam questions, feedback and marking guidance has proven very popular with students. This has driven staff to use ExamSimulator even more this past year.
The PE department also makes full use of The EverLearner dashboard. They use it to effectively track where students are at, the amount of knowledge that they have accessed and where they are applying their knowledge. It also allows them to quickly see which different concepts are areas of strength and weakness for each individual student, to quickly spot any possible misconceptions, even if that particular piece of content has not previously been tested in a pre-test or summative test.
The dashboard is, of course, also used to track progress. For example, Adam and his team use the checkpoint data as summative data to check snapshots in time of where each student is at.
The results
Using The EverLearner and ExamSimulator has dramatically improved student outcomes and engagement with their studies, as Adam explains:
“The EverLearner has become an essential, embedded process within our teaching. Students’ engagement and the depth of understanding have increased significantly. The greater focus on application is now driving outcomes in the current Year 11 and Year 13 even further than last year.”
5% above national Grade 7+ with cohort progress of 0.4 per candidate
77% of A-Level students achieved an A or A* with an ALP score of 1.14 and Grade 2
Using The EverLearner has also helped Adam and his team reduce their workload in terms of time being spent on checking students’ understanding of concepts, and the use of ExamSimulator in particular allows teachers to react more personally to the students’ requirements.
ExamSimulator from TheEverLearner helps teachers check understanding of key concepts whilst reducing workload.
In addition to this, Adam uses the site as CPD for developing his own teaching skills and to challenge himself, and for him this has been invaluable.