At Axle Education, we have established a unique system which empowers learners to take ownership of their learning. It is called DPR, the Dynamic Progress Reporting.
Our team is composed of professionals who lead in the education industry, including serving senior leaders, with proven track records in raising standards. Our solutions are therefore born from genuine challenges faced by schools and teachers across the country. This ensures that our products are gimmick-free, simple, meaningful and practical.
Forest Gate Community School (FGCS), which is part of the CST, has achieved a Progress 8 score of +1.3, putting it in the top 6 schools nationally. FGCS has championed the use of DPR since its launch and the impact of DPR is evident from the excellent GCSE results (watch a short video about it here).
Additionally, the DPR ensures students make rapid progress in their subjects. Our innovative ‘Pathway X’ project, for example, aimed to stretch and accelerate the learning of our exceptionally able students.
The examples above demonstrate the kind of impact the DPR has when used in schools. Barbara Firth, when awarding the National Association for Able Children in Education (NACE) Challenge Award to FGCS, wrote: “The DPR has increased students’ responsibility for their own progress, as well as teacher’s response, and enhanced parental involvement. All stakeholders speak enthusiastically about how DPR has impacted individual progress. As one parent said, ‘My son is excelling: the communication between teacher, parent, and child is enhanced through the ‘Dynamic Progress Report’.”
Furthermore, Miranda Perry, Director of World Class Schools Quality Mark, wrote: “The DPR was the best ‘life without levels’ secondary stage assessment system I have seen accessible to all stakeholders”.
While many schools have attempted to address the new curriculum, in particular life after levels, the mistake they have made is to make ‘more of the same’. The DPR’s success is its genuine address of knowledge acquisition through a mastery approach that practically involves important stakeholders, and this has been fundamental to the success of FGCS in 2017.
To summarise, the DPR aims to achieve the following:
- Provide clarity on what students need to learn and what they are yet to learn
- Use student-friendly terms (eliminating ambiguities of what exactly grades and levels mean)
- Connect learning upwards between years 7 to 11 and is differentiated for different abilities across the same year group
- Provide opportunities for personalised learning
- Standardise differentiated learning objectives
- Allow the monitoring of core knowledge and skills to be learnt, retained and recalled over time
- Facilitate opportunities for ‘mastery learning’ and encourages depth before breadth
- Enable meaningful interventions, which takes place both in class and out of class
- Provide opportunities for students to become independent learners who can self-regulate
- Facilitate powerful real-time collaboration between all stakeholders
- Provide opportunities for meaningful feedback (this includes DPR voice – the ability to quickly provide feedback through voice recording)
- Allow real-time reporting
- Facilitate the setting and tracking of the frequency and, importantly, the quality of homework
Meet with the Axle Education team at Bett 2018, at stand G300.
For more information, visit Axle Education’s website.
