Protected: Proactive Academic Care

Ballard’s vision for teaching and learning is to ensure that all of our pupils are provided with consistently high quality learning experiences so that all can achieve their academic excellence.

Our quality systems are all research-based, encompassing the six mastery fundamentals; Challenge, Explanation, Modelling, Deliberate Practice, Questioning and Feedback and our Teaching And Learning Policy promotes this.

At Ballard, we ensure that pupils are future-ready, knowledge rich and fully equipped for the next stage of their educational journey.

At Ballard, digital learning sits alongside numeracy and literacy. We believe that digital literacy is the bedrock for the future, encouraging pupils to become agile and future-proofed learners.

Enhanced digital literacy supports the acquisition of knowledge and breaks through their learning threshold. Online knowledge organisers and effective revision will be available for each subject, acting as multi-faceted revision guides with the added benefit of external resources, sitting alongside teachers’ OneNote pages. Each lesson is also loaded onto the system so that if a child misses that lesson, all the information, board work and associated links are encapsulated together; teachers can add and edit information, even after the class. This digital provision will enable all learners to be immersed in their learning.

Our new Digital Strategy will ensure that pupils are future-proofed to become agile learners in the digital world. Our pupils will be able to work within any digital framework so that deep learning occurs. Access, use, understand and create; all parts of digital literacy and teaching and learning at Ballard.

Ballard continues to invest in the best hardware and software; most recently putting a 75” Promethean interactive screen in every classroom; and we have introduced our Upper Prep (Year 6-8) laptop lease scheme, ensuring that each pupil and teacher has the same technology and software, which is regularly updated. By 2024, all pupils from Years 6-11 will be part of this initiative.

Lower down the School, pupils continue to work with desktop computers, iPads and adaptive, AI software, which ensures that each pupils’ learning is maximised. Even the youngest pupils are developing their IT skills, alongside the EYFS framework, to ensure they have the best foundation for future learning.

Our digital rollout centralises control of our learning resources such as Seneca, Kerboodle, Hegarty, and Duolingo. All this information goes into Microsoft Teams which acts as a filing cabinet for this virtual learning environment and adds a live element to pupils’ learning.

At Ballard, we define ‘Potential Plus’ as “Children and young people with one or more abilities developed significantly ahead of their year group or with the potential to develop these abilities.”

We understand the importance of ensuring that this potential is nurtured and stretched enabling pupils to reach their full potential. Ballard’s ‘Bespoke Education’ approach delivers just that for all our ‘Potential Plus’ pupils.

We know that highly able pupils need challenging learning experiences at both school and home and with this in mind, at Ballard we ensure that:

· We plan our teaching and learning so that each child can aspire to the highest level of personal achievement.

· Each ‘Potential Plus’ child must have the opportunity to work at their level by means of increased differentiation within the normal classroom practice and we will provide enrichment or extension activities to promote their skills and talents still further.

· We believe that the emotional and social development of ‘Potential Plus’ pupils should be encouraged alongside the development of academic and practical potential.

· We strive to create an ethos of confidence, links with the home environment and develop a sense of expectation in these pupils.

· We provide a range of enriching experiences beyond the classroom to stimulate pupil curiosity.

At Ballard, we believe every child is different, with a unique set of skills, talents, strengths and weaknesses.

Our Department of Enhanced Learning (DEL) aims to support our pupils by playing to pupil strengths and teaching skills and strategies to support the areas that pupils may find a bit tricky.

We recognise that pupils with dyslexia are not talented in spite of their dyslexia, but because of it – yes, their dyslexic processing gives them strengths and abilities to outperform their non-dyslexic peers in many areas. Their dyslexia may result in misspelling a word, misreading a sentence, or writing illegibly, but their dynamic reasoning skills allow them to mentally visualise and manipulate full-colour, lifelike imagery, which can be incredibly useful for tasks like map-reading, navigation, team sports and 3D design.

One of our pupils who found it hard to master reading, was able to design and build a robot that solved the Rubik Cube!

We passionately believe it is more about what you can do, than what you cannot! Everyone thinks differently, everyone is integrated and everyone has opportunities to succeed.

Alongside good grades and to develop ‘soft skills’ through their educational journey; giving them every opportunity to take strong steps forward and make the correct choices for their career. Mr Clifford and Mrs Hewison have been working extremely hard to establish a new Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance (CEIAG) at Ballard that now follows education’s highest standard; ‘Gatsby Benchmarks of Good Career Guidance.’

Every young person needs high-quality career guidance to make informed decisions about their future. Good career guidance is a necessity for social mobility: those young people without significant social, capital or home support to draw upon have the most to gain from high-quality career guidance.

The eight Gatsby Benchmarks of Good Career Guidance are:

1. A stable careers programme

2. Learning from career and labour market information

3. Addressing the needs of each pupil

4. Linking curriculum learning to careers

5. Encounters with employers and employees

6. Experiences of workplaces

7. Encounters with further and higher education

8. Personal guidance

Embedding the Good Career Guidance Benchmarks in Schools and Colleges

We offer a Scholarship Programme for exceptional pupils joining us in Years 3, 7 and 9. For more details, please see our Scholarship page.