Case studies

Easter holiday Year 9 English Booster

How the Year 9 booster programme fits in with our school’s priorities and agenda

Claire Jones, Key Stage 3 Pilot and Literacy coordinator at Solihull LEA, describes how her school organised a Year 9 English Booster School over the Easter holiday, and how it benefited both pupils and teachers.

Tudor Grange School is a comprehensive school with Technology College status, and has approximately 1250 pupils on roll. The school is participating in all strands of the Key Stage 3 Pilot including implementing cross-curricular policies in literacy and numeracy, and some very productive work in developing an Accelerated Learning project in the school. Resources produced as a result of this Accelerated Learning project were utilised in the booster programme.

Claire Jones worked alongside teaching staff from English, mathematics and science. A strong focus of the school’s work for the Key Stage 3 Pilot had been to implement the changes to the English and mathematics curriculum. This had largely focused developmental work in Year 7. The booster programme was a welcome shift of emphasis to focusing on those in Year 9 still not working at a secure level 5 and who had not had the opportunity to benefit from the new three-part lesson structure or Progress Units.

As a pilot school, Tudor Grange in Solihull has undertaken many new initiatives over the past eighteen months. Running a Booster School that required staff and pupils to attend school for one week during the Easter Holidays seemed one of their more ambitious initiatives. It was, in fact, one of the most worthwhile.