Shireland Collegiate Academy is a large inner-city secondary school in Smethwick, Sandwell, West Midlands. Over the past few years, the Academy has gained a reputation for effective use of technology to improve standards, innovative curriculum design and embedding new approaches to learning. The Academy has been judged as Outstanding by Ofsted in 2006, 2010 and 2013. Significant curriculum innovat
ions have played a large part in the Academy’s success. The Academy offers an integrated, competency assessed (without levels structure), thematic curriculum at KS3 and a weekly extended period of time (focus days) to students in KS4 and KS5. This has provided increased enriched activities to students as well as a platform for excellent controlled assessment delivery. The Academy is a Teaching School (one of only three in deprived areas) and was the National Pupil Premium winner for the West Midlands in 2015. The Academy is also running large-scale research project with the Education Endowment Fund and 24 local primary schools and has written 6 technology-enabled educational toolkits for the Examination Board, OCR. Over the last decade, we have harnessed technology for learning and supporting school processes which enable our high levels of progress. Every child has their own device across all year groups and the online platform, the Learning Gateway, is the driving force of our academy community. It provides access to class on-line areas and teacher resources designed to support and enhance learning for our young people. In the last few years, the quality of classroom delivery has changed dramatically through the use of a Flipped Learning approach, where work at home comes before a lesson and student online responses result in more targeted support and work in class. Teaching has been judged as Outstanding in the last two Ofsted inspections and more than two-thirds of the teachers in the Academy are currently judged as Outstanding. Flipped Learning through the use of Class Sites on the Learning Gateway has been an essential part of this journey.
