John Pacey, Lead Assistant Headteacher at Acklam Grange School, talks to Tassomai about how his school uses Tassomai’s science courses and the change he has noticed in his students’ approach to learning… 

We have been using Tassomai since just before the first lockdown in March 2020 and were part of a trial run by PiXL throughout the summer. Chris, our Customer Success Manager, luckily came to the school to give us a walk-through of the product right before the pandemic took hold, which meant we were well prepared to use it throughout lockdown.

We ran it as a competition to begin with, using the progress counter to judge how much of the course had been completed by each student, deciding that if the majority had 15% progress in 6 weeks, then we would keep it for the remainder of the year. We saw heavy usage from some students so bought it for the whole of the next year to get it really embedded with the students.

Rewards and leaderboards

We have focused on using Tassomai for science so far by setting 3 Daily Goals a week for all 5 cohorts. To keep students engaged, we use leaderboards and celebrate whole year groups or classes who are doing particularly well. We set a minimum expectation with the number of Daily Goals a week and then try to drive further engagement on top of this, which is rewarded accordingly. 

This approach is used to persuade all students to get on board as they feel like they’re missing out if they aren’t doing well on the leaderboards. One student has hit their Daily Goal every day since the start of September - even through the holidays! In my experience, once students are on board with the process they really do run with it.

The other day I overheard year 11s talking about their longest streak on Tassomai in the corridors and where their classes were on the leaderboards. Obviously this won’t be the case for every student in a year group but having this element of competition creates some intrinsic motivation within the whole school.

Where Tassomai helps most

Our students tended to struggle with AO1 general knowledge questions before we started with Tassomai but this has now been flipped on its head. Using Tassomai has filled in all of the core background knowledge students need, giving us the time in lessons to focus on exam questions and applying that knowledge in the classroom. This is exactly how I think classroom time should be used, so this has been a brilliant shift for us.

We recently had a whole school teaching and learning review and the science department noticed a significant change in the time that we’ve had Tassomai - all students are now able to talk about science, not just Tassomai but the whole experience of the subject. They’re arriving with knowledge of their own and are evidently much more switched on with the subject - Tassomai has definitely helped with that.

Year 11s are allowed to use Tassomai in school but the younger year groups are encouraged to complete their Daily Goals outside of school hours. This is why I like Tassomai much more than other platforms we use - it builds on daily habits and is all about doing something little and often. Frequency and consistency is rewarded rather than students having to do loads at once.

Next steps 

If students aren’t hitting their targets, they are invited to attend Tassomai 'crash courses' outside of school time. This enables our staff to provide additional support, removing barriers to get all students feeling confident using the program, but also provides a useful deterrent by taking away any excuses for non-completion. Moving forward, we would like to further develop our rewards systems and promote social norms to increase student motivation without the need for sanctions.

We also want to get parents engaged with their children’s usage as much as possible, as we know that will help students to stay on track. We are in the process of getting Tassomai’s weekly parent report emails set up so hopefully this will help boost engagement.

Head start

When year 11s do use Tassomai in school, it’s usually in self study time. There’s always a number of different options for how they can fill this time but Tassomai is a firm favourite for students in these sessions. I think this is because it’s much less intimidating to start a multiple-choice quiz than to dive into a long form exam question. Tassomai doesn’t feel like an onerous revision task but before they know it they’ve already done a solid 15 minutes of concentrated work. 

Creating opportunity

Our school is in central Middlesbrough, in one of the highest areas of deprivation in the country, so understandably around 40% of our cohort are pupil premium students. Our policy has always been to help students apply themselves as much as they can, no matter their background or circumstances. 

We are passionate about making a difference within the school space and making a safe haven for our students where they can learn and open themselves up to new opportunities. For some, it’s one of the only places they get a firm structure so we want to use this to empower them with as much positivity and knowledge as possible.

Tassomai’s accessibility really helps with this. We have a homework club for KS3 and study groups for year 11, as sending students home with a laptop doesn’t guarantee that they will be able to use them there. It’s all about providing the space and the opportunity within the school.

We have really high aspirations for our students and try to build those aspirations in them too so they know what they can achieve if they set their minds to it.