James Stradling, Curriculum Area Lead for Science at All Saints Church of England School in Weymouth spoke to us about using Tassomai to re-engage pupils with home learning in the post-covid era, especially in an area of high pupil premium and poor social mobility. 

It has never been more important to raise aspirations and engagement and using Tassomai, the Science Leadership Team and I can monitor every child’s performance quickly and easily using the Usage Function. Data is presented clearly and enables us to monitor the amount of time spent on homework, the accuracy, questions attempted and a range of other key values.  

The Tassomai team are very responsive to their customer base and are always seeking new ways to engage and motivate learners, so it is in everyone’s interest to build up the relationship between Tassomai and the school.

Praise to raise

The new Class Engagement and Leaderboard tools illustrate this dynamic responsiveness and enable my team to foster pride and care in student scores and performance. This ‘praise to raise’ approach is central to raising achievement in our schools. By sharing each class' performance, pupils progress through the Tassomai course which raises the profile of homework and rewards pupils for achieving their Daily Goals which has seen independent learning improve significantly. 

To sharpen the focus, we look at class data on Tasso Tuesday as a team, repetition each week being another supportive tool for promoting positive habit formation amongst pupils. Furthermore, the parent email system allows us to triangulate the support for homework between the school, home and the child. 360 degree communication on expectations. With the repeat function on Satchel One for setting homework and Tassomai being the primary vehicle for questioning and marking, teacher workload is reduced and staff are not required to either set homework or mark it. Therefore, they are freed up to analyse performance, reward and engage with pupils.

Engaging the unengaged

We have further developed our system this year in order to further engage pupils and to tackle the twenty percent of pupils who had not previously engaged with homework across the school. David Morgan, our fantastic KS3 lead, began by highlighting the pupils with less than one hour of homework across the spring half term and writing to these parents to invite the pupils to a homework support session.

All staff were asked to support this session through encouragement to attend in school time. The turnout was high with our first year group, and staff were on hand to solve issues and get pupils online and working. The eight percent of pupils who had not attended the session and had still not engaged with homework independently were then given notice of a department detention and a further whole school detention for the final three percent.

Building a network to raise attainment

Our work in using Tassomai to improve independent learning has led us to re-evaluate the triangular communication model and to replace it with a child-centred model of communication in which Edutech, SLT, parent and teacher all form a network around the child. The links between the stakeholders above hold the key to raising achievement and to developing the independent study skills that our pupils need to maximise their progress. The aim is not to impress OFSTED, or to close the progress 8 gap as a headline figure. This will happen naturally as a result of the attention to the links in the communication network around the child.

Time spent by school leaders in supporting and maintaining the systems and structures required to support learning and to challenge pupils to achieve their best is rewarded by improvements in engagement. A relentless support for young people and a determination to challenge preconceptions amongst staff, parents and pupils themselves is rewarded by improvements in accuracy and progress.

Strategy, communication, determination and Tassomai are our toolkit to move forwards.

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