Small-scale project - St Mary's

St. Mary's Catholic College is a secure, caring community with a clear focus on learning

The distinctive curriculum of St Mary's Catholic College and Christ The King's Catholic Primary School in Blackpool, seeks to provide the experiences that help create a community of enthusiastic and increasingly independent learners. The attainment of all students is a matter of pride, and good results across all ages and abilities reflect this enthusiasm. The college, designated a Mathematics and Computing Specialist College, aims to develop innovative and high quality teaching and learning across the curriculum. St. Mary's Catholic College provides an extended and enriching curriculum. Using creative and innovative teaching styles, incorporating developing technologies, the college seeks to challenge and support all students to achieve their individual potential. We promote the use of Mathematics and ICT across our curriculum.

Personalised Learning at St Mary's
Personalised Learning at St Mary's means building on previous BSF work around integrated pathways and the school's three competencies of co-operation, connectivity and confidence. Working with the Space4PL team to articulate what Personalised Learning means to them the school came to the understanding that they are keen to practice and promote structured independence in learning. They agreed their view of Personalised Learning as illustrating the idea of 'teaching someone how to navigate themselves rather than taking them by the hand'. The school identified the three major characteristics that would enable Personalised Learning as being self management, reflection and team working.

The Pilot Project Aims
The main aim of the pilot is to provide an environment for a KS3 curriculum model focused on personalisation and supporting the specific Personalised Learning themes of:

- KS3 Integrated Pathway
- KS2 to KS3 Transition
- BSF Change Management

The Process
The team and the school looked at the learning characteristics of students across the school and identified 3 main learner types:

- Team workers
- Reflective workers
- Self managers

They then used this information to extrapolate the activities and behaviours associated with these characteristics and to prioritise activities according to groups of students. The S4PL team and the school were able to take this information and work together to develop spatial characteristics for each key activity. Once all the activities were covered the team could create a menu of the most popular characteristics to inform the concept design, which centred on the provision of a range of settings within a single large space to support the different activities. An existing food technology room was identified as the area to be developed due to its being a double size classroom with high sloping ceilings and therefore able to offer more flexibility than most other spaces.

Design Principles
The aim was to create a nurturing and inspiring space where:

- Flexible Settings in learning environment meet Changing Needs - artistic, academic, individual/pair/ group, presentations, ICT
- A Variety of work areas is on offer - Formal & Regular
- Appropriate technology is available
- Student's work & achievements are celebrated
- Furniture settings can be easily reconfigured depending on the needs of the activity (individual work, small group chat, large group debate etc...)