The Most Able

Meeting The Needs of Higher Attainers

At Deptford Green School our students' achievement, progress and contributions to school life are encouraged and valued. The school aims to nurture a lifelong love of learning in students within a happy, caring, secure learning community, which promotes excellence.

We believe that appropriate challenge both in and outside of the classroom allows our students to demonstrate success and build academic and interpersonal skills for their future endeavours.

Our vision for High Attaining students is to ensure that they are suitably challenged and supported to maximise their potential; preparing the learners of today to become the leaders of tomorrow.

What Do We Mean by "Higher Attainers" 

We use the term “higher attainers” to identify all children in two categories: 

• Those who are classed as ‘Higher Prior Attaining’ students. Identification of these students begins on entry to Deptford Green School with those who achieved high “scaled scores” in their end of Key Stage 2 assessments in Year 6.  These are students who come to Deptford Green with SATS scores of 110 and over. Where SATS grades are not available, we use MiDYIS and CATS to establish baselines.

• Students, despite their Prior Attainment, who demonstrate greater depth knowledge, skills and understanding. Through ongoing assessment, we will identify and challenge students regardless of their scaled score.  These could be students who are excelling in one subject, in more than one or across the board.

How we challenge these students. We want these students to hit the ground running and access the ‘greater depth’ knowledge, skills and understanding criteria that we set out for every assessment in every subject.  This ‘greater depth’ criteria challenges students to think more deeply about about a topic or subject, above age-related expectations. 

In The Classroom

Students who are working at a high academic level, are challenged every day, allowing opportunities for deeper thinking and exposure to higher order criteria within subjects.  As part of our policy, at each appropriate stage of a lesson, students are posed more open questions which require higher order thinking, known as STAR tasks.  Whilst these tasks are posed to the whole class, they are an opportunity for students who are more able to tackle challenging questions regularly, encouraging extension of thought.  Through graduated questioning and ‘Cold Calling’ teachers should also challenge and probe students’ understanding.  Students should regularly be exposed to criteria relating to ‘Greater Depth’ standard in Key Stage 3 and grades 7-9 at GCSE during tasks and assessments, to ensure they have the substantive, procedural and disciplinary knowledge to reach top grades. 

At Deptford Green school we recognise the importance of celebrating the achievements and successes in every subject. Students who are identified as most able in particular subjects will also be awarded ‘Subject Star’ status and will be encouraged to help lead learning. This helps us to celebrate experts in their field, as well as those who excel across the board.

Pastoral Support

At Deptford Green School, we recognise that higher attaining students may have particular needs and care will be taken to ensure that they receive appropriate pastoral support. The Head of Year and Pastoral Leaders for each year will support in the academic mentoring, progress monitoring and wellbeing support of the students.

SEN student passports are shared across the school which identify interests, strengths and the needs of each student.

Outside The Classroom

Students are provided with a rich extra-curricular programme including reading groups, puzzle clubs, STEM challenges, a podcast group, University projects, entering debates and many more. Our school Library and Teams Subject Libraries are stocked with multi-subject resources for the more able, including fiction and non-fiction books and research articles collated by our colleagues, for students to independently learn from.

Frequent contact is made with parents to highlight the work being done to support their child, provide a calendar of key (age related) dates and experiences available to their child.

We have an amazing Careers provision and Enrichment programme at Deptford Green School run by Ms Nembhard with many opportunities for enriching and academic focused learning. Some activities and events include:

• Careers fairs
• University mentors for KS3 students
• Latin lessons at Colfe’s; Duke of Edinburgh Award
• Free music instrumental lessons for all Pupil Premium KS3 students
• Maths Challenge for KS3 and Further Maths GCSE for KS4.
• Visits to universities (including Oxford and Cambridge)