OUR TEACHING & LEARNING STRATEGY 2026/2027
“The school has inclusive culture with positive attitude towards learning. My son is performing well and the school motivates students to excel in their learning and share additional resources.” Parent of current student
Developing student engagement, autonomy and academic productivity promotes equality of opportunity, as it supports all students to work more effectively and efficiently to achieve their best outcomes.
One of our whole-school priorities is to strengthen student engagement and autonomy in order to increase academic productivity. This focus directly supports our core values of excellence, aspiration and achievement, and is underpinned by a strong moral commitment to enhancing every student’s learning opportunities and outcomes.
Through our Formative8 approach, feedback is timely, meaningful and actionable. Regular formative assessment helps students understand what they are doing well and identify the specific steps needed to improve. This supports the development of confidence, resilience and independence, ensuring that students remain actively engaged in their learning journey.
Alongside this, our Active8 approach encourages students to take an active role in their learning. Active8 promotes purposeful learning behaviours, self-regulation and reflection, empowering students to understand how they learn best and to take increasing ownership of their progress.
By developing student autonomy and academic productivity, we promote equality of opportunity. Formative8 and Active8 work together to support all students in learning more effectively and efficiently, enabling them to achieve their best possible outcomes. These approaches also foster individual responsibility, as students routinely reflect on their learning, respond to feedback, set meaningful goals and take proactive steps to improve their progress.
Formative8: Our Approach to Feedback
At The Highcrest Academy, we believe that effective feedback is one of the most powerful ways to improve learning. Our Formative8 approach provides a consistent framework for formative assessment, ensuring that students receive meaningful guidance throughout their learning journey.
Formative8 is built around eight key strategies that help teachers check understanding, respond to misconceptions and provide feedback that moves learning forward. Through knowing the class, checking understanding, adapting and reteaching when required, and using cold calling and whole-class responses, teachers gain a clear picture of student learning. Regular opportunities to refresh and revisit knowledge, alongside purposeful feedback, help students embed learning and make sustained progress over time.
By making assessment an integral part of every lesson, Formative8 enables teachers to identify strengths, address misconceptions and adapt teaching in response to students' needs. This ensures that all students are appropriately supported and challenged, helping them to make sustained progress and achieve high standards.
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Active8: Our Approach to Engagement
Active8 provides a shared framework that promotes purposeful engagement and academic productivity across the school. Building on the guidance and feedback provided through Formative8, it supports students to develop positive learning behaviours, strong routines and reflective habits, enabling them to take an active and informed role in their learning. Through Active8, students learn how they learn best, manage their time effectively and respond constructively to challenge.
Engagement is not left to chance. Active8 ensures that opportunities to remain passive are limited by making mental engagement an explicit part of classroom practice. Teachers consistently teach, model and reinforce the behaviours that lead to successful learning, creating a coherent experience across subjects and year groups. This approach helps students take increasing ownership of their progress and develop the self-regulation needed for success.
Through Active8, students grow into capable, reflective and responsible learners who are well prepared for the next stage of their education and for life beyond school.
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Student Autonomy
Student autonomy is developed by nurturing the attitudes, behaviours and learning habits that enable learners to become increasingly independent, confident and resilient. Through the principles of Active8, students are encouraged to understand themselves as learners, take responsibility for their progress and engage purposefully with challenge.
Our aim as educators is to empower students to succeed without constant direction. Active8 supports this by equipping them with the routines, strategies and mindset needed to thrive at the next stage of their journey — whether that is secondary school, further or higher education, or the world of work.
We view autonomy as both an individual and collective responsibility. Learning is inherently social, so we promote independence through collaboration, interdependence and emotional intelligence. In this way, Active8 helps students grow not only as capable, self‑directed learners, but also as thoughtful, empathetic and socially responsible members of their learning community.
Academic productivity
Academic productivity refers to the learning habits, routines and behaviours that enable students to make strong progress both in and beyond the classroom. Highly productive learners engage consistently in high‑return tasks, maintain excellent attendance, keep their reading age in line with their chronological age, follow healthy sleep routines and minimise distractions such as excessive social media use. Each subject area identifies the tasks that have the greatest impact on outcomes so students know where to focus their effort.
We evaluate improvements in academic productivity through a broad range of evidence. Students’ attitudes to learning are reviewed alongside their performance outcomes, while termly self‑report surveys provide insight into how they perceive their own productivity. Regular reading‑age assessments help us identify where additional support is needed, and staff surveys offer a complementary view of how consistently students demonstrate productive behaviours. Case studies and individual Academic Productivity Profiles allow us to track patterns over time and understand the experiences of students performing above or below expectations.
Together, these measures help us assess the impact of our teaching and learning strategy and ensure that students are developing the habits, routines and behaviours that underpin sustained academic success.