Research School Network: Character Education at Five Acres High School Giving students a better chance of success

Five Acres is comprehensive secondary school located in Gloucester with around 30% disadvantaged students. It is part of the Greenshaw Learning Trust and achieves well above national outcomes.

The school’s mission statement reads: ​‘Students at Five Acres High School will have a better chance of success than if they attended any other school in the country.’ As a school we have been on an incredible journey since joining the Greenshaw Learning Trust. The initial focus was on improving outcomes; our P8 figure before joining the Trust was ‑0.35 which needed immediate attention. Our first set of results, in 2018, was +0.26 which rose to +.066 in 2019.

However, simply being an ​‘exams factory’ isn’t enough to ensure that our students have access to a world-class education. A Framework for Character Education in Schools (The Jubilee Centre) states that ​‘schools that are values-driven have high expectations and demonstrate academic, professional and social success’. So, to be world-class and provide the best for our students, we needed to do more and it needed to be something else.

The Framework talks of helping students to become flourishing individuals, which in turn contributes to a flourishing society through building blocks of character. At Five Acres, we have five Core Values; Ambition, Confidence, Creativity, Determination and Respect. Our Character Education offer is intentional and planned for and it is a commitment to our students that we will provide the opportunities they need and deserve.

Each of our Core Values has three subcategories and within those there are different levels of bronze, silver and gold. They span a wide variety of activities as no two people progress in the same way. Every student has a Character Education book where they log what they have done and use this to secure a certificate that gets rewarded in assemblies and, also a badge that they can purchase and wear on their blazer with pride! For example, the bronze Adventure badge is attributed to our Confidence value and students achieve it once they have completed a residential school trip.

We also have timetabled Oracy lessons in the curriculum for students in Key Stage 3; this is a new programme which is being designed and led by our second in English. The Framework states that ​“schools have a responsibility to cultivate the virtues, define and list those they want to prioritise and integrate them into all teaching”.

One of the challenges we faced was that the Character Education was entirely new and something that our school had never done before. Another was the task of tracking and monitoring to ensure that we were doing what we had aimed to do which was to be a world-class school and provide these opportunities for ALL of our students. During the Spring term of 2019, our Character Education offer was launched and by the end of that year only 24% of the 622 certificates issued were for PP students and 10% for SEND.

With some focussed work on looking at possible barriers to this by introducing additional staff training on our offer as well as having it as part of the weekly routine for students with regular updates, we managed to build on this further. This resulted in an increase in the Autumn term of 2019 to 26% PP and 18% SEND of the 1410 certificates issued that term alone. This was only on the number of certificates though, not student engagement. Our tracking showed that 79% of our school was using their logbook to record their achievements and experiences with 73% of PP and 69% of SEND. This work is supported by staff and student ambassadors.

One of the most difficult aspects of Character Education is measuring impact as it is a part of what the school community does and also having some guidance on possible next steps. To do this we applied for the Character Education kitemark from the ACE (Association of Character Education) and had our evaluation visit on Monday 25thNovember by Dr Tom Harrison, Jubilee Centre (Birmingham University and ACE) and Mr Gary Lewis, Chair of the Association of Character Education (ACE) and Research fellow at the Jubilee Centre. It was a fantastic opportunity for the school to demonstrate the work that we had been doing and get invaluable feedback from experts in the field:

We were successful in being awarded the Character Education Kitemark and we have subsequently been invited to lead a workshop at their Character Education Conference in July 2020 to be held at Eton College. Whilst I can therefore say that our programme has been effective, we are still constantly looking for ways that it can be developed and improved and our reach into the community is getting even wider.

If you’d like to hear more or come and see what we do, then please just get in touch and we’d be happy to share our ideas and passion. I would recommend Fridays as then you’d be able to witness (and take part in!) our whole year-group choir sessions – yes, all 150 students!

Rhiannon Rainbow is an Assistant Headteacher at Five Acres High School with responsibility for Character Education.