COLUMN: Dales pupils must be resilient to make it in the world

At Highfields School one of our top priorities is to prepare young people for life in a rapidly changing world.
Peter ColePeter Cole
Peter Cole

Today’s students will have many different jobs in their lifetime, many of which haven’t even been invented yet. This requires young people to have excellent abilities to learn new skills and to adapt continuously. In this column we’ll take a look at how we are approaching this at Highfields School and consider the role of the changing exams system.

A few years ago we began to develop a common language for learning at Highfields School. Drawing on wider research we developed our model of ‘the 5Rs’, which are as follows-

Responsibility

Resilience

Resourcefulness

Reasoning

Reflectiveness

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We develop and celebrate these characteristics from day one at Highfields School.

Resilience is particularly important to us, and we have stressed that ‘sticking at it’ is crucial to success, drawing on inspirational role models such as gold medal winning Olympian Jessica Ennis-Hill, who has claimed that ‘my only talent is that I don’t give up’. By adopting a mindset where we see set-backs as good for learning we are preparing for bright futures in a rapidly changing world.

Students also need to be successful in public exams. Nationally examinations are going through the biggest overhaul for some time.

Our Year 11 students will be amongst the first cohort sitting new style GCSEs in English and Maths in the summer. Most other subjects move on to the new GCSE structure for our current Year 10s.

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The new GCSEs replace the existing A*-G grading with a 1-9 grading system. Grade five will be the new benchmark of ‘a good pass’. This grade is aligned to the top end of the current grade C, with the intention of ‘raising the bar’ of expectations for standards to be reached by 16-year-olds.

Meanwhile, the introduction of a new grade nine set above the current A* is designed to recognise and reward the attainment of the top three per cent of students.

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