We are delighted to announce that St Lawrence College has been awarded accredited AS Tracking status.
Miss Amy Humphrys has been working alongside the Deputy Head, Pastoral Mr Tom Moulton and other external AS Tracking consultants to help us achieve this accreditation. It is great news for St Lawrence College and a recognition of the work put in by all of the College staff as a collective body.
Miss Amy N Humphrys, who is Housemistress of Clifford, KS5 Coordinator of English and STEER Operational Strategic Practitioner:
“St Lawrence College are now part of an international community of schools meaning that we also have their wealth of knowledge and expertise at our disposal. To achieve this status, we were required to show that we have used the assessments and data as part of our regular practice, rolled out CPD and training for wider staff, created and used action plans from our analysis of data and begun to use the program to establish strategies to better support our students, amongst many other objectives. It will now be a work in progress as we prepare pupils to eventually take control of their own data as they progress towards university, encouraging them to reflect on where they have perhaps encountered hurdles (or indeed how well they have navigated) throughout their school journey.
We introduced AS Tracking to the school a couple of years ago, with the view of wanting to integrate a pastoral tracking tool to our practice. It is commonplace to use academic data to support our teaching and so it seems only right that pastoral data informs conversations with the students under our care in much the same way.
All pupils complete an online assessment twice yearly and the data produced from these is used to help steer our discussions and interventions with pupils, without impeding existing practices. This data is then built on each year, as we consider how it might have changed alongside transition points, year groups, or in fact global pandemics!
Having worked across both the independent and state sectors where I have encountered various different methods, it’s something I really believe in and value, which prompted me to apply for the ‘Operational Strategic Pratictioner’ role to work alongside Mr Tom Moulton (Deputy Head, Pastoral) last year.
As a school, we pride ourselves on the pastoral care we offer and so a tool which both adds to and compliments existing toolkits can surely be no bad thing.
We are now involved in webinars and discussions with other schools where we will continue working on ensuring the platform is integrated into our practice as effectively as possible. Trevor Greenhill, our previous AS Tracking consultant, mentioned how ‘caring and supportive’ St Lawrence came across during his visits and this is certainly something we want to continue to promote as being at the very core of our school ethos. It is certainly my belief that AS Tracking is a part of ensuring that care and support is consistent for all of our pupils. Ultimately, the better we understand our pupils, the more tailored and effective the support we provide them with will be.”
You can find out more about STEER on their website: https://steer.global/en
