St Edmund's School Canterbury is an independent day and boarding school in Kent established in 1749. We spoke to Joseph Pellett, Head of English in the Junior School, about how they have used CENTURY data to inform and engage parents.
How has CENTURY’s data helped with parental engagement?
Parents in this day and age are very intuitive and they understand CENTURY is a learning platform. The most common question we are asked is what their children are spending time on when using CENTURY. What’s lovely is I just go into strengths and weaknesses, and I can tell them exactly where their child is pushing forward and that CENTURY is beneficial. I can also steer them on what conversation they can have with their child about their English homework. That connection allows the parents to feel that they don’t have to battle against the children for homework.
CENTURY has been absolutely critical for time management with self-marking and the ability to instantly understand how the students are performing. Now we have a clear spread of data across all the children, we can report to parents exactly how their children are doing or speak to the pupils directly, and identify what the problem is. If we can see that they have practised the relevant nuggets and are still struggling we can do an intervention and actually help. Or if we see that they are struggling but they haven’t spent any time on CENTURY then we can ask them to do that first.
How has CENTURY helped close learning gaps for students?
CENTURY supports us with the children who sit just on the bottom of ‘average’, where they could just fall off and slip through the net. The lower ability children get the most help, the higher ability children are fine. It's those in the middle to lower section that don’t get as much support because they’re just about okay. CENTURY catches them, and gives us really specific information to give parents.
For example, we could see if a 13 year old has tried the nugget on full stops three times and still has not scored 100 per cent. The parent may say they noticed something similar when the child was writing a letter at home. As they get older they become more embarrassed not to know things they think they should already know, and they may not ask for help. CENTURY completely closes those gaps as it picks up where we thought students already knew something. It can identify that a student may not know how to use full stops, and we will then see they are using them wrongly without understanding, trying to replicate sentences parrot fashion. CENTURY tells us, we can then tell the parents.
We can tell if they’re Googling answers. It’s a pattern. We can see how many times they closed the application, how many times they came away from it and went back. We have all this information that children would usually try to hide when they’re doing homework. We tell the parents that the more their children do on CENTURY, the more information we have about them and the more we can help them. They are using this tool to allow us to teach more in class and pinpoint. In English, it has been vital for us.
This is part two of a two-part case study. Read part one here.
Find out more about how you can use CENTURY at your independent school here. Book a demo here.
