How The Royal School Wolverhampton is using CENTURY’s data to improve maths results

The Royal School Wolverhampton is a free all-through school in the West Midlands. Amina Ahmed, Head of Mathematics, spoke to us about why the Royal School chose CENTURY and their initial successes.

I had actually used CENTURY at my previous school. Particularly because of the AI recommended pathway, which is different to any of the maths software I'd used before, I asked the Vice Principal here if we could embed it for maths, English and science.

We ensure that the students are set one piece of homework per week for each of the three subjects using CENTURY. It’s essential for us that as soon as one piece is set on the software we then celebrate the students’ success as well. We present students in the classroom with bronze, silver and gold awards for the top usage. Our account manager has been great in engaging us with the Winter Cup and all the challenges which we take part in to ensure the students are on board.

The greatest thing that we've done is embed CENTURY in our all-through primary school at Key Stage Two. About 95% of our students go on to the secondary school here, so if Year 6 students are already familiar with CENTURY, embedding in Year 7 has become a lot easier.

CENTURY’s teacher dashboard is especially useful to see everything together in just one place for report writing, to contact parents, and for data drops. It’s also really useful to see how students have completed homework. Sometimes if you set work on paper that the students mark themselves, they might not want to say how many questions they got right or wrong, but CENTURY gives a clear picture. By clicking on to the nugget that you've set you can actually see which students have got which questions right and wrong. Then you can embed that into your classroom teaching for their next lesson so you are closing the gaps. 

There's also a really visual representation of how your class is doing in terms of “needs praise”, “needs stretch” or “needs intervention”, and we’ve used that data to create little classes and set intervention work.

Maths is our most popular subject using CENTURY. The Key Stage 4 results for maths were in the top 20% nationally, the Progress 8 score was 0.70, and these maths results were significantly higher than in 2019. We’ve only used CENTURY as our platform for homework and intervention, that is the success story in maths.

Do you have any advice for anyone starting with CENTURY?

Do as much training as you can to ensure that you really understand the platform, and know exactly what features there are, because there’s absolutely everything from maths resits to Functional Skills.

Then find someone else to champion CENTURY with you. We have a classroom teacher, Ashok Kumar, who works with me to promote CENTURY. We did the training together, we handed out the certificates together and we’ve come up with strategies together, such as using the interventions visual display to set homework. We also have the TAs using CENTURY for Functional Skills. All of this was possible because we’ve championed it together.

Book a demo to find out more about the courses, or speak to your Account Manager if you are an existing customer for more information.