Launching CENTURY for maths and English at Norman Street Primary School

Norman Street Primary School is a state primary school serving 340 pupils from Reception to Year 6 in Carlisle, Cumbria. We spoke to Maths Lead Adam Crewe about how his team embedded CENTURY in English and maths classes.

Why did you choose CENTURY?

We were looking for ways to consolidate learning and advance progress that made the most of the iPads within school. Reducing teacher workload was also a consideration. Our computing lead had read about CENTURY in an article, so we began discussions with the team. We had a trial and decided that it had great potential for our school, with a very reasonable price.

We had the training session with all staff, and rolled it out to Year 5 first then expanded to our other Key Stage 2 classes. We are two form entry, which means we had eight classes that were all using CENTURY to varying levels within a month or so. In maths we launched straight in with it by using it for 15 minutes at the end of every lesson. This allowed pupils to consolidate learning or advance their learning independently, while the teacher was free to follow up with any targeted individual misconceptions from the lessons. 

Initially pupils were very excited and interested in the novelty of a new online program. As the year has gone on, it has become integrated more into their daily learning for different subjects, and that excitement and interest has been maintained. In Year 5 we set an assignment each week for maths and an assignment for spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG). This normally contains around five nuggets - some to consolidate and some to pre-teach. We also routinely use the diagnostics before and then after teaching a unit to monitor understanding and progress. 

I encouraged staff to experiment with it for the first half term and then we had a quick meeting after school one night to compare notes on effective use and potential barriers. We use CENTURY mainly for flipped learning, in plenary sessions or as a morning starter in our school now. We avoided homework as too many parents would want to help their children, which we felt could impact the AI adaptive learning aspect of the programme.

Have you seen any impact from using CENTURY?

We quickly noticed a very positive impact with our more capable learners. They are already confident with the majority of the curriculum, so they rapidly advanced onto more complex learning recommended by CENTURY’s AI that they then applied to their classwork. This was most evident in their English work, where they started using much more complex grammar, such as colons and semi-colons, that had not yet been taught in class. The pupils like the instant feedback, easy interactive approach and how it works to encourage them.

CENTURY has allowed pupils to continue learning independently while supporting teachers to do almost instant interventions. In some cases it has saved time. Monitoring the pupils does still take some time identifying which pupils are achieving objectives, but it is certainly not as time consuming as going through a pile of books. The teachers like the fact that it allows pupils to advance learning independently where appropriate, and how it requires no marking, just monitoring the data dashboards.

Find out more about how you can use CENTURY at your primary school here. Book a demo here.