In school we value the importance of research in ensuring the very best outcomes for our pupils.  Our ethos is one of challenge and achievement for all, where teachers constantly evaluate their practice and often try new things or adapt their teaching in efforts to achieve excellence in everything they do.

Many of our key teaching and learning policies are underpinned by research that we do as a staff team, reading key literature and assessing the impact of what we do.  We think it is vitally important to keep abreast of new initiatives and current thinking while questioning and challenging change to always provide the very best for the pupils in our care.

Often our school may participate in research projects to help answer key questions regarding impact of approach.

This year we will join in a research group with UCL, led by Dr Ed Baines, Professor Peter Blatchford and Dr Anthony Russell in developing a programme of INSET to support the development of collaborative group work in Key Stage 2 classrooms.  Further information regarding this exciting project will be added soon.  

For the last two years our school has been participating in the Keycolab European Project, a major action research project.  This brings together teachers working with young children in Belgium, Finland , Romania ,Spain and the UK. The work focuses on children learning the agreed European educational competences which are, of course, equivalent to our own national curriculum. The research is led by the National Association for Primary Education and we are both proud and pleased that our school was selected to be one of a group of six Oxfordshire schools to be involved and to represent the UK in the work.

Selection was based on the school’s expertise in generating learning through educational visits to places of interest. Taking children out of school to be stimulated by new experiences which can build and reinforce learning back in the classroom has always been an integral part of our teaching and it is this approach which is the distinctive contribution which the UK is making to the project. Our partners across mainland Europe have welcomed the evidence that teachers guiding learning outside the children’s schools can bring undoubted success. All children gain from the challenge of real life and there are some whose interest is so prompted by their experience out of school that they begin to realise previously hidden potential.

More information can be found here.

Last academic year 2016-2017 our math leaders were members of the GlowMaths Primary Mathematics Teaching for Mastery Work Group and part of the teacher’s research groups every term.  As part of this, we worked alongside Steve Lomax (and continue to do so in 2017-2018), strategic lead for GlowMaths, in changing our teaching approach to mathematics to help our children become keen mathematicians.

In the Academic Year 2015-2016 a research project was undertaken entitled: “Learning Detectives – Pupil Voice; Embedding Learning.  An Evaluation of the Learning Detectives’ Impact upon Learning Behaviours.  A Case Study” From this research many key areas for improving the impact of our Learning Detectives program were ascertained.

Any new research will be added to this list.