Results

Photo: John Carey

The effect of the Civitas Schools on the lives of the children is noticeable in the short-term, and in the long-term it is incalculable. We are delighted by the results we see at the classes. As well as helping to boost the knowledge, skills and opportunities for all the pupils, there are individual children who make such drastic progress at the classes that it gives them a whole new outlook on education.

Week-after-week we speak to parents who say they have noticed a marked difference in their child’s ability, attitude and confidence since they started attending our classes. Parents often tell us that their children seem to learn more in the few hours they spend with us than they do in the rest of the week in their full-time schools. Please see our testimonies page for more details.

At the 2009 summer school we tested the children on the first and last days, and found that in the two-week period of morning lessons only, the reading age of the children increased by an average of one year and seven months. This being an average, some increases were of course greater. When nine-year-old Shayla started with us last September she couldn't read the most basic sentences. At the end of the summer school her reading age was 9 years and 6 months! Trevor Kavanagh, of The Sun, write an article about the summer school, which you can find here.

In August 2009, fifteen-year-old Nirmol from our Sanaton classes achieved an A* in his maths GCSE, after taking it a year early. His mother was very grateful, saying that he would not have achieved this without the Saturday School. Nirmol is intending to stay with us during Year 11, as he wants to read natural sciences at Cambridge.

Another of our pupils, 13-year-old Prithu, won a scholarship to attend Bancroft's School, a prestigious independent school. This was a welcome alternative to his local school in East London which is notorious for drugs and knives. Prithu has gone on to win the headmaster’s commendation for excellent work. We have other children, equally bright, whose life-chances we can enhance by giving them an education which, for whatever reasons, their full-time schools are unable to provide.

There is nothing magical about how these results are achieved. They entail good, committed teachers who turn up, week after week, often improvising makeshift classrooms in community centres, to teach the children the rudiments of literacy and numeracy.

InCAS testing

As well as regular tests set internally, we are using the Interactive Computerised Assessment System (InCAS) programme developed by the highly regarded Curriculum Evaluation Management (CEM) Centre at the University of Durham. InCAS is a computerised adaptive assessment, in which a pupil’s answers affect the level of difficulty of subsequent tasks, giving an individual analysis for each pupil.

The test was developed by the CEM Centre in 1991 to measure basic skills in children aged five to eleven. Through its research work with schools, colleges, education authorities and government agencies, the CEM Centre provides high quality, evidence based information. The aims of the Centre include applying “the best standards of science to the development and evaluation of policies; evidence, rather than authority or opinion; and quantification to give precise answers.” The testing will provide independent verification of the progress made by children in our classes.

InCAS is a computerised adaptive assessment, in which a pupil’s answers affect the level of difficulty of subsequent tasks, giving an individual analysis for each pupil. It was developed to measure basic skills in children aged five to eleven and is now taken by 40,000 children annually. The test generates age-equivalent scores and reports making it possible to compare each pupil with a typical child of the same age and highlight topics which require further attention.

The testing provides us detailed analysis of how each child is doing. It is a system particularly attractive to us as it tests the key topics covered in our classes: reading text, word recognition, word decoding, spelling, vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, mental arithmetic and general mathematics. An example of each child’s results is given below, using the results of one of our pupils at King’s Cross.

The results from our first round of InCAS testing across the project show that the children who have been with us for over a year are largely working at a significantly higher level than our new pupils. In July 2009 a group of eight children at our King’s Cross centre took the InCAS test for the second time – one year since their first test. The average improvement in their ‘English age’ was two years and four months, in just one calendar year. When more children re-take the InCAS test in the 2009/10 academic year, we expect that all our pupils will demonstrate significant improvement and increase their age scores by more than one year, as well as more of our pupils surpassing the national average scores.

Photo: Darren Fletcher
Michael Bradley teaching at The Sun Saturday School