Academic progress is at the heart of what we do at Nexus.
We aim to work in partnership with parents and carers to help students to be the happiest they can be at school and to help them to make the maximum progress.
The academic programme has been designed to encourage your child to take a broader view of their subjects and add depth to their understanding. In lessons students are encouraged to discover new ideas and implement them in real life situations while exploring the breadth and depth of each subject. While practice and repetition is an important part of learning, these activities will be limited in lessons and students are expected to undertake independent work alongside their lessons.
How to help your child:
- Support your child to spend any free homework time preparing revision and reviewing materials from the work they have covered in lessons. Having these materials already prepared will help enormously as they get nearer to the progress assessments.
- Help your child identify which areas of different topics they need to work on using the knowledge organisers containing checklists provided for each topic. These checklists are a reminder for your child of the work they have covered in the topic so are useful for making sure they are confident with all the material. In the lead up to a progress assessment your child will be given a revision booklet containing assessment information, a revision checklist and resources, this will work in conjunction with revision homeworks set by class teachers.
- Encourage your child to start early with their revision and to check with their teachers if there are areas of the topic they need some extra support in.
- Remind your child that they are not expected to be perfect! They can only do their best – each lost mark in a test is something to learn from.
How we will help your child:
As part of the academic programme we have put an intervention system in place to help students when they need it. The intervention has been split into two tiers, each of which will offer increasing levels of support:
- Guided support when completing the assessment reflection, resitting assessments where appropriate, small group revision support in the lead up to the next assessments, Students will also be invited to adapt their co-curricular in the fortnight before an assessment.
- As above, but also: parental meetings to discuss progress, compulsory change to co-curricular programme during the fortnight preceding an assessment to support with revision. Students may also be invited to remain on additional evenings to support revision and homework.
Following each assessment point we will assess the intervention need for students and communicate this with parents and guardians. Intervention is designed to be a supportive environment for students to improve.