Lift Kingswood

Higher ability

High Ability Provision

At Lift Kingswood, students considered to be High Ability are those whose prior attainment at primary school was high, but also includes students who we consider to have the potential for exceptional attainment in one or more subjects with us. High Ability students make exceptional progress with us due to embedded classroom provisions that provide challenge and an extended curriculum to deepen their understanding.

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High Ability Challenge In Lessons

At Lift Kingswood, we use baselining in all lessons to accelerate progress. Students are assessed at the start of each lesson using hinge questions that link directly to the learning outcomes. This ensures High Ability students are immediately set on the level of challenge in lessons appropriate to need (including not assuming High Ability students know every aspect of a subject automatically), deepening subject knowledge. Students are also challenged appropriately through exposure to deeper questions, looking to "wobble" them, and justify their responses, promoting academic resilience and conceptual understanding of subject principles. We do not wait for a certain time to give High Ability students subject content: if they are ready for subject content from a later year group's curriculum, they will be taught this, so that their learning is not capped at any point.

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Potential Barriers to Learning for High Ability Pupils

Research suggests that high ability students can exhibit traits of perfectionism in their school work. Perfectionism is often defined as the need to be or appear to be perfect, or even to believe that it’s possible to achieve perfection. Some of the common traits of perfectionism include fear of failure, procrastination, focus on results not effort, unrealistic standards and being highly critical of oneself.

At Kingswood we aim to harness these traits by promoting the desire for success in a positive way:

Encouraging students strive to attain their individual target grades, not accepting anything less;
Setting, and expecting students to set the highest expectations of themselves and their work;
Openly discussing that high targets and high expectations shouldn't come easy;
Encouraging students to be motivated by challenging outcomes;
Teaching students to see mistakes as learning opportunities, promoting a "growth mindset" approach;
Explaining that students should have high aspirations in terms of what they can achieve at Kingswood Academy and beyond;
Allowing and promoting the chance to practise and make mistakes on mini whiteboards before recording work in exercise books;
Adopting a 'baselining' approach to provide accurate starting points in lessons, resulting in students beginning a task knowing exactly what they can already do, and what the next steps in learning are.

Monitoring and Tracking

All students, including High Ability students, have a right to be pushed to meet their potential. Through our assessment systems (including, but not limited to Pre-Public Examinations) our staff are committed to ensuring student progress is monitored and tracked against expected flight paths. Where High Ability students are not on track to meet their high targets, appropriate interventions will be arranged, based on need. Families will also be kept informed of their child's progress to ensure the next steps in learning are known and realised.

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Extended Curriculum

To support your child in deepening their learning across a broad range of subjects, we have provided our High Ability students with our Extended Curriculum. While high quality schooling is crucial to learners, there is a rich world of opportunity for students to extend their learning with. We call this the “Extended Curriculum”.

Subject leaders have collated a series of recommendations for students to supplement their studies with. These will fall into these categories: