Castle View Academy smashes King Richard School “bad reputation” with excellent results
Castle View Academy received their highest ever GCSE results in 2022 and are hoping to bring this into 2023.
Despite facing the disruptions of pandemic lockdowns, an impressive 61 percent of the students at the Academy passed English and Maths while 45 percent achieved grades 5 and above.
Principal Christian Down has been at the Academy for nearly five years now. As headteacher of the school he has many roles to play in the success.
He said: “I take strategic directions within the school, making sure that the behaviour, attendance and academic outcomes are as good as they can be. Setting the culture and the climate ensures that we have a really safe school that children can thrive in.
“I am also in charge of the budget, recruitment and marketing of the school. it’s a business at the end of the day, with all businesses the principle is responsible with the direction and the leadership of those people who are working in that area”.
After last year’s students received their results, Christian Down was “elated” with the outcome but also expressed that he was “fairly confident” because the students worked incredibly hard and the atmosphere in the school was great.
Mr Down went on to say: “These were children who had been through covid times and educated at home, they hadn’t had the secondary experience and so what was most important for myself and the team here was we enabled more children to go on to level 3 qualifications at college than ever before.
“We have always seen that our job here is to open the doors for the future so we can end up with more children at university or more children that go on to higher level apprenticeships and so that was the biggest thing for us”.
Reflecting on the results last year, the academy has measures put in place to ensure that high standard GCSE results are being achieved this year.
“One of the simple things that we have introduced is that we have assessments for every year group, every summer they have what we call rank order assessments and we are able to look at those assessments and see if the year 7 from the previous year has performed better than the years from this year etc. This has continued to push the grades up and continued to push our understanding of what the children know and don’t know up”.
Castle View Academy uses a success on success method in motivating the students sitting their GCSEs this year.
“There is still a big commitment around year 11 but also what we are able to do because of the results is talk a lot more positively about the success. Last year’s group was good but you guys are better and we move that forward. There is a culture in the school now where children have seen that we have gone across the benchmark and we have started to move forward and it gets better and better each year”.
The impact of the covid pandemic saw many schools facing challenges. Students were unable to attend school which meant schools needed to adapt to online learning very quickly.
Castle View Academy did just this by acting quickly to ensure none of the students’ learning was affected during challenging times.
Mr Down explained: “Covid was a challenge for all and I think we are only now starting to see the repercussions of children having spent so much time at home. Our approach to Covid was very robust. We jumped straight to live lessons on teams pretty much immediately”.
The academy also invested heavily on equipment to help the students at home who could not afford a laptop or wifi.
“We had really high levels of engagement through covid because we were on teams, we as a school put something of the region of 500 chromebooks in to homes, we purchased dogles for families that did not wifi, where families that had multiple children we tried to ensure they had more than one chrome book and so we invested heavily in that and we tried to remove any barriers that we could.”
Despite GCSE results being up throughout the years at the academy, some students are still disappointed with their results and did not achieve what they wanted to.
Castle View Academy changed their approach to students receiving their results with one to one support from their teachers to help support those students who did not get what they wanted.
Vice Principal Rachel Fox said: “Yeah I think it definitely helps the students because let’s face it there is always a plan b and sometimes a plan b can be just as successful as a plan a. I think it’s that reassurance and offering them support on what to do next which they would not have had if they did not have one to one meetings with members of staff”.
Mr Down added: “It was a strategy we moved to 2 years ago. You know when you open that piece of paper up it can be quite confusing and we don’t always understand the number system and don’t necessarily understand what their grades actually mean. So just having that 10 minute conversation with somebody about that can help massively”.
