Year Group Learning (an alternative to Tutor Time?)

Most English secondary schools operate a traditional model of form tutoring. This is where there is a morning session lasting about 20 minutes where a form tutor will meet with their tutor group and check in on them, give out key messages, follow up any absences and be a bridge between home and school. This morning a discussion came up on twitter about whether the role of form tutor was adding unnecessarily to teacher workload in secondary, and was inspired to write about this.

This is because my school, perhaps unusually, runs a different model to the norm. In the morning, our students attend something called Year Group Learning. This is where they go to a larger space with their whole year group and engage in some learning activity based around one of the core subject areas. This is usually in the form of studying some form of knowledge organiser projected on to the screen, followed by a short quiz about that knowledge. The quiz is completed in an exercise book and students then correct when the answers are revealed. The idea is heavily borrowed from the concept of the Morning Meeting from the Dixons trust in Bradford, and as my school is also in Bradford we have some colleagues that have moved over from them to us and we’ve borrowed and adapted some of what they do.

The session is run by the Head of Year. ‘Form Tutors’ are present to ensure the morning register is taken, and they support the Head of Year by challenging any non-compliance and supporting students who need it.

This was introduced to deal with the fact that the school felt that the conventional morning registration sessions weren’t working very well. Behaviour wasn’t great and the quality of the sessions was extremely inconsistent, usually dependent on the botheredness of the form tutor.

Furthermore, Year Group Learning provides the opportunity to build the culture that we want to see. We always remind the students of our Student Goal, and it’s an opportunity to model our key academy routines and communicate the importance of academic learning to them (my school is situated in one of the most deprived locations in England — bottom IDACI decile and all that). It allows us to have a calm and purposeful start to the day, whereas before things were perhaps a little more disorderly. We can pick up equipment and uniform issues more easily, and it reduces the scope for students to be wandering the corridors when they should be in a location as it’s very obvious where each child should be (we have colour coded ties and bags that we provide to students to indicate their year group also). It’s also a chance to model positive framing to the staff, so they can see the way we want all of us to speak to the students and to emphasise the values we want to communicate.

The sessions are by no means perfect and I’m not here to say that I would 100% recommend this approach for every school. It has been an improvement for us but there are some things we need to improve. These include:

• Incorporating student home learning into the YGL process to enable triangulation of homework, YGL and classwork. Home Learning is a big area we need to improve — I think for us it will be about making it as simple as possible for students to do with the electronic device provided for them by our trust, given the fact that a significant number of our students will always find their home circumstances not conducive to doing fantastic homework.
• A technological solution for the completion of the quizzes would be ideal. We could use our devices but we think our wifi probably won’t cope with 700 on all at once (and there’s the age old problem of some students not always bringing them, having them charged and so on). We don’t give the students Mini Whiteboards and a pen but that might be a low tech solution. The YGL books currently are a bit of a magnet for busy tricking at present.
• We need to re-emphasise that the YGL is partly about CPD for staff. We need to do a bit more work with the Heads of Year to re-emphasise this aspect of the process.
• We still need more buy-in from students — this is not just a YGL specific issue as we have to move many of our students from ‘compliant’ to ‘engaged’ when it comes to their attitude to learning, and think differently about how communicate the value of learning to them. Part of this I think comes down to the triangulation point made in the first bullet — I also think we need to look at how we reward and praise students who do well in these sessions and make more of the celebratory angle. This is part of the challenge of working in a challenging school.
• This year we made a conscious choice to focus on the ‘Learning’ aspect of this whereas when the YGL was first set up (as Year Group Meeting) it was more explicitly about getting the school culture right. I wonder actually if we’ve gone too far away from that and need to re-emphasise the culture building aspects of these sessions.

We also need to consider whether some of the drawbacks of ditching the conventional tutor time session can still be addressed via our current model. Is there a way we can ensure that those students who need it have a trusted member of staff that can be their bridge between home and school? For most students currently that person is either the Head of Year or non-teaching Assistant Head of Year — but arguably that is too much for two people. Could we withdraw some students who need it from the YGL session occasionally to do some purposeful ‘checking in?’

We do have another possible vehicle for some of this which is our PARQ (Pause and Read Quietly) time session — a half hour slot in the middle of the day (paired with the split lunch break) where students engage in our reading programme. Literacy is a massive priority at our academy given the low reading ages of many of our students, so again this is an area we have really chosen to focus on at the expense of other things. We are looking at our timetable model to make sure each PARQ group (which are organised in the current form group) has a consistent staff member, which is not always the case currently because of how we organise our Year 11 time (they have extra subject teaching, usually in English, Maths or Science, in the YGL and PARQ time slots). This might also allow some of that conventional form tutor work to still take place.

I think with something like this, it’s always a lot safer to stick to what everyone else does, and when you try something a bit different it can appear odd to outsiders. We are really proud of our progress on Year Group Learning and do see it as a significant upgrade on what we had before, even if that has come at the cost of losing some other things. Making decisions in education, as in anything, often involves trade offs and we are happy with the ones we have made at this point even if the YGL remains very much a work in progress. But we’re always trying to refine our approach and make it work better.