Case study: Brunel and Burton Academies
Mandy Seymour, teacher and SENCO at Brunel and Burton Academies in Devon, explains how Unit Award Scheme (UAS) continues to be a success with both students and teachers.
Re-engaging students
I’m the UAS coordinator in a small school for pupils permanently excluded from mainstream, 100% with an Education Health Care Plan and all within the main area of need in social, emotional and mental health. As a body, our students struggle with attendance and being in learning spaces. They’ve all travelled a tough road to get to us and feel disaffected with education. Their self-esteem is low which has a big effect on how they perceive learning and themselves as learners.
UAS has been fantastic; it enables us to teach groups or individuals on a wide variety of topics and to evidence to the students how well they can learn, providing them with a real sense of achievement. One pupil, on completing some Entry, 1, 2 and 3 maths units (UAS can be used as a stepping stone towards the achievement of AQA’s Entry Level Certificates) asked “does this mean I could do a GCSE?” When the teacher replied “what do you think?”, the answer was “I know I can now, I've got no excuse – you’ll just keep reminding me of all these certificates!”
Why we use UAS
In our first year of using UAS, I claimed 250 certificates, across our 52 students. Once we knew what we were doing, we were able to create a curriculum that embeds UAS awards and so far I’ve claimed over 1,000 certificates.
For a once yearly payment we have endless chances to get our young people feeling success – priceless! I love the fact that the more we use UAS the better value it becomes.
The scheme makes this success possible by being:
- Well organised and efficient: Claiming certificates is simple, the turnaround from claim to receiving the certificate is usually around a week and staff are always quick in replying to any queries or requests for support.
- Well resourced: The breadth of subject coverage is immense and very relevant as it’s created by people working in educational settings with all types of young people. The website’s well designed and well maintained making it a useful resource and easy to use.
- Excellent value for money: For a once yearly payment we have endless chances to get our young people feeling success – priceless! I love the fact that the more we use UAS the better value it becomes.
The units are extremely broad and easily differentiated using pre-entry level, entry level, level 1 and level 2. For example, in all core subjects, English, maths and science, we’ve created a set of booklets that work through entry level 1, 2 and 3 and completion of this provides assessment of progress and evidence for the next steps which are, for us, the AQA Entry Level Certificate (ELC) and eventually an iGCSE.
Using the UAS linked to our curriculum, has enabled us, especially throughout Key Stage 3, to build a flight path through core subjects which shows progress and achievement at every stage.
It’s been a successful year and we’ve begun to replicate this process in every subject meaning we’ll have UAS awards linked to our art, history, PE, PSHE and citizenship curriculum plans.
It’s a hit with staff too
Although we have used hundreds of different units this year I have only had to write five myself.
Staff tell me they appreciate:
- the scope and flexibility of the awards
- that the units give a clear set of outcomes
- the clear differentiation in outcomes created through using the terms ‘experienced …’, ‘acquired an understanding of …’, ‘demonstrated the ability to …’ and ‘shown knowledge of …’
- the wide subject coverage: although we have used hundreds of different units this year I have only had to write five myself
- that gathering evidence is as simple or complicated as they want to make it.
Staff also appreciate that UAS acknowledge and trust teachers’ judgements in assessing by observation or discussion.
Our outreach staff who teach our most disaffected, off site, learners use UAS for everything – a basis of English and maths then a broad coverage, which has included things such as horse riding and climbing a wall. UAS provides a resource that can diversify and provide teaching and learning on any subject for staff and pupils that are rarely on site. As UAS coordinator, my biggest learning curve was how to simplify the process of showing evidence ready for claiming. Some of my simplest evolutions were the best, such as making sure staff provide a space to write the name and UAS unit number on every worksheet before photocopying – saves writing it 50 times! We have also created a set of stickers that say ‘outcome 1, 2, 3’ etc which we can stick on relevant work showing which outcomes it covers. As coordinator this helps make checking the evidence very simple.
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