Next Practice in Resourcing Personalisation - Leasowes Community College

Flexible timetable

The field trial will offer the opportunity to demonstrate innovation and Next Practice to a large national audience. Leasowes Community College is extending the approaches to learning they have used for the past 16 years into a sequence of deep learning blocks. The school has run a five hour learning block for all students every Friday for the last 14 years, opening up the curriculum and promoting a deep, immersive model for learning. In addition to this, the fast track programme for all Year 10 students offers five day learning blocks for students in two options, who eventually enter GCSEs early at the end of Year 10. Early success opens up the timetable in Year 11 with students able to personalise and customise their own curriculum. All 95 members of staff are to be involved in the trial - this includes part time staff who are invited in to the full training programme along with full time staff.

In addition to the flexible Friday and fast track programmes, Leasowes now offer all 1,200 students three longer blocks of learning at different times in the year ranging from three consecutive two day blocks up to two whole-week experiences. This leads to a 2-year Key Stage 3 with all the opportunities that this can bring, and is opening up opportunities for all students earlier. Leasowes has a strong track record of using time creatively and radically. The expansion of the concept of longer blocks to include whole weeks in single subjects represents a fundamental and radical re-think of how schools are organised to offer learning. As long as schools are constrained and trapped in a five lessons per day model and fail to realise the potential of longer blocks, the longer students will be condemned to a piecemeal and random curriculum model which suits timetablers and teachers better than it meets student needs.

Leasowes Community College has recently been designated as a Trust Pathfinder, in collaboration with two other successful secondary specialist colleges and a tertiary college. The programme to develop the extended study blocks is beginning to take on a new dimension due to the Partnership Pilot Programme in which Leasowes is now involved. They are looking at how they can use their experiences to support the development of the 14-19 vocational diploma programme and also to provide even more extended slots throughout the year. The process of designing the timetable is now a 'dialogue about learning' throughout the school, and teachers at all levels are being creative about what the curriculum can contain. In traditional models the timetabler would tell you what the curriculum would be. Neil Shaw, Vice Principal of Leasowes explains: "although it is much easier not to have a flexible timetable, what you want the timetable to do is more important than the timetable itself."

See a map showing the locations of all the Next Practice in Resourcing Personalisation field trial sites. 

top