School culture is sometimes difficult to measure and each day we work hard to maintain the culture of high expectation, happiness and success. Our Ofsted report recognises the school as ‘a truly special place’ where ‘there is a clear culture of mutual respect’. There are many, many factors that enable us to work together to foster this culture and my hope is that by describing our approach to reward and recognition I can provide some insight into how we do this.
Our rewards take many forms. Our merits recognise a myriad of positive behaviours shown by students; they are most frequently given out for excellent class and homework but we also recognise our Sheriff Learner attributes when students show organisation, curiosity, pro-activeness, reflectiveness and resilience. As we further embed metacognition within our curriculum we recently added a merit that recognises Science of Learning skills. My personal favourite is the merit for #choosekindness. Each week we analyse the merits and strikes given out and it is pleasing to note that the number of merits outstrips the number of strikes by some margin. This allows us to identify any patterns and trends and act on it, as well as identify issues early in order to intervene and give further opportunity to say well done to students.
We also reward successes by sending postcards home. We ask Head of Year and Heads of House to regularly nominate students for postcards to be sent home. These postcards recognise excellence in particular areas (and it is important to note that excellence covers effort and attitude more often that it recognises attainment) and for helping the school community in some way – most recently we thanked students for volunteering to help with the 11+ weekend and the Year 7 welcome events.
Reward also takes the form of simply praising the behaviours we see in lessons and around school. I lose count of the number of times I say thank you to students for holding open doors, picking up litter, helping each other or helping their teachers. In the classroom we will ask students to explain concepts to each other or lead discussions or share their ideas with others. I believe that this low level constant reinforcement of the behaviours we expect has the biggest impact.
We have added reward events to our calendar this year. We trialled this last year and it worked well. Once a year for each year group, after we have had a data drop of some sort, Heads of Year will analyse the data and reward those who have shown most improvement or maintained their high level of attainment and/or attitude to learning by holding a celebration event with middle and senior leaders and, most importantly, refreshments!
We also utilise assemblies to reinforce the culture of the school and recognise achievement. Our music assemblies are an opportunity to showcase students’ work as do the debating assemblies. This year student groups have led a number of house and school assemblies and this is fitting recognition for the work they carry out around school. At the end of each term we have a celebration assembly and recognise successes in House Competitions – the culmination of this is our assembly on the last day of the year where we recognise a whole year of successes!
By recognising and rewarding positive behaviours we maintain the environment that allows the observation that ‘pupils flourish here’.
