“The huge selling point about Nurture, apart from the fact that it is pedagogically sound, is it sits in the Teams environment.”
— Sir Mark Grundy, Chief Executive Officer, Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust.
Shireland Collegiate Academy is a large inner-city secondary school in Smethwick, United Kingdom. It is a hugely diverse and well-respected Microsoft Showcase School and is one of our Nurture Innovator Schools.
Recently, we visited the school to get their feedback on the Nurture solution and discuss how we can continue to innovate to better support their teachers and help shape students’ feedback journeys for the better.
Below, Sir Mark Grundy (Chief Executive Officer, Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust) and David Irish (Principal, Shireland Collegiate Academy & Deputy CEO, Shireland Collegiate Academy Trust) share the story of Shireland Collegiate Academy, particularly how Microsoft has been key to their digital transformation and how Nurture more recently is radically changing their feedback process without disrupting their current systems.
“I can absolutely see how this could work in our other schools, we’ll actually see a change in how we can work, without it being a dramatic movement from what people are used to.”
— Sir Mark Grundy.
So we asked: what excites you most about Nurture?
“The thing that really excited me was a conversation with a student about it. I was sitting in a classroom with a student and asking them were they more or less likely to engage in the feedback as a result of utilising Nurture, and they mentioned they were much more motivated to do it, much more engaged, and also the ability to have more resources with it meant they were more likely to continue to engage with the Nurture feedback.
That’s very exciting for me because, as we said at the beginning, that feedback process, that feedback loop is dependent on the engagement with the feedback as well as the quality of it, and that really excited me.”
— David Irish, Principal, Shireland Collegiate Academy.
Interested to learn more about how your school can join schools like Shireland Collegiate Academy to improve with Nurture? You can contact our team to organise a demo.
Shireland Collegiate Academy Profile
- Student numbers: 1,418
- Teaching staff: 100+
The Academy is recognised on a national level, gaining an ‘Outstanding’ rating overall and in each of the four assessed areas under the new Ofsted framework:
- Achievement of Pupils
- Quality of Teaching
- Behaviour and Safety of Pupils
- Leadership and Management
Shireland Collegiate Academy even has their own teacher training company (STT), supported by the University of Warwick and Newman University, in order to develop the next generation of outstanding teachers.