The Headteacher | Better Leadership, Smarter Spending

Blackfield Primary School’s assistant principal Josh Rigby explains how his school has integrated CENTURY into its homework policy, and the impact this has had on pupil progress.

I’ve been teaching at Blackfield Primary School for eight years, and we’ve been on a real journey in that time in terms of how we deliver homework.

When I first joined, we were handing out the traditional CGP revision books and asking children to complete one page per week, perhaps alongside a daily reading.

Last year, with a view to adopting a more effective homework approach, we revised our homework policy to include the use of CENTURY going forward.

How we implemented CENTURY with our homework

Over the past six months, we have been using CENTURY’s assignments function for setting homework and have found this really effective because the children always know exactly where to find their homework.

We create assignments with the goal of consolidating their classroom learning from the week prior.

For example, we are covering algebra this week in Year 6, so I will set an assignment containing a few micro-lessons on this for next week’s homework to reinforce the content.

Students can then supplement this with recommended micro-lessons from their individual pathways.

The children are able to use their own devices at home to complete the assignment. Most of them choose to use their school-provided Chromebooks, but CENTURY can be accessed on tablets and mobile phones as well, so access hasn’t been an issue.

Using the data on CENTURY to inform next steps

Once a child has completed their assignment, their scores are instantly logged on CENTURY. Teachers can then easily see who has and has not completed the work.

Thanks to the auto-marking on the platform, we can also review the students’ overall scores as well as more detailed information like which questions they answered correctly or incorrectly, along with specific answers.

The data on the platform is really helpful because you can see at a glance which pupils have been logging in each week to complete their home learning and already seeing positive results, and which ones have good engagement but are not quite achieving the scores you think they’re capable of.

This is a helpful indicator for our teachers in terms of next steps, both when it comes to planning future lessons and having those conversations with certain children and their parents about what we can do to increase their engagement.

The impact of using CENTURY

Since we began using CENTURY as a home learning tool, we’ve already experienced a wide range of benefits:

It saves teachers’ time. Setting work requires minimal effort from teachers because the content is already created and it’s a simple case of selecting what we want, when we want it and then assigning this to as many classes as required.

As CENTURY automarks the content, it saves teachers a lot of time on marking work as well.

It provides the children with more relevant content. We’ve found that it is very easy for us to find and assign the right content on the platform because CENTURY essentially mirrors the White Rose Maths Curriculum in terms of the language used.

This has ensured more consistency between what children are learning in the classroom and the platform content they interact with at home.

It really tailors the learning journey to each child. Once a student has completed the homework assignment, they can then turn to the nuggets recommended by CENTURY’s AI in their personal pathway, which helps me ensure that any gaps in their knowledge are addressed.

It provides us as teachers with more actionable data. CENTURY gives us a really good amount of data.

Whether you want a quick overview of scores or to explore results on each question in more depth, it’s all there for you on one clear page. I know that our staff really appreciate that.

So using the platform as a homework tool has been really successful for us so far, and it is really great to see so many children engaging with their home learning, which is a real shift from where we’ve been in the past.

Learn more about how CENTURY can support your primary school.