At Pinner Wood we strive as a whole school community to instill a love of learning and thirst for curiosity in our children, both in and out of the classroom. You can find out more about our work towards meeting these goals here.

Two of our whole school values of ‘Step Up’ and ‘Dream Big’ are fulfilled through the large number of opportunities, trips, visits, leadership roles and experiences our children can be a part of during their time at Pinner Wood. From author visits, trips to the seaside, engineering events, musical showcases, theatre trips, ‘Headteacher for the Day and parent speakers; we knew we needed to find a way to capture and record these experiences firsthand.

Some members of staff joined a Rethinking School Working Group last year, exploring how to design and create a Digital Learner Profile to showcase proud moments and academic learning during a child’s year and as a platform for sharing assessment information. The thinking behind this was that an online profile could replace the traditional report sent home at the end of the year and be something teacher, family and child could all be a part of creating and developing It could be used in Parents Evenings and offer a showcase of learning over the year. You can read more about the development here.

This year, being a Working Group Leader for the Rethinking School project, I am working on the same idea with colleagues from a number of different settings. Despite the differences across the schools in pupil age, demographic and school location we all unanimously believe the Learner Profile offers a space for sharing achievements and experiences, including those beyond academic learning, and a platform to showcase skills and talents that might not always be seen or discussed within the school day. Looking back at our own Pinner Wood Learner Profile design and structure, we were keen to make some changes to reflect this.

Drawing on feedback and conversations, we came up with a selection of data gathering questions for key stakeholders including:

Children

• What information about yourself would you like to include in your Learner Profile?
• Who do you want to share it with? When and how?
• How would you like to add your work?

Staff

• What evidence do you feel needs to be included and who will access the Learner Profile?
• What support or training will you need to best help the children complete their digital Learner Profile?
• When will children have the opportunity to use and reflect on their Learner Profile?

Families

• How do you envision the Learner Profile being used during your child’s time at Pinner Wood?
• What barriers do you see in terms of time or accessibility?

Using the responses, we then made some additional adaptations to our Learner Profile, ensuring we were prioritising pupil voice and the breadth of our children’s strengths, giving them ownership over their learning decisions. Making the link to our whole school values was also important to staff and will hopefully allow a more holistic view of each learner, offering a way to capture evidence of each Pinner Wood value over time.

Going forward, our next step will be to trial our Learner Profile with a small group of Year 5 and 6 Pupil Premium children, empowering them to articulate what their skills and interests are and be confident in sharing this. Having recently started trialing the use of Chrome books for each individual child in Year 6, we are also keen to see the new skills children have learnt and how their new found confidence in using technology can be used for this purpose.

We have got so much out of this work with the Rethinking School project and would strongly recommend it to schools looking to innovate alongside like-minded colleagues.