School 21 is a pioneering new 4 to 18 school in Stratford, East London, for children from all backgrounds.
The three founders of School 21 Peter Hyman, Oli de Botton and Ed Fidoe came together with a shared belief that education must be done differently if we are to prepare young people properly for the world they are going into. Their conviction was that we needed schools to rebalance head (academic success), heart (character and well-being) and hand (generating ideas, problem solving, making a difference).
So School 21 has developed a series of pedagogies and approaches that give students the chance to find their voice, develop deep knowledge and understanding, and create beautiful work that has real value beyond the classroom.
We believe that organisations should have a moral purpose if they are to succeed. We have strong values that guide the actions of both staff and students and make us a strong community.
At School 21, we offer
At School 21, every student in secondary starts the week with 50 professionalism points. Students lose points for unprofessional behaviour – for lateness, for lack of homework, for disrupting the learning of other students – and cannot get them back again.We celebrate the large number of students who retain all of their points throughout the week – and, every Monday, each student gets another chance to show their professionalism.
We spend longer than most other schools on reading, writing and maths because these are essential building-blocks that must be mastered. We are preparing students for the 21st century by teaching STEM subjects, creative art and design, as well as digital skills. With our English language specialism, we want every student to become a fluent writer, an avid reader and an eloquent speaker.
We encourage our students to become T- Thinkers. That means breadth as well as depth of knowledge.Students will have a little knowledge about a lot of different subjects areas so they can make connections. But they will also become very knowledgeable and, over time, an expert in a few subject disciplines.
School work can easily become bitty, disconnected and unvalued; something that is completed, handed in, receives a mark – and then is forgotten about. We think that if you want to produce really good work, you have to return to that first draft, look at it again and consider how to make it better. You have to go through many, many drafts of the same piece of work. This takes dedication, time and stamina.
Students learn to make constructive criticism of each other’s work and receive high-quality feedback from teachers on everything they produce. They put this into practice as they draft, critique and draft again.
Responding constructively to criticism is a valuable skill in itself but, when applied to school work, it has amazing potential. We’ve seen some incredible, exponential improvements in single pieces of work as students respond to what others say.Critiquing others’ work makes students better at analysing what makes their own work successful.No work is ever really finished and the purpose of a task isn’t simply to be given a mark. Students learn to produce the best work they can and the reward comes from achieving excellence.
Young people need to be able to talk in a range of settings and styles, using a wide vocabulary with fluency. Speaking is as important as reading, writing, and maths.We want our school to prepare students for using spoken language as well as teaching them to be brilliant writers and avid readers. Good oral communication skills are at the top of every employer's list, but in an average lesson in an inner city school, an individual student speaks fewer than four words.Students don’t just need these skills to get a job, but in their lives today as well, both inside and outside the classroom.
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