How Pendle Vale College uses AI to protect staff workload and drive results

Sponsored content by SAM Learning

Last month SAM Learning were thrilled to announce the latest development of their AI for students to encourage 30 minutes of adaptive learning on SAM Learning a week. This is important as EEF commissioned research shows students achieve 2 GCSE grades better with 30 minutes a week on the platform. SAM Learning now provides:

Weekly Challenges
NEW Weekly Challenges feature learning set by AI for your students, focusing on one Core subject (English Language, Maths, Biology, Chemistry and Physics) every week. Unlike any other software, the new AI suggests topics where students are most at risk of dropping marks in final exams at KS4 and building blocks for KS3. This includes, for example, spelling, punctuation and grammar or basic arithmetic and everything is adapted for each year group.

Improve Your Score
Improve Your Score automatically fills your students’ learning gaps by providing individual
activities based on areas they need to secure.

Extend Your Knowledge
Extend Your Knowledge automatically builds individual students’ areas of strength by
recommending specific activities for them to complete.

In the following case study, Oliver Handley, Headteacher at Pendle Vale College, outlines how his students have been taking advantage of SAM Learning’s latest AI features.

More able strategy – using SAM Learning’s AI to increase progress rates for high ability
students.

The challenge: To improve the progress rates of underperforming high ability students, who are already achieving grade 7s.

The strategy: We have a focus on our more able students and want to increase the
attainment and progress rates of our high ability Y11 students, specifically. Our strategy started with an Associate SLT member meeting with every student and their parents to make them aware of their potential, highlighting the challenges and outlining the support we would put in place. Subsequently, a group of students were placed on a report card for each subject.

The key for most of them was just hard work! Many of the students and their families knew they needed to be working and revising but didn’t know where to put their energies. We created an intervention group on SAM Learning and the Associate SLT member provided a breakfast club to ensure the students had space and time to work. His task was really straightforward: he told the students, ‘I’ll be here on Wednesday morning and you’ll be doing this work!’ The students completed work in English, Maths and the three Sciences – additional work was also set by SAM Learning’s AI.

This is really simple – the work is either done or not done. SAM learning marks it, provides feedback and is adaptive. It is really easy to monitor and easy to measure giving high levels of accountability to all. SAM Learning’s AI targets students’ areas for improvement and the AI also stretches them. It is now setting work in these areas too!

The impact: These are grade 7 students. They are not on my HoDs ‘to do’ list to increase
grades meaning that they can concentrate on key students at other grade boundaries.
Improving these grades is a hard thing to achieve. Our strategy is overseen by an Associate SLT member, who is a PE teacher. No teacher can be a specialist in every subject and to get the higher marks, specialism is needed. We ran this programme from Sept 2022 to Dec 2022 and their grades improved by P8 +1.2!”

To find out more about SAM Learning, please visit their profile on EdTech Impact.