School Context:
Hadrian Park primary school nurture, support and challenge minds through a safe, stimulating environment. We value the achievement of everyone, raising self-esteem, enhancing self-efficacy, and showing mutual respect.
Whole School:
We have taken part in a full staff training day on the school site for the whole team and regularly receive updates shared via email to all staff. Sharing examples of best practices across the school and using Twitter to promote our Commando Joe missions and homework to parents, as well as sharing home missions too.
Whole-Class:
Commando Joe’s is explicitly taught weekly as part of the school foundation curriculum, via cross-curricular learning opportunities. Every class takes part in a weekly Commando Joe mission linked to theirCommando Joe character.
Targeted: Used for a small cohort of children who display challenging behaviours, struggle to communicate and self-regulate. These children are focused on during whole class missions and explicitly taught behaviours around the Commando Joe character traits.
Why?
A significant number of pupils, including (but not limited to) those from disadvantaged backgrounds, have historically demonstrated a lack of resilience, low self-esteem and poor self-regulation skills. They have often struggled to reflect on their learning or received constructive feedback positively, in order to then improve on their academic achievement.
Outcomes Sought
We decided to introduce the programme across the whole school in 2019after seeing the amazing outcomes it was having in other schools. The RESPECT programme fitted perfectly with our own school values, building on the characteristics of effective learning in Early Years. We want our staff to inspire our children inside and outside of the classroom and relate learning to real-life experiences and events. Parent partnerships are an integral part of our school ethos, therefore we want to fully immerse parents in their children’s learning journey too.
How?
Children take part in weekly missions, linked to our existing foundation curriculum. We have found that this thematic approach has supported progressive learning throughout the school. Linking the learning to real-life experiences and events has created a real buzz around learning and the children cannot wait to take part in their next mission. Every year group delivers a mission each week supporting PHSE and the topic they are teaching at that time. As well as partaking in the missions and linking theCOJO character to our curriculum topics, we also link completing missions to writing, by providing children with first-hand experiences to write about. We also utilise the CJ homework menu grids. The grids are sent home termly and children can complete activities from there at their own pace. We then ask parents to post their child’s homework on Twitter and teachers celebrate the children’s work in class. This creates a level of engagement with our parents and wider school community. Children also are awarded house points for completing COJO’s homework, which is a great incentive. We celebrate COJO achievements in our Friday celebration assembly where a child from each year group is chosen to receive a COJOcharacter certificate, along with a character bear. We then tweet a picture of these children on Twitter to share their achievements with their parents and carers.
Outcome Impacts:
The COJO lead conducted a survey with staff and found that teachers love how links can be made to multiple curriculum areas. They find that the RESPECTcharacteristics are easy to promote throughout the school day and work hand in hand with our school’s golden rules. The use of the RESPECT characteristics is easily transferable to other areas of the curriculum and children are able to display these characteristics in all lessons. The missions are very adaptable and can be differentiated to meet the needs of all learners. We have held two whole school mission days where all children from Nursery to Year 6 conducted the same mission. One was linked to Children in Need and therefore had very strong connections to PSHE and the character skills. Using COJO missions for such important events and national days creates memorable experiences for all children, increasing the ‘stickability’ of learning. The same mission was used for all year groups and was adapted easily to provide challenges for all year groups. Teachers feel empowered, excited and confident to deliver the programme and often use the online resources to help inform their planning and resourcing. Some of our more challenging children have improved their communication and understanding of how theirbehaviour/s can affect others’ learning. We launched the Parents Portal during lockdown to support home learning, however, we are planning to promote it further this year and celebrate those who join in from home at school.
We’d like to thank Hadrian Park Primary school for providing information for our case study.
If you’d like to find out more about the Commando Joe’s programme, take a look here. Alternatively, get in touch here:
T: 01942 409654
E: info@commandojoes.co.uk
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