An Abergele school has been named as the first ambassador for educational excellence in Wales.
Ysgol Emrys ap Iwan is pioneering the Teacher Effectiveness Enhancement Programme (TEEP), which is already used by many English schools.
It aims to drive up professional teaching standards by improving the performance of teachers in the classroom and ensure pupils achieve the best they can, right from the start of every lesson.
Teachers from across Wales will be invited to come to Abergele to see TEEP in action and discuss how they can implement the methods in their own classrooms.
Ysgol Emrys ap Iwan head teacher Lee Cummings said: “To be the first school in Wales to achieve TEEP ambassador status is remarkable and a wonderful achievement.
“It reflects the hard work, dedication and commitment of all our staff to ensuring we provide high quality learning and teaching.
“Our pupils are prepared for their learning early in lessons. They are encouraged to carefully consider new information and then apply their knowledge to demonstrate secure understanding.
“Our teachers are then using refined assessment techniques to measure overall progress – TEEP is undoubtedly making a difference.
He added: “We want to ensure the teaching here at Ysgol Emrys ap Iwan is as good as it possibly can be.
“As a school we put a huge amount of work into ensuring all our teaching staff are trained in teaching methods that ensures the best learning within the TEEP approach.
“We are now seeing the benefits of that and the impact it is having everyday in our classrooms. Our learners are encouraged to engage from the second they enter a classroom. They then solve problems together and apply their new knowledge in the right way.”
He added: “We all take a huge amount of pride in what we have, together, achieved. All our staff spent three full days on TEEP training last year. We then began to implement the different strategies and from September we began planning all lessons using the TEEP model.
“The model looks at, among a range of other things, effective learning and teacher behaviours, how we assess learning, effective use of ICT, how we prepare for learning and how we agree learning outcomes. “
“We now use TEEP to underpin all our lessons and to develop effective learning behaviours supported by effective teacher behaviours.
“As a school we take great pride in what we have achieved and know, as a result of our collective commitment to TEEP that our teaching really is as good as it could be which can only of huge benefit to our learners.”
Now run by the Specialist School and Academies Trust, TEEP was originally developed in 2002 by the Gatsby Foundation as an action research programme to support teachers to improve their classroom practice in science, technology and maths.
It has since proved successful for teachers of every curriculum subject and all sectors of education, with hundreds of teachers in England at primary and secondary schools undergone training.
Independent evaluations by Warwick University, York University and the London Institute concluded the training positively transformed the way teachers behaved in the classroom. They describe increased engagement of pupils in their learning, improved behaviour in lessons, increase in active learning by pupils, increase in higher level thinking and improved attainment amongst their findings.
