Bedford Borough introduces its first Professional Study Group (PSG) with Elastik
Alex Oselton, November 2024
The Professional Study Group session took place in October 2024 as School Development Manager, Stephanie Disalvo, brought together Primary schools from across Bedford to share their experiences, hints, tips and tricks for Elastik best practice.
Camestone Primary School supported Stephanie as one of the longest standing users of Elastik in the UK.
Why Elastik?
Elastik was introduced into the borough through the senior leadership of Bedford Council. The brief was to support primary schools with their SATs preparation as well as their early years provision. Chris Morris, CEO at Bedford Borough Council, was looking for support for his schools as the borough had set itself ambitious aims to rise through the league tables of KS1 and KS2 attainment performance.
Gap Analysis
This tool does the heavy lifting for you when it comes to assessment data analysis. The tool is designed to facilitate an ‘Assess, Plan, Do, Review’ framework to support teachers with a familiar approach to identifying learning gaps.
Whether your students sit paper-based or digital versions of assessments, such as SATs, the Elastik platform is equipped to ingest the results and analyse them for teachers. This analysis highlights student learning gaps so teachers can put interventions in place quickly.
Gap Reviews
Teachers use the gap analysis results to inform their planning and address misconceived curriculum concepts. Gap reviews then test the impact of that teaching and learning. Gap reviews help teachers answer the question, ”have my students grasped a concept?”. Think of a gap review as a 10–15-minute low stakes quiz to assess concepts you’ve been focusing on.
Aligned to the Assess, Plan, Do, Review framework, the gap analysis function is used to ‘Plan’ and ‘Do’ and the gap reviews to ‘Assess’ and ‘Review’.
Nick Hackett is the headteacher at Camestone School and offered his perspective and overview of Elastik at the school.
Nick remarked, “We’re on a journey with Elastik. I think, for me, what stood out about Elastik is that it is very different to anything I’ve seen before.”
He then adds, “What Elastik does is focus on gaps, misconceptions, and next steps in a child’s learning. So, rather than trying to shoehorn a child into a level you can really focus on what the gaps are in that child’s understanding”.
Lucy Redman, a teacher at Camestone Primary school, delved into her specific experiences of Elastik with her Year 2 class.
She stated, “We actually use iPads, which really helps because they’re (students) a lot savvier with iPads”.
Kirsty Gadsby, a Year 5 teacher Camestone School, added to Lucy’s testimony by sharing how her students are happy to use Elastik and use a combination of computers and whiteboards to show their working out for specific questions before inputting their answer into the Elastik platform. Kirsty also adds, “the focus groups are a really good idea”.
Extended uses of Elastik
Individual student analysis
Becky Griffin, a Year 6 teacher at Renhold VC Primary School, added, “I’ve used it recently to assess the academic levels of children at a pre-key stage level. It’s been really useful to spot gaps, especially just for the one or two children that we had to do it for. That was really good”.
Feedback and optimisation of Elastik
Feedback
We want to extend our thanks to the 20 representatives of schools within our first Professional Study Group. As part of our remit for the introduction of these sessions, we want to improve the way in which teachers using Elastik can tell us how they feel about our products.
As part of our transparent approach to our work with schools, we have also shared the feedback that was documented during the session:
1. Improving the simplicity with which children log onto the Elastik platform.
2. Streamlining the ability for teachers oversight on student responses.
3. Exploring opportunities for paper-based SATs low-stakes assessments.
4. Quality assuring all Premium Assessments
Results
We are pleased to report that since receiving the feedback of our Bedford teachers, we have already implemented a new QR code-based system which allows children and teachers to log in much quicker than previous methods.
We have also initiated our first phase of internal review for the other areas of feedback shared in the session.