Dance show leaves audience 'Starstruck'

Cornwallis and NLL Academies joined forces to perform 'Dancing Through Life' in front of a packed audience of more than 300 people.

The show was part of the Starstruck Performance Week at Cornwallis Academy and was choreographed by dance teachers Lara Barton and Julie Flook.

Around 140 pupils from Years 7 – 13 were involved in the show which incorporated 32 dances. The event was also used as a final performance exam for BTEC students.

Pupils take to the stage in dance show.

New Line Learning Academies

Who we are

We are the New Line Learning Academies’ Federation Trust. We run two academies via one governing body. The academies are Cornwallis Academy and New Line Learning Academy, both located in Maidstone. Both are 11-18 schools and are mixed and non selective in nature.

Cornwallis Academy in Hubbards Lane Maidstone has 1630 students and has specialisms of technology and science. New Line Learning Academy located in Boughton Lane has 280 pupils and our site in Sutton Road has 680 pupils. The specialism there is business and enterprise and vocational studies. In June 2008 the two schools will be merged onto the Boughton Lane site.

Both these academies will be rebuilt by September 2010 for a total cost of £62 million.

What we are trying to do

At the heart of what we are trying to do is raise standards. We want more pupils to be more academically successful in order that they can compete for better and higher paid jobs and be prepared for a working life that will be characterised by fast, often destabilising change. But beyond the narrow standards agenda we offer something else characterised by the line ‘Examinations are necessary but no longer sufficient.’ We recognise that examination success in itself does not guarantee an individual’s survival and effectiveness in the longer term. What matters is the kind of people our students become and the kind of lives that they lead. To that end we offer three interconnected programmes that support learning across both academies:

1. Developing social and emotional competencies: these skills are the heart of both employability and sociability. We are working with Yale University on these skills for students and developing a mentoring model for staff to reinforce the skills within lessons.
2. Risk reduction: why do some students become successful despite the odds whilst others don’t? Such questions have preoccupied teachers for centuries. Our approach is to use modern analytical techniques to calculate potential risks of students not being successful and to then intervene to reduce such risks and increase resilience. This is a new programme which will be successively extended to all students in both academies. We are still developing the software technologies to enable us to do this. Where students are in the programme their parents are informed and we work with them.
3. The extensive use of ICT to support our learning programmes. All students in both academies are given a laptop on entry to Year 7 which they can use to access our curriculum materials both in school and at home. We are installing ever more sophisticated software to provide a more personalised contact between student and teacher. We call such platforms ‘learning gateways’ and they facilitate electronic communication and the use of on line materials.

What next

We already use technology extensively to enable us to report every six weeks or so to parents; to track and monitor attendance; and to assess how we are performing using on line key performance questionnaires with students and parents. Our next goal is to make these more interactive and enable intelligent metrics to guide both our activities and the way that learning environments respond to different groups of students with different needs. We have built one new state of the art learning environment – called a plaza – on the Boughton Lane site and are in the process of building a more technologically advanced one there. Additionally in late 2008 early 2009 we plan to build a third generation learning plaza at Cornwallis Academy. These environments are informing our plans for the two new schools which will feature new learning spaces and use of new technologies.