About the Learner Profile Working Group

As part of the Rethinking School programme, Rethinking Assessment ran a working group to explore how digital learner profiles could support more meaningful and holistic assessment and reporting. Teachers in this group explored different digital formats in order to prototype a profile that captured a richer picture of each learner’s progress, strengths, and achievements beyond traditional academic grades. Digital learner profiles can include self-reflection, teacher comments, and multimedia evidence of learning across subjects and skill areas. During the course of the programme participants either trialled their prototype with a small group of learners or conducted consultations with pupils or staff to understand how the profiles might enhance communication and engagement. The working group drew on insights from the Rethinking Assessment Learner Profile framework to guide their design, focusing on how digital tools can amplify student voice and offer teachers and parents a clearer, more personalised view of pupils’ learning journeys. These vignettes are offered in the spirit of joint exploration and problem solving and show the variety of Work-in-Progress projects across the country.

About Park Community School

Park Community is located in Leigh Park, Havant, and we serve 1000 young people. Park's goal is 'Success for all through attainment, resilience and autonomy'. This is achieved by supporting students to embed a sense of pride and find what they love at school.

Students study a broad curriculum, underpinned by our Great Learners model. We aim to weave real-world learning into everyday school life. Pupils gain practical experiences through our design and print business, our construction skills centre, where students explore trades like bricklaying and carpentry, and our smallholding where students help raise livestock and grow food, and horticulture lessons that develop both skills and sustainability awareness. Students also have experiences preparing food in our school restaurant, and producing broadcasts in our media suite.

We also have a student ambassador programme, developing leadership skills across a range of disciplines. Ambassadors for sports, performing arts, reading and languages go into local primary schools to deliver lessons and coach students.

These opportunities are not limited to term time – over 50 students were employed during the summer holidays last year and our student recruitment agency provides paid employment for students across years 9-11 in a range of roles.

What did we do?

We wanted to create a digital learner profile that captures skills development such as problem solving and creativity, leadership opportunities and the wider experiences our students have at Park, including time on the farm, at our construction skills centre or working in the school kitchen. Over time, it will become a record of attainment and achievement across students’ five years at Park.

We believe attainment is much more than a set of GCSE results and the profiles provide a way to capture all experiences at Park over time, to demonstrate the development of these key skills and experiences and also to value them.

Further advantages of the profiles were that students are responsible for populating them but need time to do this. The profiles ensured we carved out time within the curriculum to not only capture the learning but also to reflect on it, celebrate it and build on it. The use of a Google site means there is also the opportunity for parents to look at their child’s profile and build on learning conversations at home.

In Year 7, we have developed a transdisciplinary curriculum, which students study for 50% of their time. The Star Curriculum supports pupils to become Great Learners who approach their learning with enthusiasm, motivation, and resilience and make connections across disciplines, thinking creatively and applying learning to new situations for real purpose and audiences through Rich Challenges.

Our STAR Curriculum

The curriculum is underpinned by Park Basics:

• Great Learners
• Independent Thinkers
• Effective Communicators
• Responsible Citizens
• Healthy Individuals.

We felt that the STAR curriculum created the perfect opportunity to capture, and therefore value, the experiences, skills development and opportunities over each students’ time at Park and to demonstrate their impact.

To begin the journey we created a working group of teachers in school to use the Rethinking Assessment Learner Profile guidance to draft our own version aimed at capturing evidence of Park Basics in The Star Curriculum.

We populated the profiles with the key areas for assessment and also added sections linked to our Reading Canon, Finding What You Love (our phrase for encompassing all opportunities beyond the classroom) and Rich Challenges.

Year 9 mini-pilot and Year 7 roll-out

In the summer term before launching with Year 7, we used a small group of 5 Year 9 Computer Science students to pilot the profiles. We chose this group as the Computer Science lead was creating our profiles. Pupils populated their home pages, practiced uploading evidence and shared with their teacher for review. Students reported that they enjoyed using the profiles and liked the ease with which they could share their reflections with their teacher.

After our successful pilot we prepared to introduce the profiles to Year 7 in their Star curriculum lessons from September and timetabled regular lessons where they would date these. We also ordered ipads, 1 per pair, that were to be used within our curriculum but also aimed to make capturing and upload easy.

We incorporated our ‘why’ for the profiles into our Star Curriculum handbook so that it became part of expected routine and monitoring.

Extract from Star Handbook:

Having created the digital profiles online, we ensured all Star teachers created their own homepages. We invested in team CPD and created examples together, moderating each other’s and using the initial process to create a guide for students to use in the classroom.

The exemplars were used by teachers to model expectations to their classes and this also ensured all staff delivering had experience of using the profile.

Teacher Exemplar Home Page:

We then timetabled lessons in the curriculum where students regularly updated their profiles and became used to regularly accessing them to upload work they were proud of and capture examples of experiences they had which linked to the Park Basics. This included experiences at the small holding, trips or essays in English that demonstrated their increasing skill development.

Examples of ‘Proud to Be Part of Park’ work:

Most importantly we used the profiles to record reflections on each Rich Challenge, along with evidence of students demonstrating Park Basics. As Rich Challenges are designed to apply learning to new situations for real purpose and audience, they provide very deliberate opportunities to demonstrate Park Basics and the recording of this in the portfolio creates some structure to this.

Images from some Rich Challenges used to evidence Park Basics in exemplar profile:

Rich Challenges: Park Takeover:

Rich Challenges: Election Campaigns

What did we learn?

The digital profiles, along with a revised way of thinking about assessment, work! Students like it and feel that more than just a grade is valued. The thinking involved by students to reflect on how sources of evidence demonstrate skill sets is genuinely reflective and focussed on skills that matter.

Keeping it simple is important- we added too many sections to our digital profiles and would have been better just focussing on Rich Challenges in the first instance. It meant the quality was not as good as it could have been as some classes were trying to do too much.

Accuracy is a challenge- students make errors and they need to check before publishing, we didn't do this well enough initially and it took longer than we expected.

Shared ipads make this tricky, it is much easier to do on a laptop or PC.

Our next steps

This year, the whole of Year 7 have developed profiles. This was ambitious, but for us it meant that we could embed some routines and expectations across a mea of teachers to ensure it happened well. Our challenge now is to build on this in year 8 and identify curriculum time and quality assurance to build on the successes and refine.