Ark Acton Academy

At Ark Acton Academy we believe that every child, regardless of background or prior achievement, can be successful if given great teaching and pastoral support. Our mission is to create a school of the highest standard that achieves this through recruiting and training excellent teachers and support staff, and by developing a pastoral system that ensures no child is left behind.

Our mastery curriculum is at the heart of school life and ensures that all students get the opportunity to study academic disciplines and to wrestle with ways of thinking that take them beyond everyday understandings. Alongside this we invest heavily in staff training and development to ensure that every student is taught by a subject expert who is passionate about their subject and its importance to understanding the world around us.

Whilst we want all our students to leave Ark Acton Academy with the currency they need to access the next stage of their education and to have an unrelenting focus on hard work and discipline, we know that getting great exam results is only half of a good education: we are determined to deliver as many opportunities as we can for every child to flourish outside the classroom. We want our students to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with a child from a private school and compete for the same university place or job.

As part of Ark Schools, we have access to world class staff training and development, as well as expertise from across the network. Being part of a family of schools ensures that we can keep learning and evaluating our impact to ensure that every child who comes to Ark Acton leaves as a well-rounded and polite individual with the drive and resources to lead a happy and successful life.

Why work at Ark Acton Academy

At Ark Acton we have stripped away anything we feel gets in the way of being a great teacher so that we can focus on the main thing. This includes:

• Feedback policies that sit at department level and do not require slavish marking of books
• No graded lesson observations or spurious judgements
• No report writing
• No parent’s evenings
• Only 2 data points a year
• No ½ termly data metrics to track progress
• Protected Department meeting time built into the timetable and staff loadings
• Protected curriculum planning time built into the timetable and staff loadings
• A constant SLT presence to maintain our calm, scholarly atmosphere
• A binary behaviour system that enables disruption-free teaching.

Our curriculum

Our purpose as a school is to ensure our young people can go out into the world and live a life of choice and opportunity. We want them to leave Ark Acton having been inducted into systems of worthwhile knowledge that enable them to participate in and shape the national discourse.

In order to achieve this vision for our young people, we place the curriculum at the heart of school life. It drives all other decisions that we make and is the best means we have of demonstrating as a school what we believe in and what we stand for. In essence our curriculum is designed to ensure that all pupils at Acton acquire disciplinary knowledge that they cannot learn at home and that this specified curriculum knowledge is based on the most coherent and tested ways of conceptualising the world that we have.

Alongside our taught academic curriculum we run our co-curricular programme. This programme provides experiences and opportunities for all students to participate in individual and group activities that help them develop essential life skills. Debating and oracy sits at the heart of this model as we aim to enable all our students to develop confidence, articulacy and team-working skills.