Actions needed:

GAJ to take the 5th form boys out of assembly on a Friday afternoon to discuss collaborating with each other with regards to their academic work and to discuss the culture of being secret learners.

5th Form tutors need to discuss with their tutees that the use of Apps like FLORA could be detrimental to their mental health in the build up towards exams.

4th and 5th tutors need to discuss the adavantages of everyone collaborating with their academic work throughout the pupils GCSE courses.  We need to make it okay to ask for help from friends as well as teachers.    We need to foster a culture in tutorials of open learning rather than secret learning.

RDM to continue with Good Egg of the Week in MS as the boys like this.

4th and 5th Form teachers to create tighter deadlines when appropriate as the boys like to leave things to the last minute and have then forgotten the content of the lesson when they get around to completing it.

4th and 5th Form teachers to hand out more merits when appropriate in their GCSE classes.

HoH/HoB/HoS to recognise improvement in merit totals rather than the totals themselves.

Minutes:

How did you manage your time and prioritise your studies?

The boys felt they started revising later than the girls for the final exams.  The feeling was that the boys started at Easter whilst the girls started in February. The boys explained they were thinking in the short term rather than the long term with their work/leisure trade-off.

The girls were using an App called FLORA to record the hours they were doing and were incredibly competitive about it.

The boys did not talk about the work they had completed as they were afraid of been singled out.  The boys did not collaborate on work.  If they didn’t understand the work, they would copy the answers to the question they couldn’t do rather than ask for help.  This did not happen in the Boarding House and pupils regularly asked each other for help.

Are there any barriers or distractions that hinder your ability to focus on your studies?

The biggest distractions discussed were gaming and friends.  A lot of the boys suffer from FOMA.  Whilst they know what they should be doing they want to part of the conversation the next day.

Sport helps give them a focus especially during study leave and they appreciated it as it broke up the day.

Do you feel engaged in your works and what might motivate you more?

The boys all agreed they liked competitive activities in class.

They like getting merits but don’t like their name read out in Chapel.  However, they give the pupils personal satisfaction and they like telling the parents/guardians.

They like RDM’s Good egg of the Week.

They would like that people recognise and improvement in merits as the same people get the highest total each time.