On Tuesday, 61 trainees from the Ark Teacher Training programme gathered together with their coaches and Ark staff to celebrate their graduation at Ark All Saints Academy in London.
Pupils at Ark schools have posted their best ever key stage 2 results this year with 72% getting a ‘level 4’ in reading, writing and mathematics. This represents a five point rise on last year’s average of 67%.
Ark recently hosted a policy discussion with King’s College London to debate their experience of education reform over the past decade. It was the culmination of a joint research project which resulted in the publication of a report entitled ‘Lessons Learned’ bringing together a range of essays on unlocking educational potential.
Over 750 students from across the Ark network joined together in a musical celebration at the Barbican for Ark’s seventh – and, to date, the largest – annual Music Gala.
The event included a single massed choir of 400 voices, as well as a rich variety of repertoire including music from the Tudor era, a Russian folk song and contemporary pop hits like Ella Henderson’s ‘Ghost’.
Students and volunteers recently transformed the ground floor of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s London offices into a construction zone, working furiously to build free-standing bridges. At an event held 24 June, students in groups of seven relied on their maths and teamwork skills to design and create structures that spanned a gap of at least 120cm and reached a height of the same measure.
Katie, a Bank of America Merrill Lynch employee and volunteer reflected: ‘It started off with lots of individual ideas, but everyone came together and managed to build really good bridges.’
A new school set up in Camberwell by Ark has today been praised by Ofsted inspectors as a good school with outstanding leadership and behaviour - just two years after opening. Ark All Saints Academy is a secondary school which has got off to a flying start after the closure of a previous academy on the same site that was struggling.
A new school set up in Enfield has today been praised by Ofsted inspectors who gave it the highest possible outstanding rating.
The report means Ark John Keats Academy, an ‘all through’ school for pupils aged 3 to 18, is considered one of the best in the country – only the top 20% of schools are rated outstanding.
Year 7 students at King Solomon Academy got to quiz the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan during a visit to the school where she announced changes to the curriculum and new measures to tackle poor behaviour.
She praised the school as a model for others: “We are determined to make sure that the sort of excellence and high aspirations I’ve seen here this afternoon at King Solomon Academy are spread right across the country.”
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