Ark Curriculum Plus is in the shortlist for Company of the Year at this year’s BETT Awards, recognising the company’s innovative use of technology.
Ark Curriculum Plus entered the awards on the back of a raft of successes since the company’s launch in September 2019, with a focus on its response to the pandemic.
The company, which supports more than 600 schools to deliver Ark’s highly regarded curriculum programmes, responded to lockdown in March 2020 by migrating its programmes onto its new digital platform, MyMastery.
Sarah Mackenzie, who leads delivery of the Ark Curriculum Plus maths programme, Mathematics Mastery, at North Primary School, said, “The transition to the new MyMastery platform has been great. This year, more than ever, we have needed to be flexible in our approach and the platform has enabled this.”
Commenting on how new teachers have been supported to start using the programme, she said, “In the past, training places have been reserved for teachers new to mastery in the ‘roll out’ year but the availability of the induction materials on the MyMastery platform means that teachers who have joined since September have been able to complete this programme as soon as they have joined the school.”
Elizabeth Tyler, Managing Director of Ark Curriculum Plus, said, “This has been an incredibly challenging year for teachers. When lockdown hit, we looked at our strategy and realigned ourselves to make sure we could be as much help as possible to as many teachers as possible as quickly as possible and I am so proud of what the team has done and what teachers using our programmes are achieving with their students.”
Prior to the complete migration of programmes onto its new digital platform, as news of the first lockdown rumbled, Ark Curriculum Plus distributed hard copy workbooks to all of its teachers for them to distribute among their students which, in many cases, were into the hands of students before the schools’ gates were shut.
This was followed by the creation of MyMastery and close collaboration with Oak National Academy who approached Ark Curriculum Plus’s Maths curriculum experts as part of a sector-wide contribution to create resources for remote learning which have been used by millions of students since Oak was launched.
Moving into the most recent lockdown, the company has focused on helping teachers to remote teach effectively. With a focus on reassuring teachers that they are up to the task and that, while some refinement might be needed for delivery over a laptop, “knowledge is still the most important feature of a great lesson.” Find out more here.