Europa School UK is an all-through free school operating as a Single Academy Trust, in lush countryside two miles from Abingdon in South Oxfordshire, in the parish of Culham. The school's curriculum was originally based on its past accreditation as a European school and its bilingual model in the three-stream languages (French, German and Spanish).
Post Brexit, the school underwent significant curriculum change – the Primary School now has its own bespoke bilingual curriculum, whilst the Secondary School implements an International Baccalaureate (IB) Education. Academic success is impressive with a 100% pass rate in its Baccalaureate end-qualification (with a high average score of 36 out of 45).
The site that it occupies has been used for educational purposes since its construction in 1852 to house Culham College – a teacher training college. The site needed modernisation and the recent leadership set about this with a programme that has technology at its heart.
This is a growing school, currently supporting around 1,000 pupils – 630 in the Primary and 364 in the Secondary – with plans to expand in the next few years to almost 1,200 students on the site.
Technology was always an important part of the school’s strategy – in part driven by the founder (who has since left). His vision was one where the school harnessed technology to improve teaching and learning, and he sought to hire staff who could make that a reality. Early steps used low cost open source models, and these set the direction for what followed.
Unlike many schools, Europa School UK was therefore prepared when the Prime Minister closed school gates to all but the children of key workers and the disadvantaged, in March 2020. They had the software in place, most had access to a modern device, and – most importantly – staff and children had been trained and had experience in using it.
For children in the Upper Primary and Secondary Schools, they were accustomed to using Google Meet as a prime medium for communication, although the younger children in the Primary found it a little more taxing – especially those whose parents were using the home computer at the same time. Like so many, using video was the bigger obstacle – at least initially – but by the time of the second lockdown that was also something that they took in their stride.
The ultimate test of any strategy is whether it stands the test of time – in this case, whether these ventures bringing technology into the core curriculum would be maintained once schools returned post-pandemic? In the case of Europa School UK, this has certainly been the case, with multiple examples of how something that was a short-term necessity become embedded in the long-term way of working for the school:
This connectivity upgrade came about following the school taking part in the DfE and DCMS fibre broadband programme in 2020 following a notification from the DfE that they were eligible for a rural schools’ grant – known as the Rural Gigabit Connectivity Programme.
The school were then informed that they were eligible to apply for a further upgrade as part of the DfE Connect the Classroom programme – a fully funded government scheme aimed at improving wireless infrastructure in an initial 600 schools across the UK – and Europa School were included.
This changed everything for the school. The school had a vision and were excited that they now had a chance to deliver it – the virtual conferences, the parents' evenings, the collaboration sessions – but the reality was that without sufficient bandwidth these would be little more than dreams.
It is therefore no surprise to see students in the Primary School making a much greater use of tablets within their learning, whilst in the senior school, laptops are used increasingly within the class – by students and teachers alike for productive learning
One of the benefits from Connect the Classroom is not simply a wider and faster bandwidth, but it also allows the school to increase coverage – right across the school – when previously there were always some classrooms or offices where Wi-Fi was especially poor. The school now has the capacity to support up to 30 mobile devices in every classroom and performance is no longer a constraint to where technology is used.
This is a gamechanger for the school – an enabler for a whole different approach.
And this is the important point. Both the Rural Gigabit Connectivity Programme and Connect the Classroom have given schools like Europa UK the basis to build from here. It has taken the fear away from not being able to do some things that they wanted to, whilst removing the worry that something that works for one student will not work so well with 30. Put together, it has given the school the confidence to focus on what they do best – teach.
This is also why these programmes are different from those of yesteryear – Building Schools for the Future was important in getting technology into schools, but for too many it was just about shiny new equipment – iPads, interactive whiteboards, fancy CAD machines. What those programmes failed to do was invest in the infrastructure that would make that considerable investment come alive. The two new programmes do just that.
Quite simply, having a fast and reliable network is no longer a luxury – especially when children’s education is at stake. For Europa School UK it is still early days – they are at the start of this journey – just a few months into having the kind of infrastructure that they know they need to deliver the quality of education that their students expect. But for them it is just the start. They have a good idea as to where they want to be, and they now have the capability to get there.
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