Finham Park is a popular, successful and exciting secondary comprehensive school of over 1,500 students, located in the south-west of Coventry. The school became an ‘Outstanding’ converter to Academy status in August 2011 and is the lead school in the ‘Finham Park Multi-Academy’ Trust in 2015. Currently oversubscribed, the school attracts students from across the city.
Finham Park school is in Uganda and Viva College School in particular to develop World Class partnerships that focus on equipping students for life on the local, national and global stages. During the visit, the finham team interacted and shared with the viva community about various aspects and explained what it takes to attain a world class school status.
Thanks to the Principal Viva College School and the management for bringing such wonderful people who have been able to share and inspire the viva community thus more opportunity for the growth and excelling of the school.
It would be interesting to know what the team from Finham Park had to share… and whether these ideas are actually being implemented,
Of particular concern to most of us parents is the method of teaching we see in Uganda today, During our secondary school days most of us had missionary teachers who were highly motivativated and prided themselves in ensuring that we actually got an education, not just passed exams, which is sadly the case in most of Ugandan schools today, we hope Viva can at least be that beacon of hope, to do things differently. We would like to see a mechanism in place, where the performance of the teaching staff is also assessed not necessarily by the number of 1st grades they produce but more importantly by the number of students who fail to pass their subject courses.
It would be interesting to know what the team from Finham Park had to share… and whether these ideas are actually being implemented,
Of particular concern to most of us parents is the method of teaching we see in Uganda today, During our secondary school days most of us had missionary teachers who were highly motivativated and prided themselves in ensuring that we actually got an education, not just passed exams, which is sadly the case in most Ugandan schools today, we hope Viva can at least be that beacon of hope, to do things differently. We would like to see a mechanism in place, where the performance of the teaching staff is also assessed not necessarily by the number of 1st grades they produce but more importantly by the number of students who fail to pass their subject courses.
Thank you for your observations and comment. At Viva College we are implementing student-centered approaches throughout the school; in the classrooms and in our pastoral system. While we deliver the UNEB curriculum we do so with an active learning approach, incorporating international best practices into teaching and learning. We are truly dedicated to holistic education and we include sessions of projects every week in our timetable. To focus students on maximizing their progress, we set them individual targets for each subject, using their prior attainment data to do so. Teachers then track and intervene to support students to make good progress. Our teaching team attends Continuous Professional Development sessions every week and for longer periods of time before term opens which supports them with the skills and knowledge they need to remain life-long learners who can effectively deliver this kind of opportunity to our students. While attaining the best grades possible academically is very important to us, we also aspire to produce Viva College students who have great values, entrepreneurial skills and co-curricular interests. Our teachers undergo self evaluation and appraisal exercises every term as an aspect of our quality assurance. We are a data-driven school and we hold each other to account.