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World Education Week

A global School Celebration!

London Academy of Excellence, Stratford’s Event

How wellbeing programmes can boost attendance and attainment

Event Overview

  • Prize Category: Supporting Healthy Lives
  • Format: Panel discussion
  • Country: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  • Languages: Streamed live in English with automated captions in Arabic, English, French, Filipino, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish.
  • Learn more about the Top Ten Shortlisted Schools in the Supporting Healthy Lives category on the World’s Best School Prizes website.

Watch on-demand

World Education Week 2022 is streaming across social media. We will embed a live stream on this page before the event begins. We are making the live stream available directly on this page alongside the Spf.io platform. Spf.io is one of our partner organisations, and their all-in-one multilingual translation and accessibility platform is embedded and linked below. You can access a range of accessibility features from the menu in the Spf.io player.

About the school

The London Academy of Excellence, a state Sixth Form school in Stratford, London, sends more students to Oxbridge each year than most private schools. Despite serving a highly deprived area in East London, with a third of its students receiving free school meals – well above the national average – it has been among the highest-performing academic sixth forms in England since 2014. The secret to its success lies in its trailblazing wellbeing programme.
After studying rigorous research on mental health that showed student wellbeing has a strong impact on attendance and attainment, and auditing its own strengths and weaknesses, the London Academy of Excellence launched a comprehensive Wellbeing Strategy focused on improving its students’ healthy habits, behaviour, knowledge and skills.
The school worked with a local university, which sent a team of psychology students to provide all its Year 12 students with a dedicated course on strategies to improve wellbeing. The school also ran a bespoke Wellbeing Ambassador training programme for its student-led Mental Health Network, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to provide peer support. To boost attendance, the school trained staff on how to build resilience in students through coaching and instilling a mindset that being in school is essential to their future success, with the aim to empower students to overcome obstacles to being within school. It pursued an inclusive strategy, working with its student-led Mental Health, BAME, LGBT+ and Gender Equality networks to consider wellbeing through diverse perspectives. The school also created a new Attendance and Behaviour Dashboard for staff to identify causes for concern and discuss intervention strategies and reach out to students whose attendance dipped below 97%.
The London Academy of Excellence was guided by the principle that positive student wellbeing results in a wider awareness of their environment, which enables them to develop creativity, solve problems, and utilise the skills they need to be healthy and successful. The strategy proved effective, boosting attendance and in turn the number of A* and A grades.

Join us as we discuss how wellbeing programmes can boost students’ attendance and attainment.

Speakers

Moderator: Alexander Crossman

Alexander Crossman is Headmaster of The London Academy of Excellence, the highest-ranked sixth form provider in England offering a full A Level curriculum. Alex’s career in education has included being a Deputy Head at a sponsored academy in Brixton, the founding Head of one of London’s most successful free schools and the Chief Executive of an education consulting firm based in the Middle East but operating worldwide. Teaching is Alex’s first calling but his second career. Previously, he was a managing director with global responsibility for strategy at one of the world’s leading investment banks.

Alex graduated with a double first class honours degree from the University of Oxford and with distinguished higher degrees from the London School of Economics & Political Science and the UCL Institute of Education. Alex was born, grew up and went to school in one of the poorest parts of Birmingham. He is married with two grown-up sons. Alex has helped to train and mentor school leaders for both Ambition School Leadership and the New Schools Network. He is a trustee of the Reach South multi-academy trust and an advisory board member at the Centre for Innovation and Research in Learning (CIRL) at Eton College. Alex is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Arts and The Chartered College of Teaching.

Speaker 1: Ben Webster

Ben Webster is the Deputy Head (Pastoral) at the London Academy of Excellence. Ben has overall responsibility for the school’s pastoral systems, including its extensive personal development curriculum and student networks. Ben is passionate about student well-being and how it underpins academic achievement.

Speaker 2: Afsana Begum

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