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The Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for Value-Added and Assessment ensuring No Child gets Left Behind. Top Schools Awards 2023 Nomination and Entry Forms.
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The Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for Value-Added and Assessment ensuring No Child gets Left Behind. Top Schools Awards 2023 Nomination and Entry Forms.

by Jon WestleyJanuary 10, 2023

Below is the official entry form for the Top Schools Award for Best School for value-added and assessment to ensure that no child is left behind 2023-24, our award recognising schools offering an education in which every child achieves achieves even more than anyone ever thought possible.

Value-add is a way of understanding and measuring how well schools achieve for children that is too often overlooked. Many argue, in fact, that it is one of, if not the, most important single way of understanding just how outstanding schools really are in ensuring that they meet the potential of every child. What value-added tells us is how children achieve against the predictions made for them on joining a school. These baselines are based on different mechanisms according to the curricular of the school, but generally include some form of testing that establishes a baseline – together, in more sophisticated variants, a building-in of factors such as whether the language of instruction is a second language for the child. In British curriculum schools, for example, CAT 4 and SATS data is very important in establishing these baselines. The aim for schools is that every child should meet this predicted baseline, measured in the results they finally achieve in examinations, generally between the age of 16 and 18 years.

To some degree you can see this reflected in the reports of schools inspectorates across the UAE in their grading of schools for “Progress.” If children make outstanding progress at a school it means that the school is achieving extraordinarily for its children. This generally means that the quality of teachers are fantastic, lessons inspiring so children want to learn and do learn, and the whole school creating an environment for children in which learning is seen as something positive, exciting, enjoyable and something to be celebrated. The higher the number of children making progress and at least meeting their predicted achievement at any given point in their education, the more a school is able to show that it is leaving no child behind.

The end result is that during the course of a child’s education at any school, it is the added-value achieved by a school for each child that tells you so much more than looking at achievement (and, ultimately, the results achieved by children at school at any given point, including graduation).

SchoolsCompared.com, and our sister site, WhichSchoolAdvisor, have been lobbying for schools to publish their value-added scoring for children for many years. Whilst some schools creditably today do publish this information, it is a hugely complex area because there is no simple agreed way for measuring this in a way that allows parents to easily compare the progress achieved by schools. In an international environment too, measuring this becomes even more complicated. What we can do, however, is look at the progress data measured by schools themselves. All schools produce value-added data because it is the clearest, perhaps only, way for teachers to understand how well each child is doing at each and any given point in their education. Value-added enables teachers to see, for example, if a child is falling behind where they need to be at a given point to eventually achieve the potential grades in examinations that their baseline has established on joining the school. If this happens they can step in quickly and help that child. Equally, if a child starts over-achieving against that baseline, this suggests that the child is gifted in ways not previously known or expected. Teachers can then step in to adjust their learning to ensure this new found potential is exploited to its fullest.  Value added, then, really matters.

This Award then is for those schools that can demonstrate that assessment is placed centre stage in teaching and that strategies are implemented quickly to ensure that not only is no child left behind , but that children achieve outstandingly, relatively, against their predicted flightpaths. In each school the value-added scoring will be different to some degree because of the intake of the school. For academically selective schools, the way they demonstrate added-value is different to the ways a school will demonstrate this with an inclusive intake or one with a majority of second-language speakers or high investment in children of determination. What matters in every case is schools being committed to, and proud of, value-added and able to show how assessment is used to achieve for every child.

We are particularly interested to learn from schools how they bring the importance of value-added to life for parents and children, sensitively, transparently, meaningfully and successfully inspiring an understanding of its importance to engage the achievements of every child over time. This is a well-being issue and may well relate to the importance placed on the happiness of children at a school.

In this Award then, we are ultimately celebrating teachers that achieve the extraordinary for children. We are keen to celebrate teachers that bring lessons to life and inspire children – all children – no easy task in any school because we are all different and respond to different styles and speeds of teaching and learning. It is also an award that celebrates schools who recognise the fundamental importance of assessment – and have strategies for ensuring that it is carried out without its getting in the way of learning, or demoralising children. Assessment becomes a positive.

Given our focus on excellence in STEAM this year, we are also particularly focused on schools that draw subjects together to inspire innovation and creativity in solving problems defined by both students and society more broadly leveraging the discoveries made in each. We are interested examples of how problem solving is integrated within the curriculum to share knowledge across multiple subjects to build solutions that genuinely mean something to both the students – and the broader body of knowledge and human endeavour to which they naturally contribute. In many ways, this sort of approach must surely be one that plays a key role in ensuring that children achieve high value-added.

This will, finally, be a school too that sparkles with imagination and ambition in the way it teaches all children, one with a warmth that engenders the passion of teachers and the adoration of children and parents alike. And, finally, it will be a school that ensures that every graduating student can speak with others with knowledge, and passion about a breadth of subjects and interests when they leave school to start the next chapter of their lives, each empowered with the values and confidence to celebrate the different gifts of each of us and make a positive, personal impact in the world before them.

For Schools

The Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for Value-added, one committed to ensuring that children achieve more than 100% of their predicted potential on joining the school, schools please download the official application form here.

For Parents, Governors, Teachers and Students

Parents, teachers, governors and students – we want to hear from you! If you believe that your school offers an amazing education for children  in which children excel beyond expectation – and one which has made a profoundly positive and inspirational impact on its children, please contact us with your answer to the following. “I would like to nominate X school [name of school] as the best school in the UAE for value-added exceptional achievement for children because …. ” Please email us at [email protected]. You can write as little or as much as you wish, and please include photographs if possible. Please give do your best to bring to life for us the impact the school’s teachers and culture has had on you and/or children in your email. We are particularly keen to hear from parents and other stakeholders whose school has spoken with them about value-add, made it comprehensible (!) – and created an awareness of its importance.

The Top Schools Awards 2023-24

Top Schools Awards 2023 The STEAM Years

This year, the Top Schools Awards are celebrating outstanding achievement in our schools with a particular focus on how schools inspire children by linking all subject areas to bring the extraordinary wonders of the Arts, creativity, imagination – and freedom to experiment and innovate, into all areas of the curriculum including, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

We believe, passionately, that the Arts are absolutely fundamental to delivering an outstanding education for every child, one focused on the whole child and the gifts all children have to change the world for the better and make the difference – every day, and in the future. The Arts bring STEM to life.

Rocket Girl – the Arts and Sciences, together, brought to life

Award for Best School for Value-added / value-add in the UAE. Top Schools Awards 2023.

In November 2023, members of the TSA Space and Rocket programme completed first phase testing of the ImaginationTM powered Jet Pack specially manufactured for this year’s STEAM focused Awards. We visited a number of the region’s most outstanding schools. We are particularly grateful for the assistance of the extraordinary and accredited Rocket Pilot, Space Girl and aspiring young engineer Lola from South View School Dubai (pictured) for her considerable, and quite, totally, awesome, bravery and kindness in completing rocket pack inaugural flight testing.

Without her, and those many other children we visited across the UAE, none of this would have been possible. They made us… believe.

Further Information

For schools seeking further information on The Top Schools Awards 2023 – 2024, please contact [email protected]

Read our Guide to the Top Schools Awards 2023 – 2024 here, including details of our Awards for STEAM and Bursaries.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Fine Art and Creative Studio Work here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Music here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Sport here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Environmental Science and Sustainability here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for the Best School in the UAE for “Architecture and Design to Inspire Children in a UAE School” here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for the Theatre, Dance and the Performing Arts here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for the UAE Early Years Teacher of the Year 2023-24 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for the UAE Primary School Teacher of the Year 2023 – 2024 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for the UAE Secondary School Teacher of the Year 2023 – 2024 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best Principal in the UAE 2023- 2024 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best Primary School in the UAE 2023 – 2024 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for Post-16 Education here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best School for Technical and Vocational Stream Education in the UAE, including for BTEC and/or the IB Career-related Programme.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for its Outstanding Blended Arabic-International Curriculum 2023-2024 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best Indian Curriculum School in the United Arab Emirates 2023-2024 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best American Curriculum School in the United Arab Emirates 2023- 2024 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for the Best British Curriculum School in the United Arab Emirates 2023-2024 here.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best International Baccalaureate School in the United Arab Emirates 2023-2024.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best Blended International Baccalaureate School in the United Arab Emirates 2023-2024.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best New School in the United Arab Emirates 2018 – 2023.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Happiest School in the United Arab Emirates 2023-2024.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Most Innovative School in the United Arab Emirates 2023 – 2024.

Read about the Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for Children of Determination 2023 – 2024

Read about The Top Schools Award for Best School in the UAE for value-added exceptional achievement of Children and Leaving No Child Behind 2023-2024.

© SchoolsCompared.com. A WhichMedia Group publication. 2023. All rights reserved.

About The Author
Jon Westley
Jon Westley is the Editor of SchoolsCompared.com and WhichSchoolAdvisor.com UK. You can email him at jonathanwestley [at] schoolscompared.com

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