Shireland Collegiate Academy

Shireland Collegiate Academy is a comprehensive secondary school in Smethwick, Sandwell. It was designated a Teaching School in 2013 and has an established reputation as a digital champion. Shireland maintains an Ofsted rating of Outstanding and credits this in large part to its use of technology and flipped learning format.

Shireland began using CENTURY in 2017 across Year 11 and in some younger years. The school uses the platform as a tool to support their flipped learning approach with students utilising CENTURY as a free learning and homework tool. CENTURY has proved a natural and welcome fit to Shireland’s digitally advanced ethos.

Last term, Shireland students studied 3,409 nuggets – the individual mini-lessons that students learn from on CENTURY – and answered 21,526 questions across a variety of courses. Students are enthusiastic about the platform’s ability to help them achieve specific learning goals, assess their own progress, and they feel they’ve been given a course of study which is customised and sensitive to their individual needs.

Sir Mark Grundy, headteacher of Shireland Collegiate Academy, shares his thoughts on CENTURY:

“Unlike most of the other solutions that we’ve put into place to support our students, CENTURY is much stickier, it’s more appealing.

There’s a whole raft of youngsters who just switch off with other solutions, but with that group of youngsters – they’ve really got into this. I suppose, for us and for staff, the reason we think this has happened is that it gets to know the youngsters.

The underlying difference between CENTURY and other things is that it’s much more individually directed, it’s much more bespoke (…) I think our children look at is and think “This is me!”

We’re now looking at how we can use this with other cohorts.“

What do Shireland students think about CENTURY?

“CENTURY is incredibly personalised to help me achieve my specific goal.”

“My favourite part of the dashboard is where you can check if you have done the targeted nuggets. This also shows what I have done and what I need to do for revision.”

“I like that CENTURY is made to my needs.”

“We can rely on CENTURY”

“I like that CENTURY is customised to me.”