Over the next five years Ravensthorpe will be doubling in size to be a 2 form entry school with 420 pupils. And while the Ravensthorpe has a growing school body, almost three quarters come from the poorest quartile of postcodes in England. Pupils attend from the Westwood and Ravensthorpe housing estate, but increasingly, children are joining the school from across the city.
Peer tutoring is ‘an approach in which one child instructs another child in material on which the first is an expert and the second a novice.’
Damon and Phelps, 1989, Leading Other Learners, a UFA Publication p 11
Others define it as ‘…a range of approaches in which learners work in pairs… to provide each other with explicit teaching support. In cross-age tutoring an older learner takes the tutoring role and is paired with a younger tutee… with sessions of 25-35 minutes two or three times a week.’
http://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/toolkit/peer-tutoring/
Ravensthorpe is a diverse school and its pupils come from a wide range
of social and ethnic minority backgrounds. Pupils who speak English as an
additional language make up half of Ravensthorpe’s school roll which is well
above average and the largest groups are those who have arrived in recent years
from the eastern regions of the European Union. In 2015, half of the children
in Foundation Stage spoke little or no English.
Mobility is high throughout the year, with the majority of new arrivals speaking little or no English. In the current Y6 only 60 per cent started in the Foundation Stage.