Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College has a music specialist status and a shared Federation ICT specialism.
In September 2005 Hatcham College adopted music as our main specialism. The music specialism affects every student at Aske’s, and all students are given the opportunity to benefit from its vibrant music tradition. It is promoted in cross curricular learning as a way of supporting the student’s musical learning and using the specialism to benefit other areas of learning as well as team teaching and considering cross-curricular aspects in schemes of work.
Music has always flourished in the academy, and we are continually moving from strength to strength and pushing our standards ever higher. Maintaining high standards generates the feeling that high achievement is the norm. It also raises the self esteem of students involved, and this is celebrated by their peers.
The Music Department continually strives to raise the profile of music within the College and through extended curricular events. These performances and displays generate excitement, and students who participate are respected and enthused about what they are achieving. This in turn adds to good ethos of the College.
The Music Department also engages with outside agencies to enhance the learning experiences of the students and promoting their input into the local community. In the past year the College has performed at City Hall for the GLA Memorial Service on invitation of the Mayor, launched a new scheme with the Royal Ballet as well as the Senior Chamber Orchestra appearing on the BBC’s ‘One Show’ in April and the Senior Gospel Choir appearing as a featured choir at ‘The Season for Love’ event at Fairfields Hall in Croydon. All of these help to raise the profile of instrumental music within Hatcham College and beyond, spark interest in instrument learning before Key Stage 3, promote community cohesion, play a role in recruiting new students to College and promote the school to students in local primary schools. We want to encourage a learning community within and beyond the school.
Notable achievements:
Musical activities both in and out of the classroom encourage students to work together in various combinations, transcending age, gender and race, developing positive relationships without bullying or discriminating. We encourage social cohesion between students across the College and prepare them for the future.
As a Specialist ICT Federation of Academies our aims are clear. We are committed to embracing all technology throughout our whole federation, enabling us to enhance both teaching and learning opportunities within the Federation and in the wider community within which we work. The ICT agenda has impacted on the quality of learning and teaching throughout the school. This has resulted in: a whole schools approach to using ICT as a tool for enabling interactive lessons, an improvement in student engagement and motivation, GCSE results continuing to improve(not just in ICT), greater use being made of a visual stimulus, sharing good practice, improvement in assessment and data analysis to inform teachers, students and parents.
Each learning area houses a fully networked room with a class set of Work stations, a colour, black and white printer and a flatbed scanner. Pupils have access to a wide range of software, including graphics packages such as Adobe Photoshop, and a range of industry standard Macromedia products such as Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Freehand. In addition to this, the Academy uses Microsoft Windows and each pupil has regular access to a full suite of Microsoft Office 2007 packages. The ICT system is fast and powerful enough to stream multimedia supported by a broadband Internet connection. These excellent ICT facilities are maintained by a Federation Network Manager and 10 Network Technicians.
We work with the expectation that all our students will complete a GCSE in ICT, ensuring our leavers go on with their futures feeling confident and empowered users of ICT. Our students in KS3 follow a curriculum delivered in 100 minute discreet ICT lessons developing onto a varied and exciting KS4 curriculum, with Hatcham and Knights, following a similar and complementary set of qualifications both enjoying the DIDA suite, preparing our students for today’s digital world. Following on with 6 further qualifications now offered within the Federation 6th form including the industry standard qualifications such as Microsoft office qualification, Cisco and Oracle.
We extend the curriculum offer in ICT, with strong links to other subjects, such as Music, PE and Technology, making the application and use of ICT paramount to allow for interactive classrooms, on-line access and remote access to all curriculum and teaching materials 24 hours a day. The ICT department puts Information Technology at the heart of all teaching and learning with each school having an ICT champions committee with every department represented.