APT4Schools
About APT4schools
I started APT4schools in 2003 in response to a deep need in education for an approach that takes better account of how and why people learn. I’d been teaching English for a decade in a range of settings from prison and drug rehab to secondary schools and an EBD unit. Today, in a time where Student Voice and the personalising learning agenda are familiar concepts, APT4schools is part of a groundswell of awareness that how and why we teach are as important as what we teach - all corresponding to our beliefs about our students’ potential.
As an educator in seemingly diverse environments, I consistently find that no matter how disaffected or habitually underachieving a student is, there are none who don’t want to learn. Admittedly, this is not always apparent and I spend hours, days, months even, with people whose hostility to learning is profound.
But, the fact that I left school myself at the age of thirteen, unqualified and angry, with a battery of unanswered questions, has given me a certain kind of tenacity. I also hold a belief that curiosity, literacy and numeracy are part of our special inheritance. We must therefore continue to interrogate the assumptions which underpin education and their impact on teachers and learners.
Through this lens, we will encounter countless students who are utterly convinced they are unable to learn because this is what they have implicitly and explicitly been taught along with their ABC. This can lead to despair and a sometimes belligerent refusal to engage with the education offer. Academic Peer Tutoring restores dignity to education where it may be lacking. And for those students who are already able to maximise the opportunities that school offers, APT is just as powerful For teachers, the transformation in their role from policing to facilitation is heartening.
APT positions the learner at the heart of their own learning, empowering them for their futures as contributing citizens with a raft of necessary attributes: responsibility, innovation, self-reflectiveness, compassion, self-reliance, community awareness and a belief in the value of helping others. What better way to learn than in the service of a younger peer’s education, in such a way that personal excellence is virtually impossible to avoid?
I am now at a stage where I would like to establish the UK’s first APT Academy, a sustainable school founded on egalitarian principles and a belief in the unlimited potential of all students and their teachers. If you, or anyone you know, would like to be a part of such a venture, please email me.
Jacqueline Andrews
