Abdul Chohan, director of development at Essa Academy in the UK, can attest to this. Harnessing the power of technology, belief and great leadership, Chohan and the Essa team turned the neighbourhood’s ‘failing school’, as it was known when it was on the verge of shutdown in 2008, into a great success.
Situated in Bolton, just outside the city of Manchester, Essa Academy serves a disadvantaged community of low socio-economic families, and with 36 different languages spoken at the school, many are international new arrivals.
Nevertheless, the school now boasts measureable improvements in learning outcomes with a passing rate exceeding 95 per cent from its 900 students.
Chohan was a chemistry teacher at Essa Academy’s predecessor school when the transformation began, and he was recruited to join the new leadership team.
“As part of the leadership team we then started to make changes in terms of curriculum, learning and rebuilding, we got developers in, and so on. And that’s where our journey began in 2009,” he says.
One of the bold moves Chohan made as director of ICT that year, was to give each student an iPod touch.
Chohan chose the iPod touch because it was reliable, had minimal load time and was accessible to students both inside and outside of the classroom.
Also, they were inexpensive, meaning the school could provide them for the entire student cohort.
“Typically we were used to using laptop trolleys and laptop carts,” Chohan says.
“Whereas we discovered that with these smaller devices, for the same price as a laptop cart with 30 laptops in it I could buy 180 of these things.”
Despite these positives, Chohan says his idea was met with “uproar”.
“People were saying it’s a gimmick, it’s not going to work, they’re going to sell it on eBay, all sorts of stuff,” Chohan told delegates at a Learning Without Frontiers conference in London.
Chelsea Attard June 2017