Middle Years Portfolio

Truro School Middle Years (3rd – 5th Year) are a time for pupils to discover themselves through exposure to opportunities, experiences and the inevitable specialisation and personalisation of their education through GCSE options. Over this time, Truro School aims to nurture each individual, facilitating their interests, strengths and supporting challenge where needed.

Education is increasingly about embedding skills and values and not just knowledge, such that pupils are genuinely being empowered for their future.

The Middle Years Portfolio (MiY Portfolio) is a literacies-based education program developed to exemplify where Digital, Social, Cognitive, Wellbeing, and Vision is developed for pupils in the existing curriculum and identify opportunities to take these further based on the individual.

The combined power and effectiveness that arises from the interaction and collaboration of these different elements will develop our learners in ways identified as highly influential in their life successes.

The program highlights the importance of interdisciplinary learning and the mutually reinforcing nature of these skill sets. It emphasises the need for pupils to develop a balanced set of literacies that work in harmony with each other.

The idea of “Portfolio” encapsulates the development of these and their evidencing in such a way that the pupils can visualise and track their development and identify how their lessons and hobbies contribute to their personal growth. It leverages the strengths of individual components to create a greater whole, to provide pupils with a comprehensive and holistic education that bolters their potential for personal and academic success across all arenas.

It is an acute fact that success and ambition do not come in the same form for each individual within a cohort, and at Truro School we have the ultimate goal to equip our pupils with the footing and direction to lock in their next steps in post 16 Education.

The MiY Portfolio Timeline

3rd Year: Pupils are introduced to the literacies, the activity matrices and how to submit evidence.

4th Year: As part of their GCSE timetable, pupils have one period a fortnight for the Portfolio. Navigating life successfully draws on diverse topics including personal care, cooking, managing money, politics, law and many more. In their first term, 4th Year pupils embark on a collaborative group project to explore a facet of life skills that they may have an interest in already or wish to learn more about. They develop and demonstrate skills in research, collaboration, organization and communication.

4th and 5th Year: Pupils will be given devoted MiY Portfolio time – Depending on progress, pupils may be guided to use this time in specific ways with the support and guidance of teachers such as: Completing and submitting competencies, developing study skills, exam technique etc and extending areas of interest to higher levels of fluency and ingenuity.

The Five Literacies

Cognitive Literacy
Digital Literacy
Social Literacy
Wellbeing Literacy
Futures Literacy

Pupils naturally excel in different areas. One pupil might be a clear born leader and excel in Social Literacy, whereas another may be gifted with technology and logic akin with aspects of Digital Literacy.

MiY Portfolio is an opportunity to identify and celebrate personal accomplishments and strengths in different aspects and enable all pupils to obtain the highest award in the program by exploring, developing and sharing their own personal strengths.

Each Literacy contains between four and six sub strands. This breakdown of literacies enables growth and evolution of the program over time to fit our society with its ever-evolving needs and expectations.

Each literacy identifies activities and evidence that ‘unlock’ different levels in ascending order:-

Competent is generally a baseline awareness or exposure to ideas. All pupils experience sufficient opportunities in the middle school to evidence achievement of this baseline.
Literate is usually application of ideas; an extension of competence and the ideal standard of pupils.
Fluent is achievable for pupils who have an interest and/or strength in particular areas. It is not expected that pupils achieve this level across all literacies, but some.
Ingenious – the highest accolade, reserved for incredible feats and accomplishments of motivated, driven individuals within our community.

What is MiY Portfolio?

MiY Portfolio celebrates personal growth and encourages further achievement in bespoke areas, making the awarding of MiY Portfolio entirely personal. Pupils are not disadvantaged if they are less strong in one area than another, but will be encouraged to improve and given advice on how it may be achieved.

In order to “pass” MiY Portfolio, pupils will need to evidence their engagement and interaction with opportunities in school and the wider community to a minimum of “competent” across all sub strands in all five Literacies by completing TASKS.

Higher awarding levels are for pupils who reach “literate” across all sub strands in each of the literacies.
The top awards will be for pupils that earn “fluent” across all sub strands in two or more literacies or a pupil that achieves “ingenious” level in one of the literacies.

For each TASK, further details and example can be found in the relevant section on the pupils MiY Portfolio Moodle pages.

What do pupils get from MiY Portfolio?

Personalised discussions about them and their future.
Help to identify their strengths and interests.
Direction of how to develop key literacies.
Inspiration on where they can take their interests and where their interests can take them.
Provide evidence of engagement for sixth form scholarships.