“Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
― Dr Martin Luther King
We offer students the ability to sit a range of external tests and exams through various online platforms.
We are working with NEC (National Extension College) to provide access to GCSEs and A Level exams for students to do, if and when they feel ready.
We provide regular challenging tests for our students to help them track their development and progression in various skills.
We believe that students should be allowed to try and fail in tests to learn about their mistakes and gaps in knowledge - Assessment FOR learning rather than assessment OF learning.
Students will not be provided with grades or scores unless they are sitting a particular test with that kind of rubric.
We believe that grades, like exams, have their place but need not define an education. There are many valuable skills that are more effectively shown by other methods of evaluation.
Da Vinci Life-Skills Assessments (that lead to DVQs) are made regularly as learners progress. We have a more comprehensive review at the end of each semester.
Students assess their own work with support from their peers and mentors. They evidence their work in comprehensive digital and physical portfolios. These portfolios contain written work, images, photographs, films, audio recordings and dated student, peer and mentor comments and grades/results of any tests taken within the project.
DVQs (Da Vinci Qualifications) are a set of 5 qualifications that are internally awarded at the end of each year.
DVQs are awarded when students successfully complete two long projects over a year in each or any of our 5 project pathways - FOOD, ENTERPRISE, PRODUCTION, MULTIVERSE GAMES & PEPs (PERSONAL EXPLORATION PROJECTS).
The digital and/or physical portfolios from these projects are used as evidence to award our DVQs. We are working towards gaining external accreditation for our DVQs at the age of 14 and 18, to enable a student to use them as part of an application for a UTC, higher learning, apprenticeships or jobs.
Schools can contact us for an initial meeting to work out the best way to introduce our DVLS Curriculum and/or BE Mentor Development. We encourage schools to trial our system with a 10 day pilot. This is delivered by two BE Mentors over the course of two weeks to one class of students. It incorporates all five of our pathways and BE Time, as a sample of what a weeks timetable feels like at a BE School.
If both parties are happy to proceed a school can then sign up teachers for BE Mentor Development and either a license or a purchase of our projects. We provided all the teaching content (schemes of work, slide decks, printouts and student portfolio templates) and teacher training online over the course of the year, as it is delivered.
For quality assurance we review the delivery of our content at the end of the first year and then every 5 years. We provide regularly updated teaching content for schools with a license.
Click here for more info.
We have a BE (Biophilic Education) Hub (small school) that opened in Sept. 2023. for 10 - 14 year olds. We are currently open three days a week and we look to expand to a larger Hub that offers five days a week in 2024.
Let us know if you would like to come for a visit or trial day. Please contact us to be added to our mailing list or for more details.
Yes, we have a few programs check out this page in Our Services:
BE Mentor Development
We are offering in person and online programs that support and train teachers to facilitate Biophilic Education and our DVLS curriculum in licensed schools and hubs.
We have started piloting our DVLS curriculum in selected schools, globally. Once we have sufficient feedback and research data we will be opening our curriculum license opportunities to all interested schools.
Our full curriculum has been delivered at The Empathy Middle School, Bali, Indonesia since January 2022. They are currently accepting international students aged 10-14 years old.
Our curriculum will be delivered as a hybrid model with iGCSEs at Chatmore British International School, Bermuda from September 2023 for high school students aged 14 - 18 years old.
There are other school pilot projects currently in development that will be shared here soon (two potentially in Cambridge, UK).
If your school is interested in running one of our pilots, please do get in touch.
We offer a growing range of extra curricular clubs and holiday workshops at our BE Hub. Click here for more information.
Clubs include projects such as film, animation, creative expression, coding, tabletop role-playing games, enterprise, growing and cooking food, etc.
If you are interested in being kept up to date with our extra curricular clubs, please contact us so we can add you to our mailing list.