Mr. Graeme McCafferty

Mr. Graeme McCafferty speaks about life at Rosemead Preparatory School, using AI in the classroom and merging with the St Dunstan’s College group of schools.

To begin with, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your personal background leading to your recent appointment as Head at Rosemead Preparatory School?

I’m Graeme McCafferty and I am Head at Rosemead Prep School. I am a recent appointment - I took over as Head in February in 2023. I’ve had quite an interesting and varied career to date leading up to the appointment. I am Scottish, so I worked in Scotland for the first two years of my career. After working abroad for a few years we decided to move back to London, which was another new city for me. I joined Dulwich Prep, London at that point and had various roles over my five years there: I was Assistant Head of Lower School, at one point I was Director of Studies, developing their curriculum at the Prep. I then moved over to Rosemead as Director of Studies, which quickly turned into Deputy Head (Academic). I’d been Deputy Head (Academic) for about two and a half years, which led up to the exciting development in February of taking on the headship.

Can you tell us about the points of entry and requirements for children and families considering applying to Rosemead Preparatory School?

We market ourselves as a selective school, but we are not necessarily an academically selective school. When we bring children in for interview or assessment days, we are really trying to tease out what that child is like and what type of learners they are, to see if we can cater for their needs. We’ve got two traditional points of entry. We’ve got a big intake at 4+ for traditional Reception, 4+ style assessments, such as stayand-play sessions. However, it’s a very informal session with the members of the leadership team on our Pre-Prep site observing the children.

We do have a nursery as well, so we take children in from two and a half. If somebody applies at two and a half, they are with Rosemead all the way through. However, we do expand a little bit when we get to that 4+ area, so we’ve always got a little bit more intake. We have two-form entry in Year 1 and Year 2, and then our next big entry point is Year 3, 7+ entry, where the school expands from two-form entry to three-form entry for Years 3, 4, 5 and 6.

We are a little bit different from the other schools in the area in how we do the assessment at 7+. We are not huge fans of the formal assessment process, so we have as normal a day as we can with them. Usually, the children will begin an assessment day at 9am and have a music lesson with our Director of Music. They then have an Art lesson in our arts specialist room with our Head of Art and Design. Meanwhile, the Senior Leadership Team is making notes and observing the children. We do a little bit of writing, Maths and English throughout the day, but we try not to make it seem like an assessment.

The children go out to play, mixing with some of our existing children, and then they have a P.E. lesson with our Director of Sport. They then stay for lunch, which is always a highlight of the day. We then make offers based on what we see on the day.

We do have ad hoc places throughout the school as well - we have certain year groups where we are not at capacity yet. They follow more or less the same structure as a 7+ day on more of an ad hoc process as and when there is demand.

Can you tell us about the values and ethos of Rosemead? Why are these important to your school community? Do you have a school motto?

Since I took over in February, our identity and who we are is something I’ve been talking quite a lot about with staff, children and parents. We are currently in the process of rebranding our values system in school, which will all be ready for a September roll-out. This will be called the ‘Roots of Rosemead’, which will have two branches –we’ll focus on five words which showcase our pastoral care and aims of the school, and five words which encapsulate the academic aims. Our pastoral words that will be ingrained in planning, teaching and learning, in school certificates, assemblies and everything else from September are: we will be kind, we are respectful, confident, honest and responsible. Then, expanding on that, we have our academic words. What we’re trying to teach children is how to be learners and effective communicators, because we want our children to be curious, creators, risk-takers and thinkers. We’re kind of in the infancy of ‘Roots of Rosemead’ and we’re really just working with the parents and children to nail down what the words actually mean before it’s embedded in everything we do next year.

All of that links into our motto: “Inspiring Brilliant Futures” and that is what we try and live for and what we’re trying to instil in children. We want them to have inspired, brilliant futures, we want them to inspire each other in their brilliant futures and we want the ‘Roots of Rosemead’ to be the thing that underpins that overall motto. So, our children are kind, respectful, confident and all the other words I described, which ultimately come together in inspiring their brilliant futures.

Rosemead Prep recently joined with St Dunstan’s College in a merger. What opportunities and possibilities do you foresee in your future with St Dunstan’s going forwards? I think we are at a really exciting and crucial point in Rosemead’s 80-year history. Rosemead started with a group of parents who invested in the school and bought the school building, so it’s always been a very community-driven school and parents have always had a vested interest. I’d say the merger with St Dunstan’s is the most exciting evolution of the school yet. In terms of opportunities with St Dunstan’s, there are a huge number of possibilities. We are looking at bigger five- to ten-year projects, and now that we are part of a bigger organisation, we can look at economies of scale and work with St Dunstan’s to make things happen in the future that weren’t always possible for Rosemead.

We are currently working on initiatives to bring the schools together. Rosemead are joining forces with St Dunstan’s for St Dunstan’s festival and we are doing some singing with them. We are exploring opportunities for our Year 5s and 6s to use some of their DT labs in the next academic year because we don’t have them onsite. We have members of staff who are trained in 3D printing, we just need the facilities to be able to do it and St Dunstan’s offers us that. There is the opportunity for some of our older pupils to use science labs as well. We’re talking about doing our swim galas at St Dunstan’s pool. We’re also doing a lot of staff training together from September and we’re pooling resources, which will benefit both schools.

There will be a change to the Rosemead transition process into St Dunstan’s, too. Rosemead’s branding on 11+ will always be that we will work as hard as we can to get your child into the school that is right for you, and if the right school for you now is St Dunstan’s, there’s a nicer process than the 11+ for Rosemead children. For the current Year 5s, we are mirroring St Dunstan’s Junior School’s process for entry into the Senior School: in the Summer Term of

Year 5, the children will sit an internal assessment, as part of the usual battery of assessments we do in the Summer Term - there is no change in how we run our curriculum and run our assessment process at Rosemead. Then, my leadership team sits on a panel with St Dunstan’s’ leadership team and we discuss the children from both an academic data and pastoral point of view, and decide if they get an offer at the end of Year 5 to St Dunstan’s. Traditionally, Rosemead parents would have had to have gone through the 11+ process, so this is a much nicer process.

The topic of artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of teaching is something the magazine has been focusing on - we’ve been to the seminar at Cottesmore and also at the Institute for Education. It’s something that schools have been discussing and I noted that you are, as a school, using CENTURY Tech as part of the preparation for the 11+. Can you tell us about what this involves?

We made a decision, about eighteen months ago, to start exploring using AI in the classroom and start exploring using CENTURY Tech as our platform to do that. We have extensively trialled various different models and we really like how CENTURY works - it uses an AI programme to target bespoke individual learning for the children. For example, during a parent tour, we went into a Year 6 Maths lesson and the children had CENTURY Tech on their Chromebooks open (we have one-to-one devices in Year 5 and 6 – Years 4, 5 and 6 next year). They were doing a lesson on fractions and the teacher had set them a ‘nugget’ (which is what they’re called on CENTURY Tech) for the first five minutes, just to ascertain where they were and where the gaps in their learning were. So, the teacher was getting real-time feedback on what the children were able to do before the lesson started, which means the teacher can immediately start to group the children while in the lesson, determining who needs a little bit of extra teaching and who is ready to move on.

We have a very fluid approach in our classrooms at the moment and using AI to help us do that. In that lesson, after that diagnostic assessment at the beginning, the teacher allowed certain children to further their learning by pushing them on to higher content while the teacher grouped other children that had missed a couple of concepts and maybe needed a bit of extra help together. The Chromebooks weren’t seen again for the rest of the lesson and the teacher was very analogue and practical in making sure they understood before they went on to do their task. The ones who were doing the extension on CENTURY Tech in their individual recommended pathway were then brought out and the teacher moved them on even further. CENTURY Tech enables a very immediate, reactive approach to what’s happening live in the lesson, rather than a lot of data coming in from assessments at the end of the lesson and forming the next lesson. It’s quite hard work for the teachers, but they are embracing it and it’s going really well. If you are interested in learning more about what we’re doing, there are two case studies on CENTURY Tech’s website at the moment featuring how we are using it to prepare children for all the assessments as well.

What are your thoughts on the use of AI and technology in classrooms going forwards? Do you have any concerns?

As I said, I think it is about balance - everything in moderation. At the moment, the way we are using AI to inform teaching and learning has massively helped with teacher workloads and assessment-targeted teaching. I’m not concerned with using it. Nobody knows what the future is going to bring. If we go back five or ten years, everybody was panicking that Google was going to mean that nobody thought for themselves, but it’s now just part of society. You go back further than that and computers were going to take over the world. It’s opened up new possibilities and new horizons, and I think we’re just at the cusp of seeing what happens next. It’s a really interesting transition point in the world, not just in education. I think that as educators we need to think about practice, we need to stay on top of our game and we need to be thinking about these things, but there comes a point where we do become concerned about certain things, and that’s where we pull back and re-evaluate.

We would like to thank Mr. Graeme McCafferty, Head at Rosemead www.rosemeadprepschool.org.uk

School, for giving up his time to speak to us.