Watford Grammar School

Case Study

How has using First News in your school helped you?

“We’ve had First News for 7 years and obviously started off with the physical edition and then we got the digital PDF and all the activities every week. We used it across the whole of Key Stage 3 and then we started using it across Key Stage 4 and sometimes even with our Key Stage 5 English A-level classes, we’ve used articles from First News to prompt a debate so it really helps our students to be curious, to be interested and interesting people.”

How has the First News iHub helped your in the classroom?

“As soon as I went to Bett and saw the iHub I was so excited I signed up for a free trial and loved it so much that I really pushed to have that. We use it with all of our Year 7 classes once a week, all of our Year 8 classes once a week and increasingly with Year 9 as well. What we’ve found is the variety of tasks that you can do, the ability to give live, reactive feedback to pupils and gamify the experience of literacy and learning by awarding teacher points and giving a bit of cachet and kudos for being good at English and being interested in the world.”