Everyone wants a high performing education system, but education systems and individual schools assume that only a minority of children can reach high levels of educational performance. This is outdated and harmful. High Performance Learning is a movement that demands change in the education of our children.
Our story begins in 2010, our Founder Professor Deborah Eyre published a policy paper for the independent Think Tank Policy Exchange, in which she asserted that evidence from neuro-science and psychology demonstrated conclusively that the brain is exquisitely plastic and we can grow our intelligence.
She boldly challenged the system to stop categorising students by ability and instead expect high performance from everyone and systematically build towards it. Rather than a system which focuses on early detection of signs of failure, with pupils guided immediately into less demanding work, the system should be structured to provide the conditions that generate high performance and pupils steered towards this objective. A system based on building not measuring. She called this approach High Performance Learning (HPL) and created a systematic framework for adoption based on her lifetime's academic research on cognition and the codification of the known knowledge in the field.
From that point onwards the HPL approach has continued to be enhanced and flexed as more and more research has come to the fore. But the core principals remain and contemporary research is confirming just how right they are.
2010-2015 Deborah field-tested the HPL approach in 31 international schools in 11 countries which were operating in English and using English or IB curriculum. The outcomes were transformative with year on year uplifts in results and well-adjusted, confident students.
2016 the UK-based High Performance Learning Services Ltd was established. A social enterprise with a mission to support and connect schools wanting to spearhead this change in education and become HPL accredited schools. At the start, it was top schools who opted into the two-year HPL World Class School Award as their route to accreditation and immediately demonstrated that this approach could deliver an uplift in student outcomes whatever the contexts - secondary or primary, maintained or independent, UK or international.
2017 we launched a programme for a much wider range of schools that were good and wanted to be great. The High Performing School Award route to accreditation helps ambitious school leaders gain a significant uplift in quality fast. This programmes enables schools at any starting point to begin their journey towards being an HPL school.
2018 we celebrated the first schools to achieve World Class School Award status and moving into the Fellowship and Global Community of Accredited HPL Schools (FGC). The home for all HPL accredited schools.
2019 we developed our first HPL Training Schools as part of our strategic partnership with an international schools group in UAE.
2020 we undertook our first work with schools in challenging circumstances configuring a solution for schools where there maybe poverty of circumstance but certainly no poverty of aspiration.
2021 our first schools, five years since first adopting, went through Re-accreditation. They are still seeing year-on-year gains in student performance as well as having satisfied staff and parents.
2022 we celebrated over 80,000 students being educated in HPL schools in 14 countries.
The HPL movement is growing – join us in our mission to deliver high performance for the many and not the few.
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