LYDIARD Park Academy has won an award for its dedication to embracing digital technology.

The academy, which converted from Greendown Community School in September 2012, has earned the status as a centre of excellence from Europe’s largest provider of digital learning platforms, itslearning.

The award is for using the system, which enables parents and teachers to monitor pupils’ progress, attendance, achievement and behaviour.

It is used in tandem with access to Android and iOS apps, providing the best practises and training in software tools.

The school’s website has a dedicated section for the system and it is among the UK’s first designated centres of excellence, which will not only give benefits its pupils but it also acts as an ambassador and mentor for other schools which want to understand its features, content and applications.

Dermot McLaughlin, faculty leader and IT strategic manager at Lydiard Park Academy, believes that the itslearning platform is a major addition to the quality and effectiveness of what the school has to offer.

“I first came across the platform at a conference and was struck by its ease of use, compared to other systems, despite the fact that the platform has got a huge feature set and is beautiful to look at,” he said.

“We use it from Year 7 right through to Year 13 and it’s particularly helpful to students about to take exams when they go off on study leave.

“All our teachers use it too and we are the top performing school in our area by quite some distance, partly because of the added value that the itslearning system brings.”

Lydiard Park Academy consistently scores ‘good’ in its Ofsted ratings across the whole of the curriculum as well as its autistic spectrum centre.

All parents of students who attend Lydiard Park Academy have been given parental access to itslearning. The system allows them to see overviews of their child’s courses, keep track of deadlines and track lesson attendance, punctuality and achievement and behaviour points.

An increasing number of subject areas conduct assessment and feedback through the platform. Doing so allows students, parents and teachers to track learner progression, ensuring high expectations of progress are met.

And itslearning’s collaboration with Lydiard Park Academy, it says, has also helped drive up learner success rates at the school, helping put it into the top 20 per cent of secondary schools in the UK.