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About the school
Ark Walworth Academy is a secondary school and sixth form in South London, part of the Ark network. The school serves a cohort with significantly higher than average rates of free school meal eligibility, and few students have access to private tutoring. Despite this, 72% of last year's leavers progressed to a top-third UK university, more than double the national average.
About the teacher
Carl Fazackerley is Head of Sixth Form at Ark Walworth Academy. He has used Up Learn since 2017, when he was asked to take over A Level Economics teaching at short notice, without a background in the subject. He now oversees Up Learn adoption across all subjects at Walworth and represents the school in network-wide discussions on implementation.
The challenge
Walworth's sixth form has no realistic route to private tutoring for its students, so the school leans heavily on high-quality independent study resources to close the gap with more advantaged cohorts. The challenge Carl set himself as Head of Sixth Form was less about finding a resource and more about building the accountability structures to make sure students actually used the platform consistently, and not just when it suited them.
"Often when things don't embed within a school environment, it's because there is that gap in accountability... What we do now is if young people have not completed the Up Learn they've been assigned to do in any given week, my team hold them back on a Friday afternoon to complete what's missing."
How they embedded Up Learn
Walworth was the first school in the UK to buy Up Learn licences for its students, initially for A Level Economics before expanding across other subjects. Up Learn is set weekly as independent study ahead of lessons, deliberately mirroring a university seminar model: students complete the pre-learning before the lesson, and teachers use the resulting dashboard data to shape what they cover in class.
Carl built a weekly accountability cycle around this: he and his deputy review completion data every week, follow up directly with students who haven't reached a green score, and contact parents where students continue to fall behind. This school-level model has since been shared across the wider Ark network, with other heads of sixth form adopting the same approach.
"We're really pleased to hear there's going to be automatic contact to parents for assignments that are gone... I think that's a game-changer."
Why Up Learn?
For Carl, the standout feature is Refresh Knowledge, the tool's approach to tackling memory decay. Rather than letting students choose which topics to revisit (and predictably gravitate toward what they already know), Up Learn surfaces the sections they're actually forgetting.
"The platform takes away that ability to avoid the difficult stuff."
He also points to the depth of specification coverage compared with other platforms he's used, including Seneca, and the way pre-learning data lets him target classroom time precisely rather than guessing at misconceptions.
"It really does yield so much more than the other platforms do... I can target my interventions much more closely."
Impact on students and staff
Up Learn data from an internal Ark review found students who completed the platform in full, or at least 20 sections to mastery, achieved on average half a grade higher than those who didn't. While Carl is careful not to overstate causation, he sees it as consistent with what he observes in his own classroom.
The impact extends to staffing resilience, too. With subject specialist recruitment a persistent challenge, particularly in sciences, Carl sees Up Learn as a way of protecting content quality even when staffing is in flux.
"Access to something like Up Learn provides some assurance that there's quality content going in and allows my less experienced peers to focus more on the content of what's happening in the lesson."
Carl has also noticed encouraging signs among students with high absenteeism, who continue engaging with the platform remotely and appear less far behind than their attendance alone would predict, an area he's keen to explore further.
Looking ahead
From September, all Ark schools will have Up Learn licences active from day one of term, with onboarding managed centrally between Up Learn and Ark rather than school by school. Single sign-on will also roll out, removing password friction for students using school devices. Carl sees both as removing barriers to the consistent early habits he considers critical to a strong start in Year 12.
In their own words
Asked what has stood out most after nearly a decade of using the platform, Carl pointed to Up Learn's responsiveness to school feedback:
"There's always that willingness to take feedback and to look to continuously improve the product... I think that's something that's always struck me about Up Learn."
Benefits for schools
- Weekly dashboard data enables targeted, accountability-driven follow-up
- Pre-learning model frees up classroom time for analysis and misconception-fixing, not first exposure to content
- Supports consistency across departments and, at network level, across schools
- Reduces reliance on subject-specialist availability without reducing teaching quality
- Network-level reporting enables trust-wide visibility and shared best practice
Benefits for students
- Retrieval practice targets forgotten content, not just recently taught material
- Removes the ability to avoid difficult topics during revision
- Embedded questions ensure active engagement, not passive video-watching
- Gives students objective, non-negotiable evidence of their own gaps
- Supports independent learning habits, including for students with high absence
