West London Free School

The West London Free School took part in Elemental’s beta testing trial, with 35 Y11s and 4 Y13s using the platform for homework and revision in the months leading up to their exams in summer 2025. Elemental’s impact played out in three key ways:

1. Improving the learning of aural concepts
2. Identifying class/student strengths and weaknesses
3. Holding students accountable during study leave

1. Improving the learning of aural concepts

Music GCSE and A-level are replete with aural concepts that can only be musically understood through repeatedly hearing examples. If a student does not already know what an anacrusis is then a verbal explanation might briefly be helpful but this explanation is only given meaning by hearing a number of anacruses and then checking understanding by listening for the presence or absence of anacrusis in a range of melodies.

Elemental’s examples enabled the setting of homework and revision based entirely in sound, just as the students encounter in the real exams.

2. Identifying class/student strengths and weaknesses

For the four A level students Elemental’s radar diagrams gave daily feedback in the two weeks before the exam on the areas that the students had nailed and the areas that required further listening. This level of regular, granular feedback had never been possible before and so communications were possible along the lines of ‘excellent that you are reliably hearing when a melody ends on the tonic but you are less reliable when it ends on the supertonic or dominant so please do a quiz on just those two.

For the 35 GCSE students, with their much greater range and frequency of exams in May, Elemental gave broader information on where efforts were needed, such as using Elemental’s Revision to ensure that the knowledge needed to complete Rhythms of the World questions was at their finger tips. This particular area was Quiz 10 and Elemental showed that the students were making it to Quiz 5 before getting distracted, invaluable information in advance of half-term revision sessions.

3. Holding the students to account during study leave

With all the pressures of many exams student efforts dropped dramatically at the start of study leave. This year, however, we were able to give encouragement based on the real data of how much revision was being done every day. After a lull of two weeks some judicious emailing and reminders with realistic targets resulted in consistent small efforts being made four weeks before the exam, successfully pushing against the tendency for everything to be left to the last minute. We also used Elemental as a revision activity for pupils and would catch them on the way out of previous exams so they could do 10-15 minutes of work on Elemental. After all this the last minute uptick was still huge but from a higher base than would otherwise have been the case.