How do schools succeed against the odds?

Ethos and Leadership

  

‘Football’s a simple game. You play for 90 minutes and then the Germans win’.

Gary Lineker, after losing in the 1990 World Cup on penalties.

It was an extraordinary scoreline, against all betting odds. After two games Barcelona, the team touted by many as the world’s best team ever, were routed 7-0 by Bayern. Next Saturday at Wembley, two German teams, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, compete in the Champions League Final. German football has always been competitive. No country can equal the German national side’s record of 12 World Cup semi-finals. No club can equal Munich’s record of reaching the Champions League final five times in the last fifteen years. Germany has never lost a penalty shoot-out in any World Cup. What accounts for such success? I’ve always thought it was the mindset and ethos of their teams, but I never realised how much system leadership counted for. Although English football has a lot to learn from Germany’s, English schools can look closer to home for similar lessons from home-grown school success: the best schools succeed through ethos and leadership.

Three decades of research into school effectiveness and school improvement have asked two questions: what makes a school effective, and how can schools improve their effectiveness? Both have clear answers: An effective school enables students to progress further than might be expected from consideration of its intake: ‘an effective school thus adds extra value to its students’ outcomes, in comparison with other schools serving similar intakes’. (Sammons, 2008). As for improvement, what matters most for raising the bar and closing the gap in pupil attainment is strikingly similar across four key research papers:

Leadership and ethos emerge as the non-negotiable priorities of school improvement. As Sir Michael Wilshaw put it, ‘what makes the difference is the culture of the school, the expectation levels of the schools, and that is determined by leadership … schools can make a difference.’

Beyond teacher quality

Pasi Sahlberg, one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” echoes this, also using a football analogy:

“Teacher quality is often cited as the most important in-school variable influencing student achievement. But just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes.

“Education policies in Finland concentrate more on school effectiveness than on teacher effectiveness. The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school. Team sports offer numerous examples of teams that have performed beyond expectations because of leadership, commitment and spirit…

 A commonly used conclusion is that up to 20% of the variance in measured student achievement belongs to the classroom, i.e., teachers and teaching, and a similar amount is attributable to schools, i.e., school climate and leadership. Over thirty years of systematic research on school effectiveness and school improvement reveals a number of characteristics that are typical of more effective schools. Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of effective schools, equally important to effective teaching. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality”.

The Challenge

Ofsted research into the most effective schools corroborates this. A 2009 report on ‘Twelve outstanding schools: excelling against the odds’ asked the question: ‘why do some schools succeed brilliantly against all the odds while others in more favourable circumstances struggle?’ They were under no illusions about the scale of the challenge, which will resonate with many teachers in tough schools:

“The scale of challenge faced by these schools is considerable. A higher than average proportion of students in these schools come from poor or disturbed home backgrounds, where support for their learning and expectations of their achievement can be low. Many students are subject to emotional and psychological tensions, owing to their circumstances. Regular attendance at school is a problem for many. The areas in which they live are subject to some of the urban ills that often characterise poorer communities. These come not only from the ready availability of drugs and alcohol, but the peer pressures of gangs and fashions, and overt racism, all of which tend to attract behaviour which ranges from anti- social to violent. Getting these students ready and willing to learn is a constant challenge”.

 

 

The Results

Two of the best examples of schools that succeed against the odds are St Marylebone School and Paddington Academy in London. They both have over 50% of their pupils living in poverty (on free school meals, with family income of under £17,000), which puts them in the 1% of most disadvantaged schools nationally.

Their academic results also put them in the top 1% of schools nationally. Marylebone has 56% of its pupils on free school meals, but gets 81% of its students at least 5 A*-C at GCSE. In 2011, 97% of disadvantaged pupils achieved expected progress in English, as compared to 95% of other pupils. In 2004 in Paddington, just 18% of GCSE pupils got 5 C grades at GCSE including English and Maths. In 2012, 74% did. Extraordinarily, while 90% of pupils made expected progress in English and Maths, 96% of disadvantaged students in English and 92% in Maths did. Paddington and Marylebone have not only closed the gap, they have surpassed it. These are world-class results against all the odds. How are they achieved?

 

Seems like clockwork 

As Ofsted say, “Experts can make the difficult appear easy; to a visitor, the outstanding school may not appear a challenge. Such schools seem to run like clockwork: oases of calm purpose, highly focused on learning, with well-turned-out students and staff. Appearances are deceptive. These schools are extraordinary communities, exceptionally well-led and managed. They have to be”.

• They have strong values and high expectations that are applied consistently and never relaxed.
• They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency.
• They have outstanding and well-distributed leadership.
• They focus on improving the quality of teaching and learning and attracting great teachers.
• They are constantly looking for ways to improve further.
• They are focused on the things that matter most:

■discipline ■teaching and learning ■the curriculum ■attracting and retaining staff

The Reason: Ethos

The Ofsted report identified ethos as the vital, secret ingredient of the most effective schools:

Characteristically, these schools are able to maintain a sharp focus on rigour and consistency in the basics. They do not overstretch themselves and are careful not to jump on bandwagons. One of the crucial keys to the success of consistently outstanding schools is undoubtedly the culture and values of the school. These take time to establish and require constant nurturing but – once embedded – they provide the sense of purpose, direction and self-belief that will ensure continuous improvement and see the school through any unpredicted challenges. These schools have a very strong team culture, so powerful that new staff are quickly assimilated into it.

Other schools can adopt these strategies, but they will succeed only if they are born of a deep sense of purpose and commitment, courage and ambition, stemming from the leadership of the school.

When asked, headteachers in these schools responded with the importance of ethos: ‘It’s often in schools in pockets, but it is at an unusually high level here.’ ‘The street stops at the gate’; ‘We attract staff with moral purpose.’ ‘It’s a relentless struggle.’  The school lives its values. In time the values become central to the school’s ethos, underpinning everything it stands for and does. The culture encourages innovation and experimentation but never allocates blame. All the schools inculcate a strong work ethic. One of the hallmarks of very good or outstanding schools is a high degree of consistency in approaches and responses, regardless of which staff member is involved. No effort is spared in the search for ways of doing things better. No challenges are regarded as insurmountable.

In 2010, Daisy Christodoulou edited a teacher-led policy paper on ‘Ethos and Culture in schools in challenging circumstances’, with contributions from over 250 teachers working in tough schools nationwide. Teach First CEO Brett Wigdortz, with first-hand experience of over 500 of the toughest schools in the country, says in it that a strong ethos is the one thing that the most successful schools have in common: ‘A strong ethos is difficult to define, but you know when it’s there. It’s a feeling that permeates every aspect of the school environment, which everyone, including an arriving visitor, innately understands’. Daisy puts it even more simply: ‘ethos and culture can be defined as “the way things are around here”’. As one teacher said, ‘The best way to determine whether a school has a strong ethos is to ask pupils how proud they are of their school.’ Another indicator is staff retention: ‘High staff turnover the scourge of many urban schools, can be one of the biggest disruptive influences on developing a positive school culture. The more successful the school, however, the less acute is the problem.’ Another metric is the applicants per place: how many parents want their children to go to the school? St Marylebone school, for example, has 8 applicants per place, one of the most oversubscribed schools in England.

Both the Ofsted and Teach First reports argue that consistency is the cornerstone of a strong school ethos. The overarching recommendation of Daisy’s paper for schools is that the process of establishing the ethos and culture is in itself part of the output: recruitment, induction, timetabling, consultation and feedback from pupils and teachers must all contribute to the ethos. Like the words in a stick of rock, a strong ethos must run its way all the way through the school.

How do schools go from ineffective to effective?

How do schools get consistency and alignment in their systems? How do they suffuse a strong ethos across their staff team? Ofsted suggest there are three stages: achieving, sustaining and sharing excellence. This fits with what we’ve learned from London Challenge about partnership and system leadership.

Ask any parent what the goal of educational reform should be and they are likely to reply: “Why can’t every school be a great school?” ‘It is a reasonable, realisable and socially just goal for any mature education system: every school should be a great school,’ says David Hopkins. His book Every School A Great School, says that the key lesson from his 30 years in practice, research and policy is that it is above all system leadership that improves schools. But any intervention needs to be ‘highly responsive to each school’s context and need’:

“All schools are at different stages in their improvement cycle, on a continuum from ‘failing’ to ‘leading’. This opens up a highly differentiated approach to school improvement, given that different schools will need different forms of support and intervention at different times”. Context matters. Nevertheless, across contexts, there lies a simple lesson.

Schools succeed when they focus on the fundamentals: ethos, leadership, teaching and training. This post has focused mainly on ethos; in a previous post, I tackled the question of what makes great teaching. But what makes great school leadership, and what makes great training? It is to these questions that I turn in my next blog posts.

 

What makes great teaching?

Great teaching combines effective instruction with continuous improvement.

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the words you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools…

Rudyard Kipling, 1892

“English Teacher Joe Kirby has taken me to task in his blog ‘Pragmatic Education’… I take particularly seriously the concerns teachers such as Joe Kirby have about the teaching practices which our current examination system encourages.
He, and many others, are deeply worried about what he calls, ‘the enacted school curriculum: what actually gets taught in classrooms.’… Kirby’s challenge to us in government is clear.”

Secretary of State Michael Gove, May 2013, Brighton College

Just as is it an illusion to see an allusion to your words by a Secretary of State as a triumph, perhaps to see it as Blind Pew delivering the lethal black spot, a disastrous, fatal ultimatum, or an official pronouncement of a verdict of guilt, might be an imposter.

There is no lever a government in Whitehall can pull to improve the quality of teaching in classrooms. Instead, the challenge I want to focus on in this blog post is clarifying at a grass-roots level what it is that makes great teaching. As headteacher and blogger Tom Sherrington says:

‘What makes a great teacher? was a popular post. I suppose that’s not surprising; people are intrigued to know what the answer might be. Am I a great teacher? Can I be a great teacher? What would it take for me to feel that this applies to me? We all want to know. I’m the same’. 

Similarly, headteacher and blogger John Tomsett strikes a similar chord:

‘We need to break the glass ceiling which surrounds great teaching so that we all aspire to it and see it as achievable. We need to foster a growth culture which is founded upon the belief that all of us can improve.’ The challenge from teachers, headteachers and education bloggers is clear: how can we as a teaching profession improve the quality of our teaching?

Anecdotally, I’ve felt frustrated recently about my teaching practice. Last year, with a cycle of weekly observations, coaching conversations, regular observations of other teachers and a weekly journal evaluating my impact on learning, I was on a steep learning curve. This year, without such frequent observations or as much time to observe others, I’m on a flattening plateau.

The research shows that this plateau in teaching is not just anecdotal, but fairly widespread. Head of English Alex Quigley has written for the Guardian on this topic here on the autopilot phenomenon. Evidence from Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain (2005), is that after the first couple of years teacher quality reaches a plateau. Teacher experience beyond this point has a negligible impact upon student attainment. Wiliam cites sobering research to show that across 90,000 students, on average a student with a twenty-year veteran teacher will not learn much more literacy than from a novice teacher.

I think we are relatively clear on what makes a good teacher. Research shows that effective teaching accelerates students’ academic achievement. Students in the classroom of the most effective teachers make double the amount of progress of average teachers in a year.

Sir Michael Wilshaw puts it simply: ‘what’s good is what works’. His speech at the RSA on ‘what is a good teacher?’ contained some sensible ideas based on good teachers he’d worked with: ‘firstly, planning was everything for them’; ‘secondly, they were incredibly reflective teachers … teaching was a learning experience for them’; ‘thirdly, they were very perceptive people who understood the dynamic of the classroom’; ‘fourthly, they understood that nothing is taught unless it’s learned. They measured their success, therefore, on whether children were learning and making progress’; ‘they were resilient, fierce characters; fierce, not in a repressive or bullying way, but tough on standards, authoritative, not authoritarian’; ‘if you are going to be successful as a teacher, head of department or headteacher, you’ve got to be a high profile, highly visible person who has the physical and emotional energy to walk the walk and not just talk the talk’. These seem to me like sound ideas founded on a solid understanding of what schools are like and what it takes to be a good teacher.

So how can we get from good to great? The question of what distinguishes great teachers from good teachers is one I’ve been asking of headteachers, bloggers, pupils and researchers recently.

In fact, yesterday I took my Year 7 class to The Globe Theatre to see The Tempest, which we’d been studying in class, and asked them throughout the day what they thought made a great teacher. The best response I got was from Grace: ‘An inspiring teacher inspires us, of course!’ When I asked, ‘inspires you to what?’ Grace replied, ‘to love the subject!’ Quite perceptive, I thought. One of my Year 10 students (by which time they’ve been taught by over 50 teachers) who I most trust, Tamoy, wrote me a reply: ‘Great teachers get students to not only learn to love the subject more, but also give them the drive and courage to pursue that subject, even if they had doubts beforehand.’ Incidentally, both these students have a parent who’s a teacher – I often find those who do have the most empathy and insight into teaching!

The headteachers I’ve encountered have also tackled the question of great teaching. Tom Sherrington lists five things that the great teachers he knows have in common:

1) They are drivers

2) They nurture student-teacher relationships

3) They take joy in going off piste … but take exams really seriously

4) They celebrate the intrinsic reward and motivating power of learning and achieving; explain complex concepts in ways that make sense; they ask good questions and give really good feedback

5) They are principled about people, about learning and work with integrity

He also lists twelve steps to a great teacher reputation:

1. Teach great lessons consistently

2. Build positive relationships

3. Give effective feedback

4. Know your subject and use that to good effect.

5. Lay a path to successful outcomes for your students

6. Embrace a total G&T Philosophy

7. Express yourself

8. Give time generously to students who need you.

9. Engage with parents

10. Get involved in the school community

11. Maintain high professional standards

12. Show initiative; offer solutions; be collaborative; be your own CPD champion

He also details ten aspects he feels are important to great lessons:

1. Probing  2. Rigour 3.Challenge 4. Differentiation 5. Journeys 6. Explaining  7. Agility 8. Awe 9. Possibilities 10. Joy.

His ideas certainly have traction: these articles have over 1,000 shares on Twitter between them and his blog has had 150,000 views in the last year. Another headteacher with a prolific online profile, John Tomsett, ‘we need to focus on the impact of specific elements of our practice upon student learning’. I pressed him on this on his blog: ‘in your experience, what specific teaching practices make the biggest impact on student learning?’ He replied: ‘Hi Joe. I think the quality of feedback, questioning, direct instruction, and teacher/student expectations are amongst the most specific teaching practices which make the biggest impact on student learning’.

The one thing 

The trouble I find with the listing approach employed above by Sir Michael, John and Tom is this: anyone can list, but everyone’s list will differ. Instead, here’s another approach. After working at the Gallup Research Organisation for 17 years, amassing thousands of interviews with the world’s best managers and leaders, Marcus Buckingham wrote books that have sold millions of copies. One of his books is titled: ‘The one thing you need to know … about great managing and great leading’. His drive was to answer the imperative: ‘get me to the core’; ‘get me to the heart of the matter’. Despite, or perhaps because of, the significant subtlety and complexity in these roles, there is a clamour for powerful simplicity. So he asks, if you dig into a subject deeply enough, what do you find? Is there one deep controlling insight or organising principle that underpins sustained success, the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time? He has three tests for such an insight: it must apply across a wide range of situations; it should show you how to get the greatest return on your time and energy invested; and it must guide action by pointing to precise things you can do to create better outcomes. Buckingham sets the bar high for a solution to the question: what’s the one thing you need to know about great teaching?

Three Contenders

1. ‘Great teachers are effective instructors.’ 

When I asked great education bloggers Tom Bennett and Andrew Old their thoughts on this in 140 characters, their responses were typically direct. ‘Giving a damn about your subject; rigorous behaviour boundaries; high expectations of them all; tenacity’, said Tom; ‘It’s basically the ability to explain well; everything else is just administration’, Andrew said. Kris Boulton, KSA’s Deputy Head of Maths said: ‘explaining in such a way that no one can fail to understand’.  Alex Quigley fleshed this out: ‘explaining, questioning and feedback: the holy trinity of great teaching’. The e-book that 40 teachers have contributed to this summer included ‘explanations, questioning, practice and feedback’ as the four pillars of effective instruction, and research from John Hattie and Siefried Engelmann, two of the world’s most successful educational researchers, corroborates this.

As Tom Bennett points out, great teaching in a secondary school is subject-specific. Tessa Matthews concurs: ‘what makes a great teacher is excellent subject knowledge.’ A great analogy here is that in their subjects, most teachers play draughts; great teachers play chess. Deep strategic subject knowledge of how the movements of the pieces combine is crucial to effective instruction.

2. ‘Great teachers are leaders.’

After two decades of educational success in the toughest inner-city schools, Teach For America captured what they’d learned about their greatest teachers in the book ‘Teaching as Leadership’: ‘We see highly effective teachers, whose students overcome inordinate challenges to achieve dramatic academic success, embodying the same principles employed by successful leaders in any challenging context’. From thousands of surveys, interviews and focus groups with their best teachers, the principles Teach For America suggest are setting big goals, planning purposefully and continually improving effectiveness.

One of the leadership analogies that I most like is this: ‘if you want to get people to build a raft, don’t get them to fetch logs; get them to yearn for the vast immensity of the sea.’ This strikes me as particularly pressing in teaching, where a lot of my instructions are the equivalent of log-fetching rather than inspiring a love of the subject.

Just as the greatest leaders create leaders, great teachers turn their students into teachers in lessons. Stephen Covey’s books have sold over 20 million copies, and as a teacher over the decades, he distilled its essence into this great principle: ‘the best way to get people to learn is to turn them into teachers.’ He goes on, ‘when you teach you simply learn better… those who teach what they are learning are, by far, the greatest students.’

3. ‘Great teachers keep improving.’

   

When most teachers plateau, great teachers keep the learning curve steep. Carol Dwek explodes the myth of the naturally talented hero teacher, and says: ‘Great teachers are fascinated in the process of learning, and believe in the growth of the intellect’. Dylan William concurs: ‘Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better’. John Tomsett includes a striking comment: ‘Of all the excellent teachers that I’ve seen over the years, the best shared a common trait: they always thought they could do better, and they always thought their colleagues, even first year colleagues, could teach them something worthwhile.’ Alex Quigley suggests the route to improvement is deliberate practice, in contrast to unthinking habits on autopilot. John Hattie says that great teachers ‘strive to continually improve their impact’ on student attainment. Doug Lemov, whose organisation, Uncommon Schools, works in schools with poverty rates of 80 to 98%, suggests that ‘with practice you’ll get stronger results if you spend your time practising the most important things’. Great teachers love learning; they work at improving in everything they do, it all its vast complexity; they prioritise what’s critical; and they teach what they’ve learned about teaching to other teachers, accelerating their own and others’ development.

Steepen the learning curve

As Lemov realises, the focus must be on improving what’s vital for great teaching. For me, our focus should be ruthlessly and relentlessly on the critical non-negotiable priorities: student practice, effort and motivation in the subject, and feedback for improvement.

In a single sentence, great teaching combines effective instruction with continuous improvement. A consensus is gathering: by effective instruction, we mean subject-specific explanations, questioning, practice and feedback. Whether this one sentence passes the three tests for such an insight – whether it applies across a wide range of situations; whether it shows you how to get the greatest return on your time and energy invested; and whether it guides action by pointing to precise things you can do to create better outcomes – is down to you to decide.

Certainly, though, great teaching is only part of the jigsaw – it cannot happen without certain prerequisites. Other than mastery assessment, which I’ve already written about, I’m writing on those other pieces of the puzzle in upcoming blog posts: a great curriculum, great training, and great school leadership.

Why does London outperform England?

Improved Leadership and Teaching

 

οὐδὲν τοῖς θαρροῦσιν ἀνάλωτον

“There is nothing unattainable to him who will try.”

 Plutarch, Life of Alexander 58.2.3

“Turn him to any cause of policy,


The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose.

 William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1. 45–47

 

According to Greek legend, in 333 BC, Alexander arrived in Gordia, where the mythical Gordian knot, so fiendishly tied as to defy unknotting, prophesised that the one who did would be King of Asia. When after much effort Alexander could not untie it, he simply sliced it with a single sword-stroke. Ever since, the Greeks call this the Alexandrian solution.

At the turn of the millennium, two vignettes painted a dismal portrait of London schools:

 

“Prison is bad. But this was worse. At least in prison there is a sense of order. Here, there was little order and not much evidence of control… It was a sad, depressing place… The stench of apathy hung over the entire building… The ‘inmates’ were all children who hadn’t done anything wrong – except to live in the wrong catchment area of London”.

 

“Deserted, dilapidated and vandalised… Concrete ruins were all that remained of Hackney Downs School, a graveyard of ‘the worst school in England’, closed five years before. In 2000, Hackney Downs had long been a by-word for disaster… The very name conjured images of a school out of control, no learning, mass truancy, children leaving with pitiful – if any – qualifications… A sink school, with virtually no children leaving with decent GCSEs… an extreme form of the malaise affecting inner-cities: low standards, poor leadership, and bleak, unsafe schools”.

 

For decades, London schools had some of the worst exam results in the country. Recently, though, education in London has been hailed as a triumph. In 2010, Ofsted said: ‘London’s secondary schools continue to perform better than those in the rest of England’. So I began asking: what changed?

Professor Rob Coe, Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, was direct: ‘it could be a short blog: “we don’t know”.’ ‘But we can have so much fun guessing!’ was the response of the irrepressible Sam Freedman, Teach First’s Director of Research, Evaluation and Impact: ‘it’s probably the biggest challenge for education research right now’. Professor Simon Burgess at Bristol University concurred: ‘Understanding why attainment is so much higher in London is one of the biggest challenges for research in this field.’ ‘Sounds like ideal territory for opposing claims on the reasons for success,’ was the characteristically incisive insight from Tom Bennett. The Centre for London is now working with LKMco to analyse London school performance, asking: what went right? Before they publish, here’s my attempt to untangle the knotty issue of London’s educational achievement.

 

London outperforms nationally…

It is now beyond doubt that London outperforms England in educational achievement. GCSE results are better in London than in any other UK region, and improving faster: 62 per cent of state-school educated children achieving 5 A*-C GCSEs including English and Maths, compared with 58 per cent in the rest of the UK. London schools have also received higher inspection grades from Ofsted: 75 per cent are judged to be good or outstanding, compared with 69 per cent of schools in England; 27 per cent of London schools are rated as outstanding compared with 20 per cent of schools nationally. Children from poor backgrounds also do better in London than any other part of the country: the GCSE attainment gap between pupils on free school meals and their wealthier peers is much narrower in London (19 percentage points) than across England (27 percentage points). Only four schools in inner-city London (1%) are now below the government’s floor target. BBC Newsnight even ran a story in February 2013 asking: ‘How can schools nationwide mimic London’s improvement?’ Today, London is one of the few capitals in the world where educational results are better than the national average.

 

Chris Cook, the Financial Times’ former education correspondent, has done much to analyse the data (see this video from 4 minutes 50). Analysis of 10 years of state school exam results has revealed the extent of the London advantage: London schools have improved so rapidly over the past 10 years that even children in the city’s poorest neighbourhoods can expect to do better than the average pupil living outside the capital. London has raised the bar in achieving higher overall grades, and closed the gap between rich and poor.

 

… but still has its problems.

However, London is not without its educational challenges. In 2012, 15,000 children left primary school still struggling with basic literacy and numeracy, and 28,000 left without 5 good GCSEs. Of the 17,000 disadvantaged GCSE pupils in London, 47% achieved 5 A*-C with English and Maths, as opposed to 63% of all pupils in London state schools – that’s still a large gap. The Sutton Trust has shown that inequality persists: state school pupils in Hammersmith and Fulham are fifty times more likely to be accepted at Oxford or Cambridge than state school pupils in Hackney. The number of children in the capital leaving education NEET (without further education, employment or training) remains stubbornly high: 13.9% of 16-24 year olds (though nationally it is 16%). As the Mayor’s inquiry concluded, ‘If London schools had a report card, it might read, “Heading in the right direction, but not good enough”.

 

Nevertheless, if replicated round the country, London’s results would improve England’s education. Why is education in London improving, and what lessons can we learn about how to drive school improvement?

 

What changed?

The reasons for London’s success are hotly contested. Michael Gove listed the deployment of sponsored academies as one reason, and pointed out that half of all London secondary schools are now academies. The National Union of Teachers disputes this, as does the Local Schools Network. Chris Cook has drilled into the data, and says that although the best academies are in London, and they are ‘certainly part of the story’, they ‘don’t explain the difference’. Nor is London’s ethnic minority boost the whole gap, as there’s a strong London effect for white pupils, and the underperformance of schools outside of London ‘weighs disproportionately on white pupils’.

When asked by BBC Newsnight to comment, Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Mossbourne Academy which replaced Hackney Downs, said: ‘what makes the difference is the culture of the school, the expectation levels of the school, and that is determined by leadership. Limited ambitions don’t work – schools can make the difference.’ Sir Michael would know. His former school, with 40% of its pupils on free school meals (three times the national average), now gets 89% of its pupils 5 A*-C in GCSE, putting it in the top 1% of similar schools nationally. His answer struck me as cutting the Gordian knot of why London schools have improved so much.

Three reports investigating the issue corroborate his instinct: an Ofsted evaluation of London Challenge in 2010, an Institute of Education evaluation of City Challenge in 2011, and the Mayor of London’s Education Inquiry in 2012. They establish the main reasons London’s educational attainment is accelerating: it has improved its school partnerships, leadership and teaching.

 

1. Partnership

 

The objectives of London Challenge, which ran from 2003, were threefold: to reduce underperforming schools, increase outstanding schools and improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged children. Its activities were ‘characterised by the belief that school-to-school collaboration has a central role to play in school improvement’ (IoE 4).

The Institute of Education evaluation, with 221 school surveys, 69 stakeholders interviews, 34 headteacher interviews and 21 in-depth school case studies, asked to what extent London Challenge was responsible for any improvements in London Schools. Overall, the IoE reported that the objectives had been achieved. Of headteachers surveyed, 68% agreed with the statement, ‘London Challenge enabled this school to improve more rapidly than would otherwise be the case’ (35). The most plausible explanation for improvement in the city’s schools, the IoE concluded, was the Challenge program (98).

Partnerships – schools working with other schools with similar intakes – partly explains the success of London Challenge. Among headteachers interviewed, 72% agreed that ‘working with other schools has been a very effective strategy to bring about improvement in this school’ (36). Indeed, ‘good and outstanding schools benefited from helping weaker schools’ (104); ‘all schools can improve through school-to-school working and sharing practice: such strategies are not just for the weakest schools’ (106). The greatest success seemed to come from two or three schools working together.

Ofsted’s 2010 report also attributed the success of London schools to London Challenge and its partnership model: ‘pan-London networks of schools allow effective partnerships to be established between schools, enabling needs to be tackled quickly and progress to be accelerated’ (1). Ofsted reported that ‘participants and providers were unanimous in their appreciation of the positive impact that this approach was having on raising standards in both the host and participant schools’ (5). In short, Ofsted concluded that ‘collaboration is a key driver for improvement’. They recommended the DfE should ‘apply the lessons gained from London Challenge in driving school improvement across other regions, noting in particular the success of partnerships between schools’ (7).

 

2. Leadership

 

Ofsted reported ‘system leadership’ as a principal reason for success. Networks of experienced school leaders and current headteachers as credible advisers form a pool of ‘system leaders’ (5). A key strength of these leaders is their skill in matching people and schools, creating a sense of mutual trust. The leaders of the schools that contributed to the survey stated positively that the support is implemented with them and not imposed on them. The cadre of headteachers that provides the leadership and teacher training contributes greatly. An important consequence of the London Challenge initiative is that supported schools become influenced by the rigour and high expectations of the colleagues who are providing the support (13).

The IOE agrees: ‘survey and interview responses suggested that there has been a considerable change in the ethos of many London secondary schools’ (98). The focus was strongly on motivating and inspiring school leaders, and sharing outstanding practice through knowledge hubs in schools that could be visited and learned from. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and interviewees reported a ‘direct impact on practice in their own schools and the quality of education they were providing for pupils’ (107). They recommend that ‘clear and effective group leadership is needed to drive the agenda’, and ‘weak leaders can be supported through coaching, mentoring, development opportunities and a structured process’.  Common areas of focus across City Challenge, which rolled out in two other regions from 2008, were improving leadership and improving teaching.

 

3. Teaching

 

‘Improved teaching quality should be seen as an outcome of London Challenge’ argues the IoE evaluation (37). In their survey, 66% of headteachers agreed that ‘it had brought about an improvement in the quality of teaching’, and less than 10% disagreed. The most effective strategies to improve teaching and learning, recommended the IoE report, take place in schools, and involve observing excellent teaching; opportunities to reflect with colleagues; and coaching in the teacher’s own classroom.

‘Improving the quality of teaching and learning’ was the top driver behind school improvement identified by Ofsted (14). London Challenge brokered professional development programmes, which Ofsted called the ‘engine room of school improvement’:

‘Teachers on these programmes universally welcomed their impact on the quality of their teaching. School managers could point to measurable improvements in the quality of the teaching, with consequent improvements in outcomes for pupils. Providers also noted that the quality of their own teaching had improved further. This was the primary reason why teaching schools wanted to continue with this work: they recognised that their own staff and pupils benefited’ (15).

 

CPD on London Challenge used a ‘coaching triads’ model, in which the lead teacher works with two colleagues to demonstrate an element of teaching while being observed and then observes her or his colleagues ‘having a go’ themselves. Working with teachers from other schools with similar challenges, outside the confines of their home school, enabled frank discussions of strengths and weaknesses in their own teaching, free from concerns about performance management or the disapproval of peers.

 

Lessons Learned

One of the most heartening aspects of all this is that lessons are being learnt and built upon. The Major’s Inquiry into Education applied the key drivers of partnership, leadership and teaching quality to launch a London Schools Excellence Fund of £24 million for partnerships to improve the quality of subject teaching. The deadline for up to £75,000 grants is in June 2013, and £500,000 grants are also being awarded. The Chair of the inquiry, Tony Sewell, recognised that ‘in London we have many examples of schools which secure high achievement for traditionally under-achieving groups. If they can do it, so can other schools’ (6). The Inquiry recognises the challenges – for instance that 90,000 more London school places need to be found by 2016 – and explores what more can be done to encourage state schools to seize the opportunity to work with partners.

A relentless focus on improving the quality of leadership and teaching through partnerships: that is the deceptively simple lesson of London’s school improvement. If it feels a bit like slicing the Gordian knot, cutting through complexity around ethnicity, funding and academisation, that may be no bad thing. After all, leadership, teaching and partnerships are right at the centre of any school’s sphere of influence. The two vignettes from 2001 that I started with were written by Brett Wigdortz and Andrew Adonis. A decade on, and Teach First is applying this lesson: ‘that study after study, expert after expert, common sense observation after common observation, all show the same thing. An excellent education is the result of teachers who demonstrate classroom leadership, enabled by effective school and wider societal leadership. (22)’ Adonis makes the same case: ‘we need far more brilliant teachers, brilliantly led. (227)’ And it is for this reason that I’m so optimistic about the future of education, in London and in England. I see brilliant school leaders in the vanguard, headteachers like Max Haimendorf at King Soloman Academy and Ed Vainker at Reach Academy Feltham. In some of the country’s most deprived areas, the brilliant leadership of hundreds of others like them inspires a great deal of optimism. Almost 2,400 years on, the Alexandrian solution of cutting through complexity with a simple solution – improving leadership and teaching – might disentangle us from the knots of over-complicated policy debates we seem to be entwined in.

 

Why isn’t our education system working?

 

 

 

‘Educational inequality is the civil rights issue of our time’

Barack Obama, 2011

 

Our retention, training, curriculum and assessment aren’t strong enough

In 1807, radical journalist William Cobbett used an analogy to suggest that, just as his hunting dogs in training had lost the scent because he’d laid a false trail of red herrings, politics had become distracted. Some two hundred years on, the same could be said of the English education system and the fierce debates it often finds itself embroiled in: for trainee teachers, it’s a trail littered with red herrings.

One of the things that has most surprised me since starting as a trainee teacher is the sheer number of misleading diversions, which seem to distract us from what matters most: improving teaching and learning in schools and classrooms. Here are some examples of those debates that create more heat than insight: whether to implement performance-related pay; whether to impose longer school days and shorter school holidays; agonising about who’s in or out of the national curriculum in history; pursuing 21^st century skills rather than 19^th century facts; abolishing or establishing more grammar schools; soothsaying about whether tablets will transform textbooks; arguing over whether the autonomy enjoyed by academies or free schools is sufficient or extravagant. All these are seemingly plausible, but ultimately irrelevant questions for improving education.

 

From red herrings…

On confronting deep-rooted problems like educational inequality, Henri David Thoreau used this metaphor: ‘for every thousand hacking at the leaves, there is one striking at the root.’ So rather than debating questions in education that hack furiously but ineffectually at the leaves, we might strike cleanly at the root if we ask this one question: why isn’t our education system working? Let me summarise my thinking on this blog so far.

 

…. to deep roots.

 

How our education system isn’t working

One in five school leavers in England leave school functionally illiterate and innumerate. Two in five leave without five C grades at GCSE. The gap in GCSE attainment between those in the poorest families and their wealthier peers is 25%. In 21^st century England, the travesty is that poverty restricts social mobility.

It doesn’t have to be like this. In the best schools in England, there is no attainment gap between poorer and wealthier pupils at 16. In the world’s best school systems, less than one in ten leave school without a passport to a career or further education. None leave school without being able to read and write. Deprivation doesn’t have to be destiny. Schools, and school systems, can – and do – make the difference. To cut to the core of why our system today does not, let’s diagnose the problem more deeply.

Why isn’t the education system working?

In England, the non-negotiable priorities for an excellent education system are nowhere near strong enough. Retention of teachers, especially in the toughest schools, is too low. Many a school curriculum is not fit for purpose. Assessment is unhelpful for improving academic achievement. Teacher training is not robust enough. None of these priorities for effective teaching is premised on how pupils learn.

The curriculum, assessment and training are at the core of what and how we teach, central to improving classroom instruction. Far from being red herrings, these are the beating heart and vital organs of any education system, organs that do more than anything else for the life and soul of teaching and learning.

At the heart of it…

Retention isn’t robust

Almost half of all teachers training in England leave the profession within five years. In schools in low-income communities, it is often 50% every year. In stark contrast, in the world’s best performing school systems, teacher turnover is minimal. In Singapore, for example, turnover is 3% a year; in Finland, it is 2% and in South Korea just 1% (McKinsey 2010 p24). In terms of closing the attainment gap between the poorest and wealthier pupils, there is no more important factor than teacher retention. As Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust says, ‘the most important factor in inner-city schools is how you get good teachers into those schools in the first place and get them to stay there’. But Smithers and Robinson found that in England ‘the more challenged secondary schools are more likely to lose teachers to other schools’ (Great teachers 35). Anecdotally, I met a teacher this week who told me that in her inner-city school in special measures, the turnover is 90%. Low retention is a key reason education in England isn’t working.

Digging deeper, the chief culprit for such shockingly low retention rates is disruptive behaviour. Every teacher knows that the most stressful, exhausting and often demoralising part of the job is confronting disruption. 90% of teachers surveyed report dealing with disruption. A DfE survey showed that 60% of teachers felt bad behaviour was driving teachers away from the profession, a distressingly high number. Until we strengthen behaviour systems in schools nationally, retention rates are likely to remain low. Beyond behaviour, Christopher Waugh on the March #blogsync has collated 28 teachers’ perspectives on why so many teachers leave the profession within 5 years.

 

The school curriculum isn’t rigorous enough

As Siegfried Engelmann says, ‘the curriculum is the difference between failure and success in education’. But the secondary curriculum in English schools is not strong enough to raise the bar and close the gap in GCSE attainment. I don’t mean the intended National Curriculum, although its lack of substance and specificity since 2007 has played a part in the neglect of rigour: for instance, neither the 2007 nor the proposed 2014 English curriculum specifies a single literary text. I mean the enacted school curriculum: what actually gets taught in classrooms. Schemes of work in schools are admired based on how relevant and engaging they are as opposed to how rigorous and challenging they are. In principle, there is no trade-off between relevance and rigour; in practice, there is all the difference in the world: the difference between teaching transient vampire books or transcendent Victorian novels.

It is unsurprising that our school curriculum lacks rigour nationally, since OFSTED criteria and inspections dictate the terms of engagement and relevance above all else. Take, for instance, their framework for an outstanding English curriculum: media, ICT, cinema and film are all given lavish mentions, but astonishingly, neither grammar, nor novels, nor spelling gets a single mention. In lesson descriptions across the 9 most recent OFSTED subject reports in core subjects, lessons praised as best practice involved using plasticine, paint, Mr Men, baby mice as party guests, fizzy drinks, soap operas, school uniform, angels, fairies, and dressing up. If entertainment is what OFSTED recommends, this is what the curriculum in schools nationwide will aspire to, but it will do little to improve quality of teaching and academic achievement.

 

Assessment straitjackets learning

Teachers in state schools cannot focus on helping their students to improve in their subjects, because they are overburdened with assessment for accountability, resulting in narrow exam drilling. Meanwhile, assessment for improvement has been hijacked by gimmicks, distorted by enforced school mandates, and captured by counterproductive government policy that cost £150 million. In the last decade, schools have caged themselves into the unhelpful assessment and progression regime of national levels, and lack the time, capacity and willpower to redesign it. Yet without a radical overhaul, assessment will continue to inhibit students’ deep understanding in subjects.

 

Training is ineffectual

Schools in England spend just 0.5% of their budgets on CPD, according to the Teacher Development Trust. In contrast, in the world’s best school systems like Ontario, Canada, over 10% of school budgets and teacher time is spent on CPD. Research shows that barely 1% of CPD training is improving classroom practice effectively in English schools.

Neither ITT nor CPD are focused on research-based effective teaching practices. At the root of this is not structures but ideas. Practical ideas on how to teach that work remain marginalised: direct instruction, cognitive science, the core knowledge curriculum, mastery assessment; none feature in ITT or CPD. Distracting ideas like BrainGym, learning styles and multiple intelligences are discredited but still foregrounded. The understandable reaction of new trainee teachers to such ineffective ITT provision is frustration and resentment. Teacher training trains teachers in ineffectual ideas, which to me is a major reason why our education system isn’t working.

 

If we were to have a world-class education system, our curriculum, assessment, training and retention would excel. Instead, they flounder. My argument on this blog is that it is the ideas underpinning these vital areas that are misguided and ineffective: ideas, moreover, still propagated by OFSTED and many teacher-training agencies. Until and unless we improve them, teaching quality in our schools will plateau, and school leavers will continue to leave illiterate and innumerate, with the poorest worst hit.

 

Stop the rot

But if we uproot ineffective ideas on behaviour (see these posts), the curriculum, assessment and training, then the deep-rooted but rotten trunk of inequality in education will fall. Over the coming weeks, I will be posting on the curriculum and training, as well as what shores it all up: school leadership. Avoiding red herrings and focusing on what works best is vital as we work towards a great education system.

How could assessment & accountability unshackle schools?

 

Assessment should provide for clear progression and feedback;

Accountability should provide transparent benchmarking and prevent perverse incentives. 

Mind-forg’d manacles

William Blake, London, 1794 

Born into captivity, training starts on the second day in the life of a baby elephant. To break it in, the 120kg baby is repeatedly beaten with a hook. Fear and pain finally make it give up all resistance and accept its fate. Shackled into footchains, the adult elephant weighs 10 tons and is hundreds of times more powerful than its human keeper. But its mind-forged manacles cage it into its own captivity.

 

Last post, I wrote an indictment of how assessment used for accountability straitjackets teaching and shackles learning. This post, I want to explore how those shackles might be removed, and how we might rip off our straitjackets. Like captive elephants, we are complicit in our own captivity.

There are two questions to answer. What could the national accountability system do about this? And how could schools use summative assessment for pupils and parents?

 

National accountability must reverse perverse incentives and provide clear benchmarks.

Compelling research evidence shows that robust accountability is important in driving up attainment. But two cast-iron laws of metrics provide useful caveats here: Goodhart’s “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”; and Campbell’s: “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” So, to what extent will the new accountability regime avoid the perverse incentives and unintended consequences of APP? Briefly, there are three ideas:

1. Ofsted data dashboards & DfE data portal

Ofsted now publishes school data on attainment, progress, attendance and closing the inequality gap, and comparisons to similar schools. The DfE has published four times as much data on headline attainment and progress measures in performance tables, and is set to warehouse still more online. To the extent the comparisons are valid because the baseline data is robust and the schools are similar, this transparency will help parents and governors, increasing direct accountability.

2. Average Points Score & Progress Measure

The current floor standard of 5 A*-C focuses schools excessively on the C/D borderline to the detriment of other students. The proposal would be an average points score across 8 subjects measured by progress from a KS2 baseline. Whilst much more complex, multiple measures are harder to game, and this recognises not only achievements of all pupils, but also the value a school is adding from their starting point. The trouble is, as soon as this metric becomes a threshold, it falls prey to Goodhart’s law; and whether baseline data is robust enough is doubtful.

3. National Standards Tests

GCSEs are currently used to measure the performance of pupils, schools and the country. The problem is that multiple purposes of an assessment overload it and make it dysfunctional. GCSE’s have become politicised, used more as a measure of the success or failure of the ruling political party than an aid to teachers. Instead of GCSEs, new tests, independent of qualifications, school accountability and government, will track national standards over time, using respected international tests such as PISA. By removing one of the overloading uses of GCSE data from the assessment, this will reduce strain on their design. It will be clearer whether a rise in national results at GCSE shows that pupils’ understanding of key subjects has improved, or that schools have adapted their teaching based on the particular qualifications in the headline measure. There will also be less governmental and exam board incentive to reduce rigour in the qualifications.

Overall, these proposals seem to be tackling existing problems whilst reducing the probability of unintended consequences. My main caveat is around the rigour and reliability of the KS2 baseline. So, with the removal of perverse incentives, it’s up to schools to unshackle their mindsets.

 

     

Transparent data is the best accountability.

 

Schools now have an opportunity to unshackle assessment.

Over half of England’s schools are now academies. These schools have the option not to follow the National Curriculum. Indeed, national levels have never been compulsory nor statutory. Almost all of the academies and free schools I know are now considering the question of what to do about assessment and progression. ‘Is there an alternative to national levels?’ they are asking: ‘What do we do about reporting and accountability?’

Given that national levels are counterproductive, I asked in my last post, why aren’t schools casting off the manacles of levels? Although the inspection regime and league tables are big reason, an underlying reason is lack of time, capacity and frankly imagination to construct a new whole-school assessment and progression system. It is our mind-forged manacles that cage us, as Blake imagined, and our schools are like captive elephants. As this teacher says: “We are like prisoners abandoned in a cell for so long that they no longer need to lock the door. Rattle the cage and we might discover that the door swings open and the warders have left.” It is time to rattle the cage.

Sapere aude: dare to think fiercely

School assessment must provide for clear progression and feedback.

What is progress? A straightforward definition of what is meant by genuine progress in primary and secondary school is deep subject-specific understanding of core concepts, towards enduring mastery of the key skills in the subject. National models of progression should be based strongly on international evidence and comparisons with the world’s best-performing school systems, otherwise England risks slipping behind.

With 30 years of expertise in transnational assessment comparisons, Tim Oates notes that ‘a distinctive feature of the high-performing systems is a radically different approach to pupil progression, as a fundamental rather than surface element’. Achievement is interpreted in terms of the power of effort rather than the limits of ability; deep engagement with subject matter leads to deeper understanding. This mastery model is concerned with securing understanding by all pupils prior to moving on to the next set of learning objectives. A ‘ready to progress’ threshold helps secure high standards for all through targeted intervention. Assessment is not first and foremost for accountability but the bridge between teaching and learning for improving instruction.

 

Take a leap: assessment as a bridge between teaching and learning

Carol Dweck’s research shows how a mindset focused on effort and practice rather than talent and ability leads to more enduring achievement. Belief in effortless success leads to fear of effort and failure, but belief in hard work and resilience in setbacks unleashes attainment. School assessment should not focus on labeling talent and categorising fixed ability, but rather emphasising hard work, overcoming tough challenges and cultivating a growth mindset in students.

Combining Oates’ and Dweck’s research suggests a mastery model for summative assessment in schools. How is it that 17% of school leavers leave English schools functionally illiterate, and 22% leave school functionally innumerate, according to 60 years of research by Sheffield University? Year on year, pupils’ lack of fundamental skills is not flagged up, and they continue to proceed through school without knowing the basics of times tables or reading, inhibiting their progress: if you can’t multiply or read, you can’t learn much else.

A mastery model of assessment works something like this. The curriculum* is sequenced to focus on a much greater depth of concepts, which are rigorously checked for deep understanding. All pupils are expected to master all the concepts in assessments, and there is no room for underachievement, as any pupil that does not master the content is entitled to precise support and targeted intervention: so as a pupil, for instance, by the end of the year, if you have not understood all the concepts required to make expected progress, you would stay in for summer school, and your teachers would ensure you understood them all deeply. Parents are crystal-clear on whether their child has achieved the high expected threshold in each subject. Such assessment is designed to tackle the long tail of underachievement.

Mastery is precisely the approach taking by Singapore and other world-class jurisdictions. To some extent it is also home-grown; ARK academies are pioneering Mathematics Mastery assessment in England, which is being evaluated by randomized controlled trials from the Education Endowment Foundation. King Solomon Academy in London is going even further down the mastery curriculum and assessment. KSA has hired as Deputy Head of Maths Kris Boulton, the person who has been thinking most deeply about the sequencing of the school Maths curriculum out of anyone I know in the education sector, and whose forthcoming book on starting teaching Maths is out this summer. Michaela Community School, a free school to be set up in Wembley in 2014, is creating a mastery model for English and the Humanities. The Curriculum Centre, Pimlico, Pimlico Primary and Jerry Collins’ new free school with ARK are also looking to pioneer mastery models of assessment in the state sector. Does anyone seriously think it will damage their pupils that they won’t have APP grids and numerical labels?!

In the iconic film The Matrix, the choice offered by Morpheus is between the red pill and the blue pill. The blue pill is chosen by Cypher: preferring not to know, his mindset is that ignorance is bliss. The red pill chosen by Neo takes him to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Similarly, schools now have two options: the unthinking status quo of national levels, or rethinking their assessment system from first principles. Can we kick our addiction to levels? Can we unshackle ourselves from our mind forg’d manacles, and escape the unguarded cells we’ve kept ourselves in?

 

Ignorance-is-bliss with the blue pill; or down-the-rabbit-hole with the red pill?

 

In a school-led system, we would take matters in our own hands. We would design an assessment and progression system that actually works for pupils and teachers. We would send out a rallying cry: “Educationalists of England unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains”.

***

*Footnote: Above all, assessment should be used to improve learning. This ultimately depends on clear curriculum progression. Unless the curriculum is crystal clear on what must be understood within subjects by all pupils, end-of-unit assessments cannot coherently measure pupils’ progression in subject understanding over time. Teachers, especially in humanities subjects, require a formidable clarity on how the assessment criteria relate to exemplar work. Effective summative assessment inevitably depends on a coherently sequenced curriculum, well-prioritised teaching, and highly effective training, all of which I will be posting on over the coming months.

 

How is assessment shackling schools?

 

Assessment is used less as a tool for improvement than as a manacle for accountability, straitjacketing teaching and shackling learning.

 

‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes’

Lewis Caroll

They began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. When they had been running for half an hour or so, the Dodo called out ‘The race is over!’ and they all crowded round, panting and asking, ‘But who has won?’

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and sat for a long time with one finger pressed against his forehead, while the rest waited.

At last the Dodo announced: ‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’

When I was doing my GCSEs, I was always a bit puzzled as to why we never got our exam papers back. It seemed to leave me blind as to how to improve. Then, when I first became a teacher and started assessing students’ work, I felt a bit like the Dodo. I’d look from the assessments to the criteria in bemusement. I’d agonise about which level to label a piece of work with. I’d gingerly assign one, but if I relooked later, I’d often come up with a completely different level. But as everyone had to move onwards and upwards, I tended to err towards optimism, as if all should get prizes for progress.

Last week I posted on formative assessment, and how it got hijacked by gimmicks. This week I want to write about how the topsy-turvy world of summative assessment straitjackets teaching and shackles learning.

 

What’s assessment for?

Assessment is one of the most complex issues in education. Fundamentally, there’s no agreement on what it’s for. Tim Oates at Cambridge Assessment has enumerated about 80 separate purposes that assessment data are used for. Broadly, they include diagnosing students’ strengths and weaknesses in subjects; evaluating whether students have learned what teachers have taught; judging what students are learning more broadly; challenging the brightest students whilst allowing the weakest access; deciding whether to award qualifications and distinction; reporting to parents on children’s progress; comparing departments; benchmarking between schools; inspecting the quality of teaching and achievement in schools; monitoring performance locally; publishing data to hold the government accountable for public spending… the purposes of assessment are almost innumerable; many of them are conflicting. The more purposes an assessment has, the more strain is placed on its design: GCSEs, for instance, encompass several. The crux is the tension between assessment for improvement and for accountability.

The assessment for accountability regime gets teachers fixated on exam drills, hooked on levels, ratcheting up ladders and bogged down in bureaucracy, all of which straitjacket teaching, shackle learning, and crowd out important formative assessment.

Fixated on exam drills 

The high-stakes exam system and league table metrics exert inordinate pressure on teachers. This anecdote from an English teacher, which will seem familiar to many, reveals the pervasive, chronic short-termism of drilling in exam technique and timing that the system forces us into:

My year 11 pupils couldn’t have told you the name of a poet, but they could tell you that section A of paper 1 assessed your reading skills, that it involved 4 questions, that each question had 10 marks, that question 3 nearly always dealt with the writer’s techniques, that they should spend about 10 minutes reading the passage and then 10 minutes answering each question that followed, which left about 70 minutes for section B, which assessed writing and involved two tasks, both of which were worth 20 marks, but the first of which you should only spend 25 minutes on, leaving 45 for the piece of creative writing, which in any case you would write beforehand, memorise and regurgitate in the exam so you didn’t have to waste any time thinking and structuring a story from scratch.

 

It’s not just at GCSE that teachers are affected, but also at Key Stages 2 and 3. The 2011 Lord Bew report on assessment and accountability took 12 weeks, 4000 online responses and 50 interviews. Respondents with ‘considerable and significant concerns’ criticised National Curriculum levels as ‘too broad, inconsistent across Key Stages, not specific enough about a pupil’s attainment in any given subject and difficult to interpret, including for parents.’ The counter-intuitive consequences of the high-stakes accountability system, the report concluded, was pervasive teaching to the test, placing a ceiling on attainment of pupils, and impeding their progress.

Hooked on levels 

It seems, however, as if we’re all addicted to grades and levels. Dylan Wiliam uses the colourful analogy that we have our students hooked on them like drug addicts, that we teachers are pushers and parents are co-dependents. Like any addiction, it absorbs attention, temporarily gives gratification, artificially inflates self-esteem and exacerbates the problem it seeks to remedy. Wiliam’s summary of the research is that constantly giving grades actually lowers achievement. Not only that, but giving comments with grades means that students don’t read the comments, as they’re too busy comparing grades. He concludes that grades inhibit learning.

The problem with national levels is that the success descriptors are vague, abstracted, overcomplicated, overlapping, over-generalised, jargon-heavy, vacuous, and almost unintelligible. Try using the above English descriptors to reliably distinguish between pupils’ writing at levels 4, 5 and 6 in assessment focus 2: ‘understand, describe, select or retrieve information, events or ideas from texts and use quotation and reference to text’:

• For a level 4, ‘comments supported by some generally relevant textual reference or quotation’
• For a level 5, ‘comments generally supported by relevant textual reference or quotation, even when points made are not always accurate’
• For a level 6, ‘commentary incorporates apt textual reference and quotation to support main ideas or argument’.

If that impenetrable bureaucratic educationalese makes your brain hurt, imagine what it’s like marking, leveling and moderating 30 essays using sub-level guesstimates across four assessment foci. Three different teachers could assign the same piece of work three different sub-levels; in fact, one teacher might on separate occasions assign three different sub-levels to one piece of work. Validity and reliability depend on the precision and specificity of assessment criteria, and are compromised if they are vague and vacuous.

Numerical levels, though, are easily compared across departments and schools. Parents thirst for them, managers and teachers persist with pushing them, and students become more and more addicted to them.

 

Ratcheting up progress 

The linearity of levels has led to the idea that a students’ grade or level should never go down. Pupils, parents and managers complain unless there’s continual upward progression being evidenced by numerical levels, regardless of reliability.  But this anecdote illustrates the problem with generic levels when applied across content of varying difficulty:

 

In a media unit in English, the assessment question was: ‘How does Spielberg create drama and tension in the film Jaws?’ When marking these essays, there were kids who had effectively got to the top of the level grid.  They’d analysed the film perfectly. Admittedly they’d spelt some words wrong, but they weren’t being marked on that. They were being marked on how well they could analyse, and I didn’t see how they could have done it better. So what was I supposed to do? Give them a level 8, the top grade you can get at Key Stage 3?  But I knew these pupils were not level 8 students.  If I gave them a level 8 now, there would be outrage when at the next assessment on Shakespeare they went back to level 5. But if I gave them a level 5, I was at a loss as to what to put for a target.  In the end, I gave them level 5 and made up a target that wasn’t on the grid.

 

Like a game of snakes and ladders, no one wants to be the snake that moves pupils down.

 

Encumbered by bureaucracy 

The classic example of how assessment and accountability bogs down teachers in bureaucracy is the last government’s 2008 DCSF £50 million initiative: ‘Assessing Pupil Progress’ (APP). It diagnosed school assessment’s ‘unnecessarily bureaucratic, time-consuming and workload-intensive burdens; and promised to ‘replace existing bureaucratic internal school assessment practices with a more streamlined and purposeful approach’. It had precisely the opposite effect, as another English teacher writes here:

 

The APP grids came on a double-sided A3 sheet consisting of the 14 English Assessment Focuses, or AFs, broken down by the 8 key stage three national curriculum levels – that’s 112 tiny little boxes of skills targets. I taught 90 key stage three pupils, so that meant 90 double-sided sheets of A3 to update every half term.  That was how often we updated the sheets, but there was a suggestion that it should be updated after every piece of assessed work. If that’s called reducing bureaucracy, I’d love to see what increasing it is like.

 

Because of the imprecision, some schools started assigning national levels to 2 decimal places, giving out levels like 4.45. But this isn’t just anecdotal. From 2008 to 2010, teachers’ Union NASWUT received increasing numbers of reports from teachers about the burdens of APP. It put this down to ‘inappropriate approaches to implementation promoting its use in ways never intended’. It was only ever supposed to be used twice or three times a year, NAWSUT argued. But I think it’s more likely that the entire micro-prescriptive premise of APP was fundamentally flawed in the first place.

 

The assessment for accountability regime is shackling learning. 

The effects of the assessment for accountability regime on learning are imposing, obscuring, weakening and demotivating. It imposes crude and unhelpful student labels: from the ages of 7-14, countless conversations between students compare what level they are: ‘I’m a level 5b: what are you?’ It obscures what students actually know and can do – who knows what 5b actually means in Maths? How strong or weak their grasp of number, algebra, statistics and geometry is obscured. Assigning a ‘best fit’ level across all subject areas, weakens teachers’ and parents’ clear understanding of pupils’ specific weaknesses or misunderstandings. Worst of all, expected national progress of 2 national levels from Years 7-9 is pretty demotivating for students. What if students don’t progress as ‘expected’? ‘ Ellie, at the start of Year 7 you were on a level 5. By the end, you’re on a level 5. Well done’. It’s not very motivating, is it? Assessment for accountability even fails on its own terms: as Tim Oates points out: ‘generalised reporting using levels obscures the fact that too great a proportion of pupils fail to attain elements of the curriculum that are vital for the next phase of their education’.

So why do we still use levels?

If levels are so evidently counter-productive for learning, why do so many schools still use them? In June 2012 the DfE took the decision to scrap national levels and not replace them in its letter to the expert panel on the National Curriculum Review. So why haven’t more schools taken the chance to do away with them?

In a word, accountability. Schools are locked into levels because OFSTED inspections and data dashboards measure progression in levels; league tables measure progression from baseline levels; and SLT, perversely incentivised by these metrics, enforce levels on teachers. Even if a school somehow devised its own system of progression, how would it benchmark?

The 2011 Bew report stated that ‘in the short term, we believe we need to retain levels as a means of measuring pupils’ progress and attainment. Key Stage 1 continues to be reported by levels, and therefore to measure progress robustly, Key Stage 2 results should be reported in the same way’. This sounds identical to the argument for using levels at KS3: that KS2 data is measured in levels, so there’s no other option.

With the focus on measurement, benchmarking and accountability, the logic seems inescapable. But such regressive logic reminds me of the start of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, when he mentions a conversation Bertrand Russell had after a lecture he gave on the universe. An old lady came up to him, and said, ‘Rubbish. The world is really a flat plate on the back of a giant tortoise.’ When he asked what the tortoise was standing on, she replied: ‘Very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down!’ It sometimes seems as if the education system yields to none in embracing the logic of the Dodo.

“It’s turtles all the way down”.

Mind you, it’s easier to criticise than to propose a credible alternative. But it’s also important to diagnose before you prescribe. If this post diagnoses the extent of the problem, the next tries to envisage an alternative assessment regime. If Wiliam is right and we’re addicted to levels, as my friend Harry said: we’re going to need a methadone.

 

What can we learn from Dylan Wiliam and AfL?

 

‘The only thing we learn from the past is how little we’ve learned from our mistakes’.

Geog Wilhem Friedrich Hegel

 

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’

George Santayana

 

 ‘Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders’.

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Inside the black box of classroom practice…

 

Formative assessment helps pupils understand how to improve

but requires teachers to focus on what works best and change their habits of practice.

 

i. What AfL is: getting pupils to understand how to improve.

 

Before I started to teach, my Head of Department said, ‘if you read one thing, read ‘Inside the Black Box’. So I did. AfL seemed to revolve around getting and providing effective feedback (1999). Research that summarised 250 assessment articles over a decade argued that AfL ‘could do more to improve educational outcomes than almost any other investment in education’ (Black et al 2003, 2). International evidence corroborated this: a synthesis of 250 studies concluded that ‘the gains in achievement are amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions’ (Marzano 2007, 13). Studies from Natriello (1987) Crooks (1988) Kluger & DeNisi (1996) and Nyquist (2003) backed it up. John Hattie’s research that I summarise here, enthroned feedback as the most effective teaching strategy, bar none. Clearly, all this stuff on questioning, peer- and self-assessment, and feedback, could be powerful stuff.

 

AfL in a nutshell.

 

ii. What AFL became and why: hijacked, hoop-jumping gimmickry

 

Few education concepts have been more distorted in a shorter time span than formative assessment: teachers falling prey to gimmicks, schools mandating unhelpful AfL policies, and government policy confusing AfL with national levels. Lolly pop sticks, coloured party cups, red-amber-green traffic lights five times a lesson, thumbs-up-or-down, starred self-confidence post-its, scribbled emoticons for end-of-lesson feelings, strange and unhelpful acronyms like WALT & WILF all became a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Many senior leadership teams then enforced the letter of the AfL law rather than the spirit of it: school-mandated lesson plans, observation rubrics and progress checks 3 times a lesson and endless mini-plenaries; objective sharing in rigid but often counterproductive formats required across all subjects like ‘by the end of the lesson, students will be able to…’; peer assessment on levels that often resulted in comments like: ‘5a because he tried hard and wrote neat’; marking in green pen rather than red to avoid damaging students’ self-esteem; and posters with tiny, illegible, incomprehensible but displayed level descriptors. Prescriptive but flashy AfL techniques like waving around mini-whiteboards became the OFSTED-enforced orthodoxy, and inspectors became obsessed that pupils could say what level they were on.

The last government then bureaucratised AfL into a National Strategy, which ‘practically ignored the process and pedagogical essence of AfL and its underpinning principles’. Critics described it as a ‘woeful waste’ dominated by an alignment with ‘Assessing Pupils’ Progress’ and summative assessment’ (Swaffield 2009, 13): a ‘misinterpretation of AfL as a mechanism for advancing students up a prescribed ladder’ (Swaffield 2009, 13). Politicians hijacked Afl and ossified it into sub-levelling and labelling students.

Dylan Wiliam himself recognises these unintended consequences as what he calls ‘policy diffraction;’ or, more graphically, ‘scoring a spectacular own goal’. He gives the examples of one school that showed him ‘AfL lessons where pupils know what level they’re on, and when asked how to get to the next one, they say ‘listen in class and do my homework’; and one teacher who had ‘lost the plot’ and combined ‘lolly pop sticks with bunny ears that pupils held up to show they were listening.’ He put these own goals down to government ‘looking for a quick win’ and being ‘in a rush’.

Perhaps, though, such spectacular own goals are being scored and the ideas misunderstood because they weren’t clearly communicated in the first place. One of Wiliam’s four top ideas was, after all, the formative use of summative tests. Confusion between AfL and APP is more understandable in that light. His 2011 book, Embedded Formative Assessment, looks set to repeat the mistakes of his past 1998 and 2001 pamphlets. A laundry list of 53 techniques includes coloured cups, popsicle sticks, red/green disks, traffic lights, WALT, WILF, two stars and a wish, ask the audience and phone a friend amongst others. A decade on, it seems we have learned little from such unthinking, hoop-jumping blunders. 

 

iii. How to make formative assessment work: examples, questions and feedback.

For a classroom teacher, teaching an average of over 200 pupils more than once a week, checking and improving the subject understanding of every individual pupil is a huge challenge. Wiliam clarifies it in a helpful grid, and I simplify it below as a cycle. I then summarise the top five (out of 53!) highest-impact ideas for applying formative assessment that work to help pupils understand how to improve in my experience: exemplars, hinge questions, exit tickets, checklists, and numbered questions – dovetailing with Engelman’s advice of examples, questions, practice and feedback.

 

Where we’re going: Clarify Success

1. Snap & share exemplars

Comparing multiple student samples of essays, paragraphs or sentences that exemplify excellent work or different levels of a success criteria rubric. Discussing strengths and areas for improvement helps them understand what excellence looks like. An easy way of getting sample work is to ‘snap and share’ from students’ books with the camera on your smartphone to save you or them typing it all up.

 

Where we are: Check Understanding

Just as a pilot guides a plane toward its destination by taking constant readings and making careful adjustments in response to wind, air currents and weather, so a teacher within and across lessons must check whether and to what extent students understand what they need for the destination or end-of-unit assessment. Both these ideas are ‘all –student response mechanisms.’

 

To reach your destination, adjust direction.

 

2. Ask & adapt to hinge questions

Asking a key question at the right moment in a lesson allows you to visibly see among your whole class who gets it and who doesn’t, then adapt afterwards. Multiple-choice questions work well for this as you can scan the class instantaneously then probe and follow up misunderstanding. Wiliam suggests the options of using mini-whiteboards or ABCD cards, though the content of questions matters most.

 

3. Pose & use exit tickets

At the end of lessons, and for longer responses, ask a single question designed to assess whether they’ve learned what you’ve tried to teach them by getting them to apply it, and get all students to write an answer in their books or on cards you’ll take in.

How we’ll get there: Share Teacher-, Self- & Peer-Feedback

To be effective, feedback must provide a recipe for future action. Otherwise, feedback is more like the scene in the rearview mirror than the windshield. Feedback only functions formatively if it is used by the learner in improving performance. Wiliam says he often asks teachers whether they think that their students spend as much time using their feedback as it took to give it. Typically, he says, fewer than 1 percent of teachers believe this to be the case. His advice is not to provide students with feedback unless you allow time, in class, to use the feedback to improve their work. Feedback should be focused, as less is often more, focused on the rubric of success criteria, and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor.

Feedback as a windshield not a rearview mirror

4. Tick & target with a preflight checklist

Peer and self-assessment works well through a simple checklist of requirements and success criteria. You get students to tick off criteria they or their peer have met, and write targets for criteria as yet unmet.

5. Mark & require responses to numbered question options

Before you mark 30 books, decide on six or so questions that you might want students to respond to next lesson when they get their books back. As you read, write a number or two for questions that student will have to answer for ten minutes next lesson. In the lesson, display the questions on the board, and get the students to copy their questions and respond to them. It takes you just a minute to read the work and write two numbers, and takes them ten minutes to respond. For examples, and instead of numbers, you could use icons.

 

iv. How we can improve teaching: focused habit change

 

Wiliam says all the research shows the best way of improving student achievement is by improving teaching quality: the most effective teachers help their students learn at four times the rate of the least effective teachers. But he argues that just improving the quality of entrants by raising the threshold for entry whilst getting rid of underperforming teachers with rigorous deselection takes too long. We need to help improve the quality of teachers already working in our schools – the ‘love the one you’re with strategy.’

 

Old habits die hard.

Wiliam then uses a Weightwatchers analogy. Everyone knows that the route to a healthy body is to exercise more and eat less. But Weightwatchers realise they’re not in the knowledge-giving business; they’re in the habit-changing business. Similarly, most teachers know that questioning and feedback are the ways to improve learning; but old habits die hard. If you’re serious about improving teaching, he says, you’d better get in the habit-changing business.

If you don’t change what teachers do in classrooms, students don’t benefit: that’s why so much structural and curriculum change has made such little impact. But no one has cracked this idea of habit change. Mixing his metaphors slightly, returning to the pilot analogy, he thinks the reason why teachers resist change is it’s scarily like doing engine change in flight.

His solution is Teacher Learning Communities, with the principles of choice, small steps and flexibility as to which of his 53 techniques teachers opt for. Monthly 2-hour sessions between 8-10 teachers help sustain dedicated practice and undo old habits.

Whether Dylan Wiliam’s TLCs will get the better of the AfL blunders, time will tell. In the meantime, as teachers we can first and foremost ask whether our own use of formative assessment is genuinely helping pupils understand how to improve in our subjects.

Black, P. and Wiliam, D. 2001 Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam King’ s College London School of Education

Marzano, R. J. 2007 The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework For Effective Instruction. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD.

Swaffield, S., 2009. The misrepresentation of Assessment for Learning – and the woeful waste of a wonderful opportunity. Unpublished paper’, at the 2009 AAIA National Conference (Association for Achievement and Improvement through Assessment) Bournemouth, 16 – 18 September, 2009.

Wiliam, D. 2011, Embedded Formative Assessment.