5 May 2020

By Jennie Golding

The move to ‘home schooling’ has, quite rightly, triggered a storm of commentaries about how the gap between the disadvantaged and the middle class will widen.

Last week the House of Commons Education Select Committee conducted a session on the impact of COVID-19 on education and children’s services. Several MPs, particularly from more economically challenged northern constituencies, expressed their fears about inequity of access to education during school closures. The answer to many of their questions was ‘We don’t yet know’ – whether there is a correlation between pupils’ time studying and their socioeconomic position, how many disadvantaged learners are not eligible for free laptops – or when and how schools will re-open to more young people.

Committee chair Robert Halfon warned that the UK could be facing a ‘wave of educational poverty’ as a result of the lockdown – and of course there is a moral imperative to prioritise the needs of those who are already disadvantaged. However, emerging evidence suggests the picture is complex, and there are serious challenges across all social groups.

My own current research with primary schools and A Level providers has serendipitously (more…)

29 November 2019

By John Jerrim

School league tables produced every year by the Department for Education currently use a single year of test score data in the headline measure. Based upon how a school’s most recent cohort of Year 11’s performed on their GCSEs, schools get labelled with terms such as “above” and “below” average.

This is not a smart thing to do. It would be much better to use the average performance of a school across multiple years instead.

This blog recaps the reasons why – and then suggests how this could be done.

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17 October 2019

By Mark Quinn

For some time now, teachers have been wondering whether there are better, less labour-intensive, ways of giving feedback to their students. Surely marking stacks of books every night cannot be the only way? We now have some evidence that verbal feedback is at least as effective as the written variety. And it might just help give teachers their lives back too.

Every workload survey of teachers in England reveals that they believe they are spending far too many hours on tasks they feel have little value for their students. In July 2019, Ofsted said that their own findings ‘show that teachers spend less than a half of their time on teaching, while lesson planning, marking and administrative tasks take up a large part of their non-teaching time’. Teachers told the DfE’s Workload Challenge survey that the amount of marking they had to do, and the ways they had to do it, was the key factor in driving up their workload.

The Education Endowment Foundation’s 2016 report, A Marked Improvement?, found few robust studies into the effectiveness of written marking, even though it takes up so much of a teacher’s time. Consequently, in their myth-busting document, Ofsted have reiterated that they do ‘not expect to see any specific frequency, type or volume of marking and feedback; these are for the school to decide through its assessment policy.’

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15 October 2019

By John Jerrim

In England we are fortunate to have a lot of data available about school pupils and how they are achieving academically at school.

Organisations such as FFT aim to make this data available and easily digestible to schools through services such as Aspire so that it can be used to inform the decisions of teachers and school leaders.

But how does the way schools in England make use of data compare to schools in other countries?

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24 January 2019

By George Croxford

The Wiltshire market town of Wootton Bassett is no stranger to remembrance and commemoration. Paying our respects, pausing to remember, to learn and show solidarity with those who grieve or suffer is perhaps what most people know us for. So, remembrance is in the DNA of the town. This is evident in the recent WW1 centenary events, the war memorial, the annual Remembrance Day commemorations the more recent repatriations through the town, when the bodies of British soldiers were returned home – it’s a feature of our community we are proud of. It allows us to come together with shared values to reflect on the past, consider the present and work to a better, safer future – to learn lessons, perhaps, reconnect and reaffirm. Royal Wootton Bassett Academy (RWBA), is very much part of that community of memory and, as its head, I am very proud that remembrance, respect and civics lie at the heart of the school’s educational experience.
One of the things that first struck me about the school was its deep commitment to empowering young people to safeguard the future by learning about the past. The importance afforded civics and the idea of service, community engagement and the wider world was hugely impressive. Remembrance, respect and community were not superficial, but deeply embedded in the school’s mission and curriculum; we are a global school in a local community. I was most struck by the school’s marking of Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27). Unlike some schools, this wasn’t some tokenistic assembly, a one-off nod to Holocaust education. Rather the marking of HMD was in tune with the school’s values; it was something lived and (more…)

8 January 2019

By Melanie Ehren

In the last decade many countries have introduced policies to mandate or incentivise school networks. Examples are teaching school alliances and Multi-Academy Trusts in England, regional improvement consortia in Wales, area-learning communities in Northern Ireland, and networks for inclusive education in the Netherlands.
Network governance and school-to-school collaboration seems to be the new panacea for educational improvement. Even the OECD is advocating network governance as an effective strategy for school improvement and to tackle complex educational challenges in child development.
The introduction of networks has not been without problems, but most of these can be attributed to policies that failed to ensure that the conditions for effective collaboration between (more…)

3 January 2019

By Zachary Walker

Every generation brings new faces, new ways of thinking and new challenges into our classrooms. In order to prepare students for the dynamic, exciting world they are entering, it is important that we understand and honour this generation of learners. We can do this, in part, by questioning our own ways of thinking. As school leaders prepare for 2019, I’d like to propose you ask yourselves the following five questions:

Are you acknowledging reality?

The number of unique mobile users (individuals owning a mobile device) was up again in 2018 and now 75% of the UK population owns a mobile phone. We use mobile phones for social activities, directions, work, entertainment, shopping, and countless other activities. But schools are often the one place we do not allow the use of mobile devices.  (more…)

Clare Brooks. 
As schools begin a new term, many headteachers are faced with chronic gaps in their staffing. It is at this time of year that the teacher shortage is most keenly felt. At the same time teacher education and teacher training providers prepare to welcome a cohort of new recruits, and consider how to best induct them into what is, for many, a new career and a new professional identity.
As a new report from the Education Policy Institute outlines, the teacher labour market is getting worse. Applications for teacher training are in decline by 5% and exit rates are increasing by up to 10%. For both schools, teacher education providers and the DfE now is a good time to think about the issue of quality initial teacher education (ITE) at scale.
In recent years (more…)

Toby Greany and Rob Higham.
The economic and regulatory incentives facing state schools in England are increasingly in tension with an inclusive, broad and balanced education for pupils.
Since 2010 the Government has used the language of a ‘self-improving school-led system’ to characterise its reforms, arguing that these are ‘moving control to the frontline’. Our research shows that this is a partial and idealised account: while some higher performing schools are benefitting, the system as a whole is becoming more fragmented and less equitable.
Schools have been strongly encouraged (and sometimes forced) to become academies, which are independent of local government, on the premise that they will be freed from red tape.
Yet schools and academies have faced greater regulation… read the full article on guardian.com.
See our new report here.