In case you’ve been living in an underground bunker for the last year or two, the curriculum is now a thing. More than that, it’s the next big thing in education. The new framework for inspection arriving in our schools from September 2019 will have the quality of the curriculum firmly in its sights. Intent, implementation and impact are set to become our new lodestar, possibly (fingers crossed) eclipsing sats and GCSE results at the centre of the school solar system.  Amanda Spielman has made it quite clear, mistaking ‘badges and stickers’ [the performance table success that comes with having great data] for learning and the substance of education, is a mistake, and one, presumably, that the new framework will seek to overcome. I do not under-estimate the massive culture shift involved, for both inspectors and schools. It’s nothing short of a revolution. (I wrote a blog about this a year ago; in terms of what actually happening in schools I don’t think much headway has been made in rearranging our priorities.)

Inevitably, in the build up to the new framework, various people, myself included, are offering training to schools about how to develop your curriculum. I’m seriously worried about some of the examples on offer.  For example, I heard about one school advertising that its amazing curriculum now had 60% of learning outside (and they weren’t talking about Early Years). Why is doing 60% of learning outside of itself a good thing, any more than doing 60% of learning indoors is a priori a good thing? Surely you decide this on a case by case basis? Pond dipping? Orienteering? That’ll be outside. How to use semi colons? Writing a paragraph about the Roman invasion of Britain? Probably inside. Learning does not become more durable or transferrable according to its location, though I would have thought for most learning having a regulated temperature and protection from the elements and flying insects, not to mention good acoustics, the facility to model ideas on a board of some sort and a surface upon which to write are all quite useful features.

I’ve heard of schools where ‘hooking’ the children into learning involved spending a whole day dressing up as Romans, and eating Roman food and so on. A whole day! Or another school where to build empathy with the homeless they spend the day (and possibly the night) camping on a field.  When reading and discussing Way Home would have achieved the same objective in 30 minutes. Personally I think the best hook is a teacher saying animatedly ‘You are going to love learning about the Romans!’ and then teaching it with passion, but if a school wants to spend 10 minutes on some sort of hook, so be it. But burning through whole day of precious curriculum time is just profligate! As if fitting everything into the limited time we have available to us was easy!

The mot du jour seems to be ‘exciting.’  All around me, schools are proclaiming how exciting their revised curriculum now is, as if ‘excitement’ were the substance of education. Alongside ‘exciting’, I also often hear that curriculums are ‘innovative’ and ‘engaging.’  Superficially, these sound like persuasive descriptions of great learning, especially if you contrast excitement with boredom, innovation with stagnation and engagement with distraction.[1] The problem with ‘excitement’ though, is that it’s not a great way to ensure the kind of learning that is durable in the longer term, or that transfers from one context to another. In other words, it might be fun at the time, but it is less likely to result in long term learning. In exciting lessons, you run the risk of remembering the excitement, rather than the learning. I’ve written before about the difference between episodic and semantic memory.  Let me recap the essential differences between the two.

Episodic memory is where we store the ‘episodes’ of our life, the narrative of our days. This is the autobiographical part of our memory that remembers the times, places and emotions that occur during events and experiences.  We don’t have to work hard or particularly concentrate to acquire episodic memories, they just happen whether we like it or not. When we talk about having fond memories or an event being memorable or exciting, we are talking about episodic memory. We are talking about something that happened, something where details of time, place and how we felt at the time are central.

Semantic memory, by contrast, is where we store information, facts, concepts.  These are stored ‘context-free’, that is, without the emotional and spatial/temporal context in which they were first acquired.  These type of memories take effort; we have to work to make them happen.  That might sound a bit boring, compared with episodic memory.  Yet it is our amazing ability to store culturally acquired learning in our semantic memory that makes as so successful as a species. Semantic memory is how we know stuff. Without it, human culture would not exist.

The problem with episodic memories is that while they may be acquired effortlessly, they come with several drawbacks in terms of acquiring skills and knowledge. Episodic memories come tagged with context. In the episodic memory, the sensory data – what a child saw and heard during a lesson – alongside their emotions, become part of the learning. These emotional and sensory cues are triggered when they try and retrieve an episodic memory. The problem being that sometimes they remember the contextual tags but not the actual learning. Episodic memory is so tied up with context it is no good for remembering things once that context is no longer present. Because it is context-bound, it does not transfer well to different contexts. Luckily our brains also have semantic memory. Semantic memories have been liberated from the emotional and spatial/temporal context in which they were first acquired. And once a concept has been stored in the semantic memory, then it is more flexible and transferable between different contexts.

At this point, it is usual for people to say ‘but what about understanding? There’s no point having a load of facts if you don’t understand them.’  Which is of course true.  However, understanding happens in the semantic memory! Understanding is the word we use for when we have a well-developed schema for something – in other words, understanding is what happens when we have lots of well organised, connected knowledge, as opposed a handful of unconnected facts (or no facts). It’s the connections between facts that is understanding. When we misunderstand something, that is because we have made the wrong connections. For example we might have connected how the concept of value works in natural (counting) numbers with how value works in rational numbers such as fractions, and therefore think the bigger the denominator, the bigger the value of the fraction.  When we don’t understand something (as opposed to misunderstanding it), that is because we have not made enough connections yet. If we only know one or two facts about something, understanding is hard because the potential to make connections is so limited. Our two lonely facts may seem a bit meaningless. If however we know hundreds of different facts about a topic, that changes the nature of our thinking; we can now weave a rich web of understanding because there are so many connections that can be made.  Because of the wealth of connections, we can think deeply and creatively. Jo Facer has written an excellent blog expanding on this here.

This is why progression in a subject necessarily involves acquiring more knowledge. As more knowledge is acquired, more links are made; thinking is structured differently so more nuanced application is possible. Schools should be wary of curriculum packages that describe progression in terms of levels of learning (e.g. basic, advancing and deep) and spout nonsense such as progression involving ‘changing  the  nature  of  thinking  rather  than  just  acquiring  new  knowledge.’

Because understanding is literally made out of knowledge, it is possible to know something without understanding it, but you can’t understand it without knowing it. The onus on the teacher then is to carefully share their own schema step by step, explicitly describing/explaining/modelling the links and being alert for misconceptions. Indeed, assessment for learning – or responsive teaching as it is more appropriately called, involves checking for missing knowledge and misconceptions (wrongly connected knowledge) and remedying them when found.

This being the case, I would argue that the main substance  of education – the back bone of it, so to speak – is building strong semantic memory; the passing on and further development of the knowledge built up over centuries to the next generation; how to read and write, how stories work, how to use mathematical reasoning to solve problems, science with its amazing power to gives us to predict the future, how people in different times and places are so different and yet so similar, and the myriad of other concepts, ideas and practices.  We want children to understand concepts and facts rather than just remember events and experiences. Alongside this, we should also be building procedural memory (the memory of how to perform physical tasks and skills such as handwriting or riding a bike, or playing the piano).  Honing these skills – or procedural knowledge – comes down to regular practice, not to exciting, innovative experiences.

This building of semantic and procedural memory sounds terribly prosaic. What about critical thinking, problem solving and creativity I hear you ask? Why aren’t we teaching them? Surely this is what education is for – not just knowing stuff?

Again, I’d agree. Helping children grow into people who can think critically for themselves, who can solve problems and be creative is the ultimate goal of education.  However, we should not confuse the ends with the means. If we want children to be able to think critically and solve problems, then they need something to think critically with. For this they need knowledge, and the kind of flexible knowledge that is durable and transfers between contexts. This necessarily involves using semantic memories stored in the long term memory. If we want children to be creative and innovative, they need knowledge of the tradition upon which they are going to innovate.  You can’t really teach critical thinking as a detached skill; what you can do is teach various metacognitive strategies such as ‘consider both sides of an issue.’  Of course, this only helps if your students know what both sides are, so these metacognitive strategies need to be taught and applied within a specific context. In other words, teach someone about something and then give them opportunities to think critically about it. Don’t start off a programme of study with critical thinking or problem solving. Lay the ground work first, carefully and systematically building the requisite knowledge so that then students can apply their knowledge, using it to solve problems, possibly generating creative, novel solutions.

This building of semantic and procedural memory is not the only purpose of education, of course.  If it’s the backbone, then it will need further fleshing out. It’s just as important that we educate children to be emotionally literate and morally responsible and that will involve thinking about the kind of episodic memories we try and build for our children. We want some memories to come tagged with emotion. If we treat our children with kindness and respect, they will have episodic memories of what it was like to be treated kindly and respectfully, which makes it more likely they too will treat others with kindness and respect themselves.  If we want them to feel compassion for others, we will treat them with compassion.

Building of episodic memory is important for other reasons too.  Episodic memory encodes memories of our experiences, whatever they are. Another key purpose of education is to broaden the range of these everyday experiences so that we are lifted up out of our familiar and parochial context and gain the kind of perspective that comes from encountering new, different situations. Some children have very narrow life experiences, as this thoughtful blog by Debra Kidd testifies. Here’s an extract from it:

Hywel Roberts tells a story in his wonderful key notes about teaching in a school in Sheffield. The class are looking at town planning and urban developments, so as a way in, he asks them what they might find in a great city – if the city of Sheffield were to be redeveloped, what would they put there? One by one, the children list things the city should have – a Greggs, a BP Garage, a hairdressers called Streakers…they are describing their walk to school. For many of the children, their only experience of the city they live in is the walk to and from school. For those children and others like them, getting on a coach and going to a museum is about far, far more than remembering aspects of the curriculum. It can be literally life changing.

It is not only the most disadvantaged children who could benefit from experiencing wider horizons.  Plenty of children, particularly in they live in a city, might never have climbed a mountain or seen the sea, or even been to the local park. Rural children might never have been to a big city, let alone looked down on a cityscape from the top of a skyscraper or cathedral or castle turret.  Swathes of children might never have visited an art gallery or heard classical music or music from a different culture or been to the theatre or nature park or on a train or in a boat or even gone away on holiday, beyond visiting relatives.  This is why schools such as Hartford Manor have a curriculum pledge that builds in a range of experiences – dare I say, exciting experiences – into their curriculum as an entitlement. See this blog by Loic Menzies which articulates how life enhancing he found the rich opportunities he had for outdoor adventure as a child and why he believes all children should have such opportunities.

Other, superficially more advantaged children may also have limited life experiences. They might never have properly encountered people who live in different socio-economic circumstances, for example and so have no idea how challenging it is to live a life of grinding poverty. Or they might live within a mono-culture, never meeting people from different cultures or traditions. With adults increasing living in narrow social media bubbles, rarely encountering people who think differently from them, it is all the more important that education broadens out all children’s horizons and enriches all communities. In other words, curriculums need to be planned to foster spiritual, moral, social and cultural development as well as knowledge acquisition.  This will require attending to both episodic and semantic memory formation.  A carefully planned programme of experiences that compliments and reinforces the super abundance of SMSC inherent in a rounded study of history, literature, art, music, RE, geography, MFL, maths, science, PE, PHSE and so on should provide this.

So if I’m all in favour of building procedural learning, opportunities to apply knowledge in critical thinking and with creativity, to emotional literacy and moral responsibility, and experiences that broaden horizons as well as education that builds semantic memory, what exactly is my problem and why am I banging on about a prosaic curriculum?[2]

This is because there is a world of difference between planning a set of experiences that consciously address the specific kind of narrowness that a school’s particular context creates and believing that excitement per se is a good enough reason for inclusion on the curriculum.  Providing experiences just because children might find them exciting and enjoyable is not a great reason to allocate them precious curriculum time. (Which is not to say they can never happen, just that they should be the rare exception rather than the rule).  Nor is this to say lessons must be dull and uninspiring. That’s just as bad.  There is a middle ground between a curriculum that panders to a craving for ever more excitement and is preoccupied with novelty and gimmicks and a dismally boring, dry as dust snooze-fest. Something solid and prosaic, something with enough cognitive challenging to be absorbing. The engagement comes from the subject matter itself and the feeling of satisfaction one feels after a bit of struggle.  Easy success isn’t rewarding; earned success is motivating.

When I use the word prosaic, I am not using it to mean dull and boring, but to mean ordinary, everyday, usual, familiar, regular, customary, typical, bread-and-butter – stuff that isn’t ‘sexy’ or glamorous or flashy, but that forms the bedrock of what we do in schools. Some of this is the stuff that forms the foundation upon which more interesting stuff depends. Learning to read, to add and subtract, learning number facts and times tables, to use punctuation and spell correctly, handwriting; basic, humdrum everyday stuff, no bells and whistles, the stuff of learning, this should be at the heart of our curriculums because without it, nothing else is possible. Sometimes derided and sneered at, often looked down upon, let’s hear a cheer for the workaday workhorse of education.

I sometimes see on Twitter teachers moaning that phonics is tedious and the decodable early readers are boring. Which is to completely miss the point – they aren’t intended to be great works of literature, they are intended to teach children to read (so that they can go on to read great works of literature).  Teaching phonics is as tedious as you want it to be. Young children love learning to do ‘grown up’ things like reading, and if you show how excited and impressed you are that children can now blend p-i-n, then they will be excited and impressed with themselves too. That’s where the engagement comes in, with the success. The lesson isn’t meant to entertain the teacher after all, it’s meant to develop the child and some of them things that help a child develop, especially early on, are pretty prosaic. The sentence ‘Clap, clap, clap on the big, red bus,’ is not, of itself, desperately interesting. However, being able to turn all those squiggles into actual words that make up a sentence is amazing! Criticising a decodable reader because of its limited story line is like telling a babbling baby their conversation is boring. To the ‘phonics is boring’ brigade I say, ‘stop raining on the children’s parade!’ If you are not delighted and enthused by helping young children take their first steps on the reading journey, then you are in the wrong job. (Or wrong phase, perhaps).

Then there is also the content, the knowledge, the substance that we want to teach; knowing where countries are on a map of the world or what a force is or what the industrial revolution was or what the 5 pillars are or what irrigation means. Content that is taught and practised and revisited so that the learning is durable. So that it can be transferred in different contexts and used in critical thinking. If we want children to think critically about arguments around immigration, it helps to know where different countries are in relation to one another. If we want children to think critically about the engineering challenges inherent in a mission to Mars, it helps to know about force and gravity. If we want children to think critically about the advantages and disadvantages of industrialisation for an economically developing country, knowledge of the industrial revolution will provide a useful way in. If Britain developed in the 19^th century by exploiting our resources and workers, are we right to condemn other countries for doing the same now in the 21^st century? If we want to have an informed understanding of Islam rather than one tainted with ill-informed Islamaphobic histrionics, understanding the importance of the 5 pillars for Muslims is a necessary but not sufficient starting point. If we want children to think responsibly about natural resources, knowing about water use and the benefits and pitfalls of irrigation is vital.  The knowledge we teach forms the “teeth” in the gears of understanding. Without knowledge, understanding cannot gain any traction.   Such content is inherently interesting in the hands of a skilful teacher, it does not need sugar coating with gimmicks in order to make it palatable.

There is a misconception that this entails a ‘lecture’ form of lesson, with children meekly listening for long periods of time to their teacher. This is not at all what I am advocating. Rather, I am suggesting (courtesy of Greg Ashman) that the majority of lessons have four main features. They are planned and led by the teacher, who makes conscious choices about the sequence of learning, the content is broken down into small steps with children learning how to do each individual step well before the steps are brought together into task that require the sub steps to be integrated all at once, concepts are fully explained – children do not have to ‘discover’ it all by themselves and finally teaching is highly interactive with everybody required to participate throughout the lesson.[3] I’d also add in that they frequently revisit previous learning with regular retrieval practice so that memory of previously taught content is strengthened. Such lessons are usually calm rather than dull or whacky.

Towards the end of a sequence of such lessons, I’d advocate opportunities to apply what has been learnt.  At this stage, the child integrates the sub steps in some way with less explicit teacher direction. There are a myriad of ways this could be done, from writing an essay to goal free problem solving to pursuing one’s own line of inquiry to doing a test to making a model or creating some art work.[4]

However, anything can be done to death.   Having a template lesson structure is one thing, clinging to it come hell or high water is another. Occasionally mixing up the structure – for example – using a Mantle of the Expert approach once in a while or doing some sort of whizzy experiment or workshop provides variety and counterpoint.   Just don’t confuse this with the prosaic core.

.

[1] Though you could also contrast over-excitement with calmness, gimmicky innovation with tried and tested methods and superficial engagement with the medium of the lesson as opposed to focused absorption on the core content.

[2] Yes, it’s beginning to sound a bit like the ‘what have the Romans ever done for us’ sketch from the life of Brian.

[3] This list comes from Greg Ashman’s excellent new book, chapter 5, The Truth about Teaching, sage Publications 2018

[4] Though I’d be wary if the final project ate into too much curriculum time. I’d go for an 80:20 or 90:10 balance. So making a claymation video about embalming mummies would not be a good use of time, unless you believed learning how to do claymation was as itself an important part of the art/computing curriculum. Great for an after school club though.

Based on my presentation at the Medway Network of the Chartered College of Teaching

Inaugural Conference on Culture, Wellbeing, Workload.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve made a concerted effort to question how we do things. Just because something is the accepted way of doing things, doesn’t mean it is the most efficient or effective. The two main things we’ve really changed is how we mark and how we observe lessons.  Reading the research around marking and feedback and reading various blogs quickly convinced me that marking was a very inefficient use of staff time and had limited impact on learning. Similarly, having termly graded lesson observations was an inefficient use of SLT and had limited impact on improving teaching or learning. Instead of marking, we now have responsive teaching; instead of termly observations we now have responsive leadership.

Kluger and Denissi’s research into written feedback found that students often learn less when teachers provide written feedback than they do when the teacher writes nothing.[1] 38% of feedback made learning worse! Yet the marking mania epidemic still has teachers throughout the land double or triple marking work, with teachers, or maybe just their senior leaders, convinced that this is a touch stone of good practice. Assessment for learning has become a ritualised performance believed to magically invoke learning, as long as the prescribed coloured pens, fans, gestures or whatever are used in the liturgically correct way.  No wonder Dylan William declared he wished he had called formative assessment ‘responsive teaching’ instead.

So what is responsive teaching?  It’s really very straightforward. It’s

• Looking at pupils’ work, either within the lesson or after it, and responding to what you find out.
• Gathering feedback for the teacher, about the pupil
• Using this feedback to decide what to teach next

Shorn of its ritualistic associations, we can embrace a simple definition of feedback as ‘information about reactions and/or performance which is used as a basis for improvement.’ So scanning the classroom to see what pupils’ facial expressions are telling us is one commonplace – and very useful – way of gaining feedback. If half the class look clueless, there is probably a problem that needs urgent responding to!

When we look at pupil’s work after a lesson to gather feedback about what to do next, it’s looking for the bottleneck, the main thing holding pupils back in their learning, and teaching that, regardless of whether or not it is on the scheme of work for that year group. If many pupils still can’t use full stops and capital letters correctly even in year 3/5/10, there’s no point in moving onto fronted adverbials or whatever, despite what the official plan says. Fix that first. It’s not going to fix itself. Instead of writing in pupils’ books what their next step is, the next step is…the next lesson. Respond to what pupils don’t yet know by teaching them.

Tom Sherrington outlined 5 ways teachers might respond to feedback. I’ve played around with this a bit and come up with my own version of 6 ways, more geared to a primary context (though I don’t see why these wouldn’t work with secondary pupils too).

1.Reteach – they don’t understand this. I need to reteach with different examples

Sometimes you look at books after a lesson and realise that an awful lot of pupils have got the complete wrong end of the stick. So instead of pressing on with the next lesson in the series, you go back and teach whatever it was again, only better.

2. Revise – they know something about this but we need to go over it again because otherwise they will forget it

Often you pick up either within the lesson itself or afterwards when looking at pupils’ work that pupils have begun to learn whatever it is you are teaching them. However, you don’t have enough evidence yet that this learning is really secure and won’t be immediately forgotten the moment you move onto something new. Better consolidate the learning by going over it again. Resist the siren voices telling you that if pupils can do something a couple of times they need to move on to new learning. That’s just madness. Vaguely understanding something is not the same as really knowing it. Progress does not always involve learning new stuff. Often it involves learning ‘old’ stuff more securely.

3. Redraft – they can do this better. I need to model how to improve it.

This sort of response is typically used when responding to longer writing tasks. But expecting children to be able to make things better without showing them how is pointless.  It’s a bit like rushing to do your photocopying only to find the ‘paper jam’ and ‘change toner’ lights flashing at you. The lights are giving you, the learner, very specific feedback, but unless you already know how to clear a paper jam, where the toner is stored and how on earth you change it, it is not going to be any use. In fact, it will probably just wind you up. Dylan William mentions some written feedback that told a pupil to ‘be more systematic in your scientific enquiries.’ To which the pupil’s response was, ‘if I knew how to be more systematic, I would have done it the first time.’

What we now do instead of marking longer writing tasks is to devote a whole lesson to whole class feedback. During this, the teacher showcases small extracts – possibly just a sentence or two – where various pupils have done a particular thing very well.  So for example, they might share some well punctuated speech, then some excellent description, a great use of rhetorical questioning and the deft use of a range of sentence lengths to build suspense. Pupils may or may not work together on improving fictional examples where the particular thing is lacking immediately after the good example has been shared. Then teacher will then go on to share (anonymously of course) some examples – probably slightly tweaked, of brief extracts that could do with improving in some way. Usually teachers type up these sentences, rather than use a visualiser because first of all it’s easier to read and secondly it gives the teacher the chance to correct all but the actual mistake s/he wants pupils to focus on. Otherwise, pupils might fixate on incorrect spelling when you want them to focus on mixing up tenses, for example. Pupils then get short examples with similar errors to practise improving (usually in pairs). Finally, after this sustained quality modelling and practice, the children redraft their own work.[2]

This works really well. The children love their feedback lessons. They make great progress. And teacher workload has been cut by at least two thirds when compared to marking, even factoring in the need to plan a feedback lesson. Whereas marking one set of books used to take three hours, the whole process now takes about an hour. And it’s more effective.

4. Practice – they can do this but it is not yet automatic

This is different from revising (see point 2 above).  This is about practising things we know how to do but have not yet learnt to automaticity. So this might include being able to use a standard algorithm to do vertical subtraction, for example, or times tables, or number bonds, or converting measures from one unit to another, or revising key vocabulary or handwriting or a forming a stroke correctly when swimming.

5. Check – I need more information before I am convinced they really have this securely

This is when you want feedback about if pupils really know something securely, at some remove from the initial teaching. So it usually involves giving children questions to do at least a month after that original teaching has taken place. Can they still do fractions now we’ve moved on to area? Can they remember anything about the Romans now we are learning about the Vikings? And if not, what am I going to do about it? (If you are not going to do anything about it regardless, there is no point in checking, unless you like making yourself depressed).

And finally

6. Move on to something new

Sometimes feedback tells you good news. They’ve got it! We can move on to something new.

So that’s a whistle-stop tour through responsive teaching.  Harry Fletcher Wood has just published a book called ‘Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in practice’ that I would strongly recommend if you want to look at this in a lot more detail. But what does this have to do with the second part of my title? What has all this got to do with responsive leadership? Well it turns out that responsive leadership is a lot like responsive teaching. Like marking, doing termly high stakes lesson observations can actually make things worse, rather than better. The problem with this kind of lesson observation is that they lead to teachers showcasing compliance, rather than their warts-and-all, everyday practice. Instead, you observe lots of all singing, all dancing lessons quite unlike everyday practice that are therefore useless for helping people talk about how they might further improve their teaching. What a monumental waste of time!

Responsive leadership is

• Looking at teachers’ work, either within the lesson or after it,[3] and responding to what you find out.
• Gathering feedback for the leader, about teaching
• Using this feedback to decide what professional development is most appropriate

In the context of lesson observations, feedback used to be something potentially ominous delivered to the observed teacher, some sort of label denoting their professional worth.  This is nonsense. In the same way that feedback about pupils should feed forward into planning future lessons, feedback about teaching tells leaders what should feed forward into planning future professional development. In the same way teachers need to think about what is the bottleneck holding children back, leaders need to reflect upon what it is that is stopping a teacher from teaching as well as possible, and then plan a course of action – usually in partnership with the teacher –  to help them improve.

And guess what, here are 6 possible ways to respond to what you’ve learnt from gathering feedback.

1. Reteach

You know that feeling when you’ve delivered some inset on the latest whole school initiative and then you go and observe lessons and realise that almost everybody has either got the wrong end of the stick, or isn’t implementing the initiative at all? (No? Maybe just me then). Anyway, should that happen, here are some things to reflect upon

• Maybe I didn’t explain this initiative properly
• So either they don’t ‘get’ it…
• Or don’t understand why it is important
• Or possibly both
• So I need to explain it better and persuade people why it is important
• Did I explain what they can now stop doing?
• If anyone is to blame, it is me
• (Or maybe it’s an unworkable initiative or a seriously bad idea)

2. Revise

This time when you see how the initiative is working out in practice, you find out that some people who were doing this really well seemed to have forgotten all about it. So ask yourself…

• I need to remind them about this, and why it is important, before it fades away, like so many previous initiatives that were quietly forgotten, rather than explicitly stopped. I need to emphasise that this one is important. I really mean it this time!
• Ask why it is fading? Forgotten? Not useful? Tricky? Logistics?
• Spend quality time going over it again in a staff  or departmental meeting
• Pupils aren’t the only ones who need time to work on remembering things. Retrieval practice is useful for teachers as well as pupils!

3. Redraft – they can sort of do this, but it could be better.

• They’ve half got this
• We need to provide modelling of how to do it better and supportively coach people as they learn how to do this

4. Practice

There are some techniques in teaching, such as giving clear explanations, specific behaviour management techniques, and various ‘Teach Like a Champion’ techniques such as ‘no opt out’ ‘cold calling’ etc. that are highly amenable to improvement through deliberate practice. With specific, deliberate practice, things become habitual, and no longer need conscious effort to remember to do. Some schools devote the first 20 minutes of staff or departmental meetings to deliberately practising specific techniques.

5. Check

We need to ask ourselves about key initiatives

• Is this really embedded across the school 3 months later, 6 months later, a year later?
• Is this as secure as I like to think it is?

And finally

6. Move on to something new

A cherished initiative is now part of the life blood of the school. Everyone does it, and does it well. If we need to, we could now introduce something else, without worrying that this will fade away.  But we need to remember newcomers to the school who missed out on the concerted effort it took to get everybody to understand why this was important and how to do it well. If it took a year for staff to really get this, don’t expect new staff to get it after a 10 minute briefing.  When something is automatic, or obvious, remember those who join the school sometime after the initiative was introduced. It probably won’t be obvious to them.

In the same way that ‘You need to be more systematic in planning your scientific inquiries,’ is not terribly helpful to a pupil who doesn’t know what this actually involves, teachers who aren’t doing the sort of things we want them to be doing probably just don’t understand what we mean and need some modelling and coaching, opportunities to observe others alongside someone who can provide a commentary, and time to practise.

And instead of termly high stakes lesson observations, try using more frequent, low stakes, developmental observations that are all about genuinely helping staff get better at what they do, rather than finding fault. Our model is as follows:

• Senior leaders do low stakes, 10 minute ‘drop ins’ most weeks
• Subject leaders do lesson-long modelling, team teaching and coaching
• We bring books to staff meetings a lot
• Also look at books in SLT meetings
• Staff meeting timetable flexible and responsive
• We revisit previous inset a couple of months after (spaced practice!)

I’ve written a blog about our approach before for thirdspace learning.

When I started in headship, in somewhat inauspicious circumstances, someone told me to remember that your staff team is just like your class. You will have well behaved ones and challenging ones, people who learn things really easily and ones that need more support and so on. Using feedback to help children learn is not really very different from using feedback to help adults learn.  Don’t rely on ritualistic responses; seek evidence with an open mind, have a good think about it and plan the best way to respond.

[1] Kluger A, DeNisi A. The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin. 1996;119(2):254–84.

[2] The process is a little more complicated than I’ve explained as for brevity’s sake I’ve left out the finer details. We usually divide the lesson into a proof reading part (changing those things that make our writing harder for someone to enjoy reading) and then a longer editing session (making our writing even more interesting for a reader). In ks1, we mainly to proof reading with a hint of editing. In year 1, in the main, pupils proof read fictional ‘work’ written by the teacher rather than their own.  We also give fictional work to pupils of any age who have something very specific to work on, that few other pupils need (or are ready for).

[3] By looking at work and/or by talking to pupils

KS2 class teacher vacancy

Salary:  MPS/UPS

Want a great job in a great school in a great location?

You will have to work hard here, but only on things that make a difference: we don’t do meaningless paperwork; we don’t grade lessons or monitor your planning.  Instead of marking we give feedback in lessons.  We are always trying to find smarter ways to do our work. We only recruit people who are passionate about making a difference to children’s lives, people who challenge themselves to keep on improving. This means our working relationships can be relatively relaxed and informal. People love working here; we are warm, welcoming, positive, supportive and forward looking.  Our innovative approach means that teachers from all over the UK and beyond come to see our work in practice, so expect to welcome visitors into your classroom.

You will be joining a 1 form entry Church of England school with an inclusive and multi-cultural ethos based in the vibrant Shoreditch area of Tower Hamlets. Our community includes pupils and staff from a range of different faiths as well as people with no faith – all are welcome. We work together to foster children who are compassionate, respectful, happy, tolerant, curious and collaborative as well as academically successful.

We are looking for a teacher who:

• Has a proven record of success as a class teacher and expertise in empowering children to make rapid progress.
• Demonstrates optimism about children and expect the highest possible standards
• Nurtures pupils’ emotional wellbeing

We offer you:

• Sensible and successful systems, based on research, with a commitment to reduce workload whenever possible
• A positive, warm and welcoming working environment
• Experienced, intelligent, lively colleagues
• Family-friendly working practices
• A fantastic location with great transport links

Closing date for applications: Friday 11^th May 2018
Interviews: Friday 18^th May 2018

Visits to the school are strongly recommended and can be arranged via on 020 7739 8058 or by emailing Maureen Marlborough at admin@st-matthias.towerhamlets.sch.uk  This is also the address if you want an application pack.  We reserve the right to close the selection process early.

St Matthias School is committed to safeguarding all children. Successful candidates will require a DBS clearance and suitable references before commencing employment. We welcome applications from all section of the community, regardless of gender, race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or age.

www.stmatthiasschool.org.uk

St Matthias School, Bacon Street, London, E2 6DY

020 7739 8058

Numbers don’t actually exist. There is no actual number three somewhere. It is not a thing. There is just ‘threeness’, a relationship between things that we learn to recognise; that this small cluster of cubes is similar to that small cluster of counters in a way we learn to call ‘three’.  The cubes themselves are not three; we declare their threeness when they are associated together in a certain way.  We learn what three means through repeated exposure to clusters exemplifying this relationship and thus come to learn what three and not-three look like.  But there is no spatiotemporally locatable prototype ‘three’ against which all other instances of three can be verified.

Pupil progress is a bit like that.  We tend to act as if ‘Progress’ is a real, tangible thing that really exists. Worse than that, we even believe that we can measure it.  This is an illusion.

It is, however, incredibly useful to have a word to describe ‘the process of gradually improving or getting nearer to achieving or completing something’ in the same way that it is even more useful to have the concept ‘three’.  So what’s my problem? Is this just an exercise in clever semantics?   My point is that progress isn’t a generalizable thing that exists independent of a highly specific context, a point that seems obvious. Yet the assumption that ‘Progress’ can be reduced to one, measurable thing that can or cannot be found hidden inside pupils’ exercise books or test scores is the basis of the panoply of accountability; all those graphs and charts and spreadsheets purporting to ‘measure’ something.  What then, we may ask, is the unit of measurement? The microGove perhaps[1]?

Of course we can look at pupils’ work over a period of time and see if they are getting better at the things we want them to get better at. Indeed, it is really important that we do, because if they are not getting better then there’s a problem of some sort that we need to get to the bottom of and then remediate. So we need to be clear about what we want them to improve. Generally, this is to do with either knowing more stuff or knowing how to do certain stuff or knowing how and when to do certain stuff rather than others.  So we will listen to pupils’ answers and read their work and set them tests to find out if what we are teaching them is sticking. And if it is we will be pleased that they are making progress, maybe even good progress.  But the improvement they make in their times table test scores and the improvements they make in knowing more about the water cycle or using fronted adverbials in their writing are just not commensurate.  That would be like trying to compare mass with colour intensity or length with electrical charge.

Even Ofsted High Command are trying to move away from the idea that you can ‘measure’ progress.  The Ofsted Handbook, the report of the Commission on Assessment without Levels, the data management report from the Workload review group all say the same thing; you need to be able to show progress, but that does not mean you have to be able to quantify it.[2]  Here’s a brief selection (courtesy of James Pembroke and Gaz Needle) from those listed above, saying just this.

Inspectors will use lesson observations, pupils’ work, discussions with teachers and pupils and school records to judge the effectiveness of assessment and whether it is having an impact on pupils’ learning.  They don’t need to see vast amounts of data, spreadsheets, charts or graphs.   –  Sean Harford: OFSTED National Director, Education, 2015.

From:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7whb8dOk5Q

Be ruthless: only collect what is needed to support outcomes for children. The amount of data collected should be proportionate to its usefulness. Always ask why the data is needed.

A purportedly robust and numerical measure of pupil progress that can be tracked and used to draw a wide range of conclusions about pupil and teacher performance, and school policy, when in fact information collected in such a way is flawed. This approach is unclear on purpose, and demands burdensome processes.

The recent removal of ‘levels’ should be a positive step in terms of data management; schools should not feel any pressure to create elaborate tracking systems

Focusing on key performance indicators reduces the burden of assessing every lesson objective. This also provides the basis of next steps: are pupils secure and can pupils move on, or do they need additional teaching?

From:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/511258/Eliminating-unnecessary-workload-associated-with-data-management.pdf

‘Progress became synonymous with moving on to the next level, but progress can involve developing deeper or wider understanding, not just moving on to work of greater difficulty. Sometimes progress is simply about consolidation.’

From:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/483058/Commission_on_Assessment_Without_Levels_-_report.pdf

“We want to see the assessment information you use as a school to identify how well your pupils are progressing in your curriculum and, crucially, how you use that information to improve pupils’ achievement.”  Sean Harford

And then today, Sean has both ‘liked’ and retweeted this Tweet of mine:

However, some of Ofsted’s foot soldiers still appear not to have yet got this message. A report published on May 25^th 2017 had as a key issue

• There is not enough emphasis on the measurement of pupil progress from individual pupil starting points.

But that was nearly a year ago. Maybe things have improved since then? To find out, I decided to read all the areas for improvement in Ofsted reports for primary schools published in March. However, that runs to over 70 pages, so I gave up after reading 7 pages worth of reports. With 10 schools per page – that’s 70 reports I read. To be fair, most of them seemed sensible enough, but I found a fair few recommendations that worried me. All of the following are all recommendations from reports published in March 2018. I have highlighted in bold the problematic parts.

• ensuring that success criteria regarding pupils’ progress and attainment in performance management documents and in the school’s development plan are measurable, to hold teachers more clearly to account for the achievement of pupils in their classes.

I’m not sure how this can mean anything other than reducing progress to a numerical score? As James Pembroke says ‘numbers in a tracking system do not prove that pupils have made progress; they just prove that someone has entered some data into the system.’

• assessment information is accurate and used alongside improvement plans that have precise objectives and clear measurable outcomes, in order for academy committee members to further hold leaders to account

• leaders’ plans for school improvement and the use of the pupil premium have clear actions, timescales and measurable outcomes

Again, an emphasis on measuring the unmeasurable – a desire for the false illusion of accuracy that measuring something purports to bring.

• outcomes of groups of pupils, no matter how small, are reviewed more precisely, so that leaders know whether their actions to raise standards are effective and represent good value for money
• action plans contain precise success criteria, with specific targets for groups and cohorts of pupils, so that leaders and governors are able to check the impact of their actions on improving outcomes for pupils

With both ASP and the Ofsted dashboard moving away from looking at smaller groups, it is alarming to see this in recent reports.

• they strengthen their analysis and evaluation of the progress of different groups so that they know how well different groups of pupils are progressing

Indeed, even this one bothers me. Why can’t we just check and respond on a pupil by pupil basis? How does it actually help any child do better if leaders are spending precious time analysing groups? Even bigger groups? Especially in year. At the end of the year, then yes, I’d have a look at how pupil premium children were doing compared with non-pupil premium. And obviously at the end of a key stage a whole raft of data is produced. But I’d rather spend my time improving the curriculum and teaching than making pretty charts on excel.

Then there is the question of whether ‘tracking’ really means ‘have a spreadsheet with numbers.’ See for example, these recommendations.

• systems for tracking the progress of pupils in subject-specific skills across the curriculum in subjects other than English and mathematics are embedded
• track the progress of pupils so that governors, middle and senior leaders are fully informed about the progress of groups of pupils, particularly across the wider curriculum.

So they want information about how different groups are doing in geography then, do they?

These two might not mean ‘have a spreadsheet for the other subjects, but that’s probably not how it is going to be interpreted.

So much for being ruthless and only collecting what is needed to support outcomes for children!

Be that as it may, we are doing our best to go ‘data naked,’ by which I mean having the least data we possibly can, only resorting to numbers if they actually tell us something that will enable someone to do something that will make things better for the children as a result. I’m not sure we’ve got it all right and it is still very much a work in progress, but this is what we currently do.  I am not holding this up as a marvellous example for others to follow. We are currently due Ofsted, so, not quite holding my nerve, in September our assessment plan included more data than I really thought necessary. While I believe that Sean Harford means what he says, I get nervous about individual inspectors – so the plan included data as a sort of security blanket or lucky amulet to bewitch any data-besotted inspector. However, the plan did not survive contact with reality. Either that, or I just got braver.

Maths

We started the year intending to carry on from the previous year using the PUMA standardised tests at the end of each term. The standardised scores from these were then entered into, yes, you guessed, a home-made excel spreadsheet, which was formatted to colour code certain ranges of scores, based on benchmarks suggested by the publishers of PUMA.  The idea being we could have a column with the previous scores from July alongside the December scores, thus being able to make useful comparisons over time. Is Abdul still ‘green’?  Why has David done from ‘orange’ to ‘red’? In other words, pseudo-levels.

However, come December, the year 2 and 6 teachers asked if they could do a previous SATS paper instead – which seemed liked a sensible idea. That immediately meant that the December results could not be directly compared with the previous July ones, since the children were taking a test intended for several months later. These results were worthwhile though, and gave us a rough but useful indication of who was ‘on track’ or ‘behind’ or ‘ahead’ given their ks1 score or EYFS score. Everyone else did PUMA but came up against the obvious problem that when you take these kind of tests in year, they don’t necessarily test what you have taught. In other words, it was pretty meaningless except as a way of the individual teachers checking if those questions they had actually taught had been answered correctly. So any attempt to check progress from the previous July was futile.   For year 1, the situation was even worse as they were being compared to FSP outcomes.  Nevertheless, we valiantly attempted to crunch data and report to our standard and curriculum committee. We even analysed groups – though only boys, girls and pupil premium vs non pupil premium. However, by the time we’d explained for the umpteenth time that ‘you can’t really compare December results with July results’, the governors looked at us all funny and asked us why we were wasting time on in depth analysis of something patently not suitable for such treatment. Then when we tried to talk about groups –and some of our classes are small with only 18 pupils in – it got even more farcical.  Governors and leaders together resolved not to waste any more time analysing stuff that was not properly analysable.

So this term, year 2 and year 6 are doing another sats paper, and everyone else is either  doing PUMA or White Rose – whatever best fits what they have actually taught so far – but they are doing these assessments not so the SLT can analyse and draw (highly dubious) conclusions. Instead, they are doing them to inform their own teaching so they know what needs more revising and who might need more supporting. At our next pupil progress meeting we will have a conversation about each pupil, and how they did on whatever tool the teacher used will be discussed as a possibly useful starting point. Where pupils do not appear to be doing so well, we will have a look at their maths book to see if that sheds any light on the situation.  I will also look at the tracker that tells me if the child knows their number bonds and timetables.  I will ask the teacher if there were any particular areas of maths where many children did badly in questions, and if so, what are they going to do about it.

Then in July, everyone (except Early Years and years 2 and 6) will take PUMA (because by then, everyone should have taught the year’s curriculum, so the test:curriculum misalignment problem should not arise) and then I will enter those scores against last July’s scores. I can see a point of data tracking year on year.  I can see how that can flag up potential problems either for a child or teacher.  But within year, talking to the teacher about their class, looking at books, watching lessons and tracking acquisition of key number facts is much more useful than wasting hours with a spreadsheet.

I should add that, as an experiment, this year we bought into Star Maths (part of the Accelerated Reader package from Renaissance Learning) for years 5 and 6. This enables pupils to do a maths test in a matter of minutes, with no marking for the teacher, and result instantly available (and analysis of what the pupil can and can’t do).  Apparently, according to @MrLearnwell, these results correlate very well with actual sats performance.  Renaissance Learning bought the anonymised sats data from the government and matched (via UPN) actual sats results with performance of the thousands of children who use their product and got a very high level of correlation.  I will wait and see how this bears out for us when this year’s sats results are out, but it may be that from next September we use Star Maths across the school. I don’t understand the product enough yet to understand how it gets round the curriculum: test misalignment problem that happens in year. That’s something I need to find out more about.

Reading

We abandoned PIRA (twin sister of PUMA) this year as we didn’t find it helpful at all. It’s nothing like actual SATS papers, some questions are really odd and all in all, it’s not a good assessment. Several other people have contacted me via Twitter to express the same opinion. Instead, we use Accelerated Reader to find out all sorts of useful things. As well as getting a standardised score from Star Reader, it also gives us a fluency measure, a reading age and, best of all, how many minutes of independent reading each child is doing.  This kind of granular information is so much more useful than a test score and really helps us pinpoint what needs more attention. For children in Reception and KS1, (or for older children where appropriate) we also track their progress in phonics. As with maths, all of this information is discussed for each child in our pupil progress meetings and where there are problems, strategies are decided. Years 2 and 6 do previous Sats papers in December and March, in part to give children practice of the format.

Writing

Last year we bought into a tracker system that had every objective for the year. It took a lot of teacher effort for practically no impact on children.  Indeed, by focusing on the objectives for that year, it drew teachers’ attention away from objectives in lower year groups that might urgently need attention. Yes, full stops, I’m looking at you. So  this year we’ve invented our own really minimal writing objectives tracker for ks2. This starts with the year 2 interim framework objectives, then builds from there, with each year group having 4 or 5 further key objectives, drawn from the national curriculum. So each ks2 teacher checks off the previous year groups objectives first, starting with the year 2 ones. It’s quick and makes sure teachers address learning gaps. On top of that, we are involved in the Sharing Standards comparative judgement project from No More Marking.  This gives us a good measure of how well we are doing as a school in relation to other schools, as well as giving each child a scaled score.  This scaled score is only based on one piece of work, but a useful starting point for discussion and enables us to target book looks on those children who seem to be doing worse than we would have expected, given their prior attainment. Added to that, it means every teacher has seen a piece of work from every child in the school from year 1 upwards and I have instant access to that work from my computer.

History, geography, science, RE

Children do a multiple choice quiz at the end of each unit. The score out of 10 (or 5 in ks1) gets recorded on a spreadsheet. Then a couple of months later (when that unit has long finished) they do another quiz on that subject. That score is also recorded. Then at the end of the year they do a quiz of quizzes, with questions from all the units that year. And guess what – that score gets recorded too, and goes on end of year report. I was really worried about assessing the foundation subjects when this first became a thing, but actually, this system works really well, is quick and easy and has impact.  It allows us to identify which questions children are finding harder and which children are not doing as well as they should. In order to assess children’s ability to apply knowledge, we have just started using stem sentences and ‘but, because, so’ to see if children can put their knowledge to work.   For example, given the stem sentence, ‘the River Nile used to flood each year…’ can the children carry on this sentence 3 different ways, using but, because and so?  For example, the River Nile used to flood each year but does not any more since the Aswan dam has been build.  Or, the River Nile used to flood each year so the land became very fertile from all the minerals in the floodwater.  At the moment this is mainly formative, but we may also weave it into their end of unit assessment once children are more familiar with the process.

MFL is similar with end of unit quizzes, but I haven’t got round to having them on a spreadsheet yet.

Computing

This is still under development and not yet available for every class. Children start each coding unit with screenshots of various bits of code (usually from Scratch). They write what they think this code might do. Then at the end of the unit, they get the same screenshots and again write descriptions – which are of course then much more accurate and detailed. Nothing gets put on a spreadsheet. Ironically the computing assessment is the most low-tech! The assessment helps the teacher see how effective they have been and which aspects were the least successful. Children like seeing how much they have learnt. So I am quite happy with this system. In addition, we have a multiple choice quiz on online safety, which the children do every term. Yes, the questions are the same, because it’s not about progress, it is about keeping the children safe.

PE, art, DT and music

We have a PE coach who takes all PE lessons. He has this massive spreadsheet with 3 or 4 objectives from each sport plus one for being a good team player. Hand on heart I have no idea if it actually has any impact on children’s progress in the subject but he said he had all that information anyway and was happy to do it.

We have a similar system for art and DT (though much shorter). I’m not wedded to the idea. We have also started doing simple assessments of children’s ability to copy patterns of increasing complexity – starting with just a line and getting progressively harder, the child stopping at the pattern they find difficult to copy. I think this is much more likely to be useful.

And as for music…er…I confess we don’t have a system yet for music.

Reporting to governors and parents

The great thing about graphs and charts is they make complex information understandable. The downside is they give the illusion of making flawed information meaningful. They enable comparisons but at a cost; everything has to be reducible to a number.  This is a cost I am no longer prepared to pay. But while I think our present way of checking for progress is far superior to previous systems, without a doubt it is harder to report to others in terms of accountability.  As you can see, we have different systems for different subjects; some information tracks discrete objectives or behaviours, some is comparative with other schools, some is strictly formative.  I can’t reduce this complexity to a numerical value. Governors have to bear with narrative descriptions of how we know about the progress our children are making. Some subjects have some numbers, but the score out of 10 in a history quiz is in no way directly comparable with say, average reading age or the number of number bonds a child in year 1 knows.  And as for tracking groups – well – except for at the end of each key stage, we don’t. It doesn’t add any value at all to the achievement of any child so I simply refuse to indulged in such a meaningless ritual.

Reporting to parents, on the other hand is much easier. Parents understand things like a reading age or a score out of 10 or a chart that shows how many times tables or spellings a child knows. That’s far more understandable than being told your child is 3b or ‘emerging plus’ or even ‘working at the expected level.’

And Ofsted?

Maybe I’ll just give them this to read?

[1] Yes, I know I’ve made that joke before. It’s good though, isn’t it, even though I say so myself.

[2] Read this excellent blog which says everything I am saying, only better, and from which I have drawn extensively in this blog

As the long autumn term crawls towards the finish line, as well as rehearsals for the Nativity play, Christmas parties and gorging on Quality Street, in all probability someone somewhere is poring over end of term assessments and trying to divine how well Year 6 are going to do in their SATS in May. Data is mulled over for signs of promise in similar fashion to a fortune teller scrutinising tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. What does the future hold?

The more important question being, where performance is not yet as good as we would like it to be, what can we do about it?

Over the years we have used various different strategies to help children catch up where they have gaps  – or sometimes chasms –  in their learning. The front line strategy is, of course, making sure that classroom teaching is as good as it can possibly be, not just in year 6 but throughout the school.

I remember Sir Kevan Collins, now Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, when he was Chief Executive of Tower Hamlets, talking to us head teachers about the importance of getting our everyday provision right so that we don’t actually need to use intervention anywhere near as much.

He compared this to an imaginary situation where there is a children’s park located close to a cliff edge.

Unsurprisingly, children keep falling off the edge. As a result, the authorities get really good at rescuing severely injured children, their ambulance service is second to none and their A&E provision is superb.

However, no one thinks to actually build a fence at the top of the cliff, to stop children falling off in the first place!

We need to do all we can to build that fence, so that the number of children who need rescuing from mathematical muddle and misconceptions is as small as possible.

For this to happen, we need to make sure our staff are as knowledgeable as possible, and that we’ve provided them with the best CPD and resources to enable this to happen.

However, even with this, the likelihood is that there will be children who could do with an extra something to help them do as well as they can.

It’s not just about SATs; we want our children to go onto secondary school confident mathematicians who have the mathematical fluency to use the algorithms we have taught them effectively and efficiently to solve problems. We want children with both good conceptual and good procedural ability.

And probably most of us have children who need a little bit more preparation to obtain the fluency and make the conceptual connections between the different bits of mathematical thinking they almost-but-not-quite understand.

Over the years, we’ve used a range of different strategies to help these children.  We’ve run after school booster classes run by our class teachers, we’ve bought in a maths specialist teacher to work with small groups or sometimes 1:1, we’ve purchased online programmes for children to practise at home.

All of these work well to some degree, but since both time and money are limited, there are limits to what can be achieved. Teachers – and children for that matter – can only attend so many booster classes.

I doubt many schools have enough money to employ an extra specialist teacher for more than a few hours a week – if that.

Online programmes can really help children build up their fluency, but often the children who use them enthusiastically and get the most out of them are the children who are already really skilled mathematicians.

This year we tried something different.

Over the past year I’ve written blogs for Third Space Learning , and used the selection of excellent resources and CPD material available on their online maths hub, but I hadn’t really considered using their 1-to-1 maths tuition.

When they suggested I could receive the online 1-to-1 maths tuition for 13 pupils in return for participating in filming some of their primary Maths CPD and as payment for writing my blogs, I didn’t initially jump at the chance.

The idea of children learning maths via a tutor situated thousands of miles away and accessed via a computer seemed rather impersonal to me. It’s not like they even saw their tutor, since they only communicated through the headsets they wore.

Might this be like the worst kind of call centre experience? Frankly, it seemed a bit weird to me and I wasn’t sure it would work. But then a friend told me how positively it had gone in her school and how incredible it was to eavesdrop on a session and hear a roomful of children all animatedly explaining their mathematical reasoning to their tutor through their headphones and how much the children enjoyed sessions and the difference it seemed to make.

So this September I decided to give it a go. Recalling Kevan’s cliff top and ambulance scenario, I wanted to concentrate our efforts mainly on our Year 5s. If we could make sure that their learning was really secure in year 5, then building on that in year 6 should be a breeze. Most of the children we targeted were hovering close to the expected level for their age, or maybe just inside it, but not yet securely. Alongside these children, we also included a handful of children with low attainment.

The way the Third Space Learning weekly maths programme  works is that you are allocated one or two hourly slots at the same time each week, during which all pupils do the intervention simultaneously. When your slot is, depends on availability. The schools that book first get the choice of all the slots.

We were a bit slow of the mark but ended up with a 3pm-4pm slot which actually worked well for us. School finishes at 3:30pm but parents were all quite happy to collect their children 30 minutes later.

We timetabled a TA to supervise the session. She collects the children at 2:50pm and together they get the laptops out and headsets on and get logged in, ready for their session to begin at 3pm. Once they are all logged in, they are talking to their tutor within seconds. Soon, the whole room is buzzing with maths chat as each pupil interacts with their tutor, solving maths problems on screen. There is a big emphasis on pupils explaining their reasoning to their tutor; it’s definitely not just drilling through endless problems. Once the session is underway, the member of staff supervising has very little to do, so can get on with something else while the children beaver away.

Before the children started their weekly sessions, they all did an online diagnostic assessment (no tutors or headphones – just a series of questions). From this, the programme recommended the best programme for each child. We then set priorities from among the recommendations on a child by child basis. We chose to concentrate on number and place value, the four operations and fractions, decimals, and percentages, but there is a whole range of options we could have chosen.

There is also the option of the teacher deciding on a week by week basis what are the priorities for each child – I can imagine if we were doing this with year 6 that might be really useful to follow work in class, but we went for the ‘diagnostic’ option where we just assigned priorities at the beginning of the termly block and left the computer to work out what to teach, given their initial diagnostic performance and their progress in each session.

At the end of each session, the software produces a short report for each student that the class teacher can look at should they wish to. This shows what they were working on and how they did. For example:

We can see here that this child started the programme with some gaps in ordering and comparing.  Indeed, the diagnostic assessment had identified this child as being slightly above the year 2 level in terms of this concept. On 19^th October, the tutor, guided by the diagnostic assessment, initially selected activities at a year 5 level – ordering and comparing numbers to one million, to try and gauge where the gaps were.

This was very wise, since the child did very well in terms of counting and ordering powers of 10:

However she made slower progress with later parts of the unit, particularly with using < and > , partitioning bigger numbers  and being able to say a number that lay in between two other larger numbers.

So the next session, (2^nd November since school journey and half term intervened), the tutor decide to make sure that the year 3 objectives (ordering and comparing numbers up to 1000) were really secure, so any further work was built on really secure foundations.  Then for the next 2 weeks they worked on ordering and comparing numbers beyond 1000, before finally returning to numbers to 1 million on 16^th November. By now this is much more secure:

The tutor still does not think this child is quite fluent enough to sign this section off as total secure – hence the final assessment for this concept was emerging at year 5 level – but even so, that’s great progress considering the child started a few weeks early just beyond year 2!

We have also just finished our own end of term assessments (independent of Third Space Learning) and the great news is that this child has increased their standardized score from 103 to 112.

All bar one of the ‘borderline’ children we selected are now securely achieving at age appropriate levels.  The children who started out at a much lower level have also made progress.

The programme isn’t a miracle cure – they are still some distance away from being at the level expected for their age but for the first time they scored enough marks to actually get a standardised score on the correct assessment for their age range. (Previously we have had to use an assessment from a much younger age group in order to generate a score).

For example, one child scored 76 on the year 3 assessment at the end of year 4 but now scored 72 on the year 5 assessment.  Of course the information on how they did at an objective level is much more useful in terms of planning further teaching than this data, but it is still good to know that  the progress they are making is also reflected in other assessments.

What I hadn’t expected was how much the children loved doing the programme. I interviewed each child separately and almost all of them were gushing in their praise. They love it!

They each seemed to have a really good relationship with their tutor (so much for my fears about it being a dodgy call centre experience) and said it was really helping then get better at maths – they could feel the difference and felt more confident.

I asked how it compared to working with an in-the-flesh teacher 1:1. They said both were good and couldn’t choose between them.  The difference for me as a headteacher though is that the Third Space Learning intervention is so much cheaper which means we can target many more children than we could otherwise afford.  They really want to carry on next term and say I should buy more spaces so everybody in their class has the same opportunity to take part.

Disclosure: As mentioned above 13 pupils in my school received 12 weeks of weekly 1-to-1 tuition from Third Space Learning as payment for blog posts and my participation in filming their primary Maths CPD.

Special Offer on Third Space Learning’s 1-to-1 Maths SATs Booster

I’ve already booked pupils in for the 1-to-1 tuition next term.  If you want to find out how the programme could work in your school, book a demo here  or call their school team on 020 3771 0095.

Third Space have told me they will be happy to offer any school mentioning this blog-post a discount on their KS2 Maths SATs Booster  which starts in January.