Master Teachers

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On 12th December 2011 the UK Department for Education announced that a new ‘Master Teacher Standard’ to recognise outstanding teachers should be introduced.

The review team has sought to simplify the current teachers’ standards by scrapping the existing system, which has three separate categories, and introducing a single 'Master Teacher Standard' to recognise truly excellent teachers and provide a focal point for all good teachers to plan their professional and career development.

The 'Master Teacher Standard' describes a clear set of characteristics for high-performing teachers. They include:

• Deep and extensive knowledge of their specialism, going beyond the set programmes they teach.
• Command of the classroom, skilfully leading, encouraging and extending pupils. They will have the respect of both pupils and parents.
• Excellent planning and organisation to ensure pupils are well-prepared for all forms of assessment.
• Their classes demonstrate a stimulating culture of scholarship alongside a sense of mutual respect and good manners.
• They are highly regarded by colleagues, who want to learn from them. They play a role in the development of school policies and they engage with professional networks beyond the school.

Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Measurement at London’s Institute of Education, speaking on 9^th December 2011 at the Salzburg Global Summit, stated that Teacher Quality was critical for education:

“We are discovering now that Teacher Quality is the most important variable in any system so each country needs to do all it can to improve teacher quality. …. Entry into the profession and getting rid of the least effective practitioners are only marginal in terms of their impact ….If any country wants to improve the quality of its education system, the challenge is to improve the performance of those teachers who are already serving in the schools. The idea is that every teacher needs to get better. No matter how good they are, they can get better.”

Ofsted 3 year survey on ICT

Ofsted surveyed the teaching of  ICT in UK schools over the three years of 2008-2011.


Headlines:

Primary schools were better than secondary schools. teachers struggled when the demands of the subject became difficult.

"Few ... schools assessed systematically the impact of ICT on pupils’ achievements although many headteachers were convinced that their investment in ICT was making a key contribution to improving outcomes."

Nearly half of secondaries failed to deliver the full ICT core to all students at KS4.




Ofsted recommend that:

• The DfE reviews equivalences in performance measures for schools between vocational coursework-assessed qualifications and more traditional GCSEs and GCEs. 
• All schools should: 
• Improve AfL in ICT
• Ensure the ICT entitlement is delivered
• Make ICT teaching engaging and relevant
• Provide CPD to improve teachers' confidence and expertise and enable them to teach ICT effectively
• Make e-safety a priority
• Secondary schools in particular should:
• Provide a range of KS4 ICT courses mapped to pupils' needs
• Encourage girls to study ICT at KS4
• Ensure ICT across the curriculum

Good practice seen included:

"Pupils used data-loggers in science to record changes in the weather. They then produced their own weather forecasts, including recordings of broadcasts, and created maps which depicted weather conditions and reports for cities across the UK."

"Year 6 pupils were using spreadsheets to test hypotheses and compare test results of differences in temperature and light around the school."

"In one school, the opportunity to contribute online book reviews to a site provided by a commercial book supplier was encouraging reluctant readers."

What made ICT teaching outstanding in Primaries:

• Well-judged pace "sustained throughout the lesson"; good pupil engagement; brisk transitions
• Teachers with excellent subject knowledge
• Consistent attention to pupils’ understanding; use of key words
• Thorough and detailed   planning, "with particular attention to meeting the different requirements of individual pupils"; "learning activities were expertly differentiated"
• A good variety of activities and a range of equipment and resources available 
• Clear and explicit learning objectives negotiated with pupils
• Safe working  with all resources
• Excellent use of IWBs
• Opportunities "to experience ‘real world’ ICT use outside school"
• Pupils encouraged to be independent
• "Questions were used skilfully to challenge and extend learning" and " to deepen understanding, rather than just to check knowledge"
• "Formative assessment, through a variety of means, was an integral part of each lesson and [well-structured] self- and peer-assessment were actively promoted"; " feedback, frequent marking and praise linked into planning the next lesson"; pupils "were clear about their own current level and what they needed to do to improve"
• Explicit links with other subjects especially literacy and numeracy.

Leadership and Management

The 2011 Ofsted annual report reviews Leadership & Management on pages 63 - 69.  Ofsted believe that "the quality of leadership and management makes a critical contribution to the quality of teaching and learning."

Features that reduce the quality of leadership & management include:

• "The evaluation of teaching is often over-generous, and places too little emphasis on exploring what pupils are actually learning and the progress that they are making, focusing rather on the activity of the teacher." 
• "Best practice is not shared effectively" and "weaknesses that emerge in the monitoring are not pursued."
• "The limited role of the governing body in self-evaluation"
• "Inconsistent school systems for making use of assessment to accelerate learning." Pupil progress data "is not always used efficiently to intervene and support pupils who are falling behind."
• "The lack of leadership from middle managers, for example in improving the quality of teaching or ensuring the systematic monitoring of pupils’ progress, was also a common weakness, although this was sometimes due to the failure of senior leaders to delegate responsibility or ensure that middle management was effective."

Attendance

The 2011 Ofsted annual report discusses attendance on page 62. "As with behaviour, there is a strong correlation between deprivation and poor attendance .... attendance was more than three times as likely to be high or above average in schools with the least deprived pupils compared with schools with the most deprived pupils."

Ofsted identifies factors that support good attendance:

• "A curriculum that interests and excites pupils"
• "Opportunities to undertake work outside the classroom"
• "Excellent relationships between teachers and pupils
• "Rigorous monitoring of patterns of attendance" including 
• "immediate" following up of absences
• "Identifying quickly a trend in poor attendance"
• "Early notification of the problem to parents and carers"
• "Clearly explaining the link between achievement and attendance to pupils and parents .... reinforcing the importance of the issue"
• "Targeted approaches to supporting the attendance of individual pupils"
• Ensuring that teaching is "focused on the individual’s needs"
• "Close liaison with ...  the education welfare service and police"

Alternative Provision

The 2011 annual report from Ofsted pointed out that many providers of alternatives to mainstream schooling are outside the inspection framework. A survey in the 2010 autumn term visited 61 providers of whom only 17 were subject to inspection. Despite this over 10% of pupils in years 9-11 attended off-site provision; for some this was a "significant proportion of their week"; occasionally they were full time.

Supervision can be patchy. "It can be the case that the school’s or unit’s staff visit infrequently or not at all"; nearly 20% of the providers had "never received a visit from a member of staff from the school or unit"


The characteristics of effective alternative provision was:

• Careful selection of placements
• Good communication between school and placement: the school should share relevant information with the provider and agree on "what information the provider would collect to show a student’s progress." This would be used "to celebrate success or intervene when things were not going well."
• Regular visits from school staff to students at providers.
• Careful timetabling so students  "did not miss key lessons when they were out at their placement, or at least they were given good-quality additional teaching to keep up."

All quotes from p 61

Reducing the variability of teaching

The UK Department for Education's annual 2011 Ofsted Report notes that "achieving consistently outstanding or good quality teaching across year groups and across subjects remains a challenge for schools." They recommend that SLT:

• "Demonstrate a genuine interest in the work of pupils and teachers and promote professional dialogue that is focused fully on pupils’ learning and progress."
• "Encourage teaching staff to consider different teaching approaches that extend the repertoire of teaching techniques that can be deployed effectively."
• Use classroom observation and discussion of practice; in some "successful schools staff observe each other’s lessons, which are planned together and sometimes taught together." 
• In meetings to "dialogue is focused on pedagogic practice. Peripheral issues are sidelined."

(page 55)

The Quality of Teaching in Sixth Forms

The UK Department for Education's 2011 Annual Ofsted Report (p54) discusses the quality of teaching in sixth form (ages 17-19) lessons and discovers that:

• Outstanding teaching is "often characterised by teachers sharing a genuine love of and interest in their subject" but weak teachers often talk too long. 
• Outstanding teachers set tasks which "flow smoothly from the introductory stage of the lesson and build up knowledge and understanding sufficiently to ensure that students are confident of the subject matter when homework is set. Such lessons do not always have a rigid structure, which instead is tailored to the material being taught and kept interesting for the students." whereas during weaker teaching "insufficient attention is given to the balance and appropriateness of activities and tasks expected of students during lessons. This approach does not support students’ specific learning needs."

What Assessment Can and Cannot Do

This is a summary of a paper by Dylan Wiliam originally published in Swedish in Pedagogiska Magasinet in September 2011 which can be downloaded from http://www.dylanwiliam.net/


There has to be a system for holding educators accountable to those who pay. High-stakes assessment can be used for this accountability. Strong evidence suggests that "the presence of a high-stakes accountability system raises student achievement by the equivalent of as much as an extra two months’ learning each year" but every high-stakes assessment system studied has negative unforeseen consequences. This is because (a) less than one quarter of student achievement can be attributable to the school and (b) 'Campbell's Law': the use of a quantitative social indicator distorts the social phenomenon it is intended to measure eg teachers teaching to the test ensure that pupils get better at passing the test but often at the expense of them getting worse at things that are not tested. 


Furthermore, we tend to measure what is easy to measure rather than what should be measured. Thus in languages we assess written proficiency more than spoken proficiency because it is easier to measure. "Even if the teachers try to take a broad view of the curriculum, the students will often resist, asking, 'Will this be on the test?'"


The ideal assessment system would be:

• Externally referenced ie not dependent on the standards of each individual teacher
• Distributed across the whole course
• Cumulative ie what is learned at one point of time will be needed later so that students cannot just cram for the test and then forget everything they have learnt.

Assessment improves learning when:
It helps teachers and learners to clarify, share and understand what is to be learned and how we know it has been learnt
It helps engineer "classroom discussions, activities, and tasks that elicit evidence of student achievement"
It provides formative feedback
It encourages students to collaborate acting "as learning resources for one another"
It encourages students to be "owners of their own learning"


But "weighing the pig doesn't fatten it".


Furthermore, AfL can be taken to extremes. "giving grades and scores too frequently will certainly slow down learning, but not giving students any indication of whether they are making progress is just as misguided. The important thing about feedback, however it is given, is that it should cause thinking. Once an emotional reaction occurs, the learning will certainly stop, but there are ways of telling students whether they are, indeed making progress that does not allow them to compare their current achievement with others, thus minimizing the extent to which the student reacts to the feedback by attending to their well-being rather than by using the feedback to improve."

National Curriculum changes postponed

On 19th December the UK Department for Education postponed the 2013 implementation for changes in the National Curriculum in Maths, English, Science and PE until 2014 when changes will also be implemented in  all the other subjects.

"The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande

Gawande is a surgeon whose failures led him to devise an aeroplane-pilot-style checklist approach to operations. He claims that this reduces failure and complications hugely and significantly.


He suggests that "Know-how and sophistication have increased remarkably across almost all our realms of endeavor, and as a result so has our struggle to deliver on them." (p11) This is because the systems delivering have become too complex for individuals to master. This causes deep customer dissatisfaction. "Failures of ignorance we can forgive. .... But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated." (p 11) This is the point at which failure becomes negligence.


Gawande offers examples from his own world, surgery, and from the worlds of aviation, construction, and finance to suggest that checklists help people to "improve their outcomes with no increase in skill" (p168). Checklists can't improve best performance but they can help you avoid some stupid mistakes; they therefore improve the baseline and thus improve the average.

Checklists are ideal when complex procedures are made from many simple steps. Checklists are particularly good in situations where teams of people have to work together for the outcome because checklists improve inter-personal communication. Builders even use checklists to make sure everyone has been consulted whenever there is a change from plan.

Gawande clearly believes that checklists also improve communication by flattening hierarchies and giving the least important team member the right to challenge the team leader.

But checklists must be very carefully designed if they are to be effective.

• Every item on a checklist must be non-ambiguous.
• Some checklists are proactive and should be read out before performance, others are retroactive and should be a check after performance.
• One's procedure needs to incorporate one or more 'pause points'. Each pause point contains a single checklist.
• Checklists should be physical; ideally the whole team should agree that each item can be checked. This emphasises the communication function of a checklist.
• Each checklist should take no more than sixty seconds. This means that you cannot include everything. Items that have little leverage (operating theatre fires as opposed to post-operative infections) should be left off the checklist.

Can checklists be successful in the arcane mystery that is persuading pupils to learn? There are differences between operating theatres and classrooms. In surgery a team of people work on a single individual whereas in a classroom a single professional teaches many. So on that basis there seems to be large differences. But looking at a school more holistically we could argue that we need (and often use) checklists in education. For example, can we be sure that every pupil in year 11 who needs a particular intervention to improve their reading/ spelling/ numeracy/ chance of achieving 5 A*-C grades at GCSE has been given that intervention? We can justify limiting our interventions because of resources but what if we just forgot that Joe Bloggs Junior needed a test for dyslexia? Would that not be negligence? And is this not something that a checklist could catch?

There are advocates of checklists in education. The UK government behaviour adviser Charlie Taylor recommends using a checklist for behaviour management and cites 'The Checklist Manifesto'. His checklists for behaviour (one checklist for headteachers and one for teachers) are published by the UK Department for Education here. 


However, Taylor's checklists are not classic checklists in the Gawande mould; they are fairly long, are not structured into pause points and some of the items are not perfectly clear. The checklist for encouraging positive behaviour in the classroom published by Friern Barnet School is perhaps more user friendly. Here is an extract:

Start of Lessons

• Be on time and prepared

• Greet students by name at the door and oversee the corridor near the door

• Instruct students to line up sensibly and to go straight to the seats in the seating plan

• Have an activity already on the board

• Take the register in silence and deal with latecomers later on

• Give praise for good conduct/starting the lesson on a positive note/welcome any new students or those who have returned from a long absence

• Aim to have students on task straight away

During Lessons

• Present the big picture – link the learning with previous and future lessons

• Explain clearly what the lessons aims, outcomes and activities are

• Instruct students to have their planners open on their desks

• Ensure there are a variety of activities, resources and learning styles catered for

• Set targets for outcomes, ensuring appropriate/differentiation/keep standards bhigh for everyone

• Use descriptive praise and encouragement – try to say something positive to everyone

• Reward good behaviour and work with commendations

• Remind students of rules/admonish them in private

• Be mobile around the classroom and ensure you can see everyone

• Ensure that homework is set and clearly written down before the end of the lesson

End of Lessons

• Plan sufficient time for a plenary summarising/assessing learning

• Comment on the overall lesson identifying achievements and or individuals

• Ensure clearing up is carried out by all

• Dismiss students in groups, see them out of the door and say goodbye to all

I particularly like Friern Barnet's advice about preparing quality lessons: "Above all, we should always ask about every lesson we teach: Is this lesson worth behaving for?"

Who owns the learning in your school?

Alan November at the 2011 SSAT conference asked: Who works harder in your school: teachers or students? He suggests that students work harder in developing countries but teachers usually work harder in the developed world. He believes that students work harder when they own the learning. He describes schools in which students own the learning as having “amazing energy and excitement, of discipline and quality work.”

The three things that people need to do quality work are:

• Purpose: the sense that your work will have value for others;
• Autonomy
• Mastery

Perhaps we should ask our pupils whether they have purpose. Is all the work they have done just for themselves or can it make a contribution to others? Will it have a beneficial legacy?

He quotes examples of students creatingMaths videos and using a wiki to write the course textbook.

Why should a student do homework when the teacher already knows the answers? Students work on the web when they won’t do their homework: “Do I publish to the world or my teacher?”

A school should be a global publisher. To give students a global voice, teacher and schools need global voices.

Alan November.

School funding for 2012-13

On 14th December the UK Department for Education issued details about school funding for the next financial year.

The key features are:

• The underlying school budget will be kept at flat cash per pupil before the addition of the Pupil Premium.
• No school will see more than a 1.5 per cent per pupil reduction (excluding sixth form funding)  before the Pupil Premium is added.
• The Government plans to fund an increased number of places for Sixth form students as we approach the raising of the participation age: 1,577,000 places in the 2012/13 academic year compared with the 1,543,000 in 2011/12.
• Transitional protection for sixth form budgets will continue until 2015/16.
• Overall capital funding remains the same as last year – £800 million to address the shortage in pupil places and £1.4 billion for maintenance, including £200 million for devolved formula capital. The methodology for allocating funding for pupil places will change to better reflect local need.
• Basic need allocations for 2012-13 will be decided using both numbers on roll and capacity data. No local authority will receive, in 2012-13, less than 80 per cent of the funding they would have received had we taken the same approach as taken for 2011-12.
• This does not include the additional £600 million for basic need allocated to Education in the autumn statement. No decisions have yet been made on how to disburse this money.
• Devolved Formula Capital will remain at similar levels to last year so that the limited capital available can be more strategically targeted.
• There is a central pot of £276 million  to meet the maintenance needs of Academies. It  will be administered in a similar way to this year.
• Over £107 million of capital funding will be available in 2012-13 to meet maintenance and building needs of sixth form colleges and demographic pressures for new 16-19 places in schools, Academies and sixth form colleges.
• £59 million of this funding will be allocated to the sixth form college Building Condition Improvement Fund 

The YPLA state that:

Core education programmes are being protected. £770 million will support disadvantaged young people.

The reduction in funding per sixth form student that any provider will suffer will be limited to a maximum of 3%. 

Allocations are based on lagged learner numbers and programme size.  Programme sizes will be reduced because the 114glh entitlement per learner is being reduced to 30glh.

Providers whose programme sizes are in the largest 20% will have their programme sizes reduced half way to the 80th percentile.

Three dimensions of effective teaching

Ofsted's annual report 2010-11 written by HMCI Mirian Rosen in November 2011 has identified three dimensions of effective teaching: 














Planning: appropriate pace and challenge

• "The right mix of activities chosen to sustain pupils’ concentration and develop their understanding ....
• "High expectations of all pupils’learning and .... appropriate support and challenge.... rather than  insufficiently challenging activities which "occupy pupils" and are "not well matched to the needs of the pupils and often based on procedural and descriptive work" including  "an emphasis on low level tasks" and including "an over-use of worksheets and an over-reliance on a narrow range of textbooks"
• "The pace of learning is well-judged and there is no wasted time in lessons;"such as copying out the objectives for the lesson, completing exercises without sufficient reason, or simply spending too long on one activity"
• "The sequence of lessons and activities is well planned, and teachers use a good range of resources ....
• "Lessons are interesting .... and include a range of activities, including practical sessions and out-of-classroom activities ....
• "Imaginative and effective use is made of the internet, interactive whiteboards and other technical resources .... 

Interaction and dialogue

• "Where teaching is outstanding .... teachers explain things clearly, anticipate pupils’ misconceptions, select their teaching strategies judiciously, and target the use of high-quality questioning ....
• NB: It might be useful here to consider work on pupil misconceptions and threshold concepts  
• "There is a creative and appropriate balance between teacher-directed learning, which sets the framework .... and independent learning, which allows pupils to explore questions and solve problems" rather than lessons in which "pupils listen to the teacher for too long" 
• "There are good opportunities for pupils to make choices, ask questions, find answers, collaborate, listen, discuss, and debate and present their work to their peers so that others can comment....
• "The interaction between the teacher and the pupils is positive but challenging .....  teachers take care to build up pupils’ confidence and encourage them to take on new challenges ....
• "Support staff, where available, are well directed, have clear roles and provide good support for individuals and groups, which deepens their understanding.
• Questions are open ended rather than "focused on low-level cognitive activity"  which encourage pupils to "give simply factual low-level responses"

AfL

• "Assessment that clearly identifies pupils’ starting points and understanding, checks progress, establishes what has been learnt and can inform the next steps in learning" rather than assuming that "because one pupil has answered a question successfully, the rest of the class is ready to move on." 
• Effective assessment "enables pupils to demonstrate their understanding and ensures that teachers can adapt" the "direction or pace of learning within a lesson and for particular individuals"
• "Pupils receive clear feedback and understand what they need to do to improve" rather than "the imprecise marking of written work, lacking subject specific comments"
• Effective assessment "may include peer and self-assessment"
• "Differentiation is a challenging but essential task for teachers" and requires continual assessment.

Ofsted's Four Challenges

Miriam Rosen's HCMI report for Ofsted published in November 2011 identified four challenges facing education in the UK. 


Tackling failure. 

• The number of schools judged inadequate went down from 553 in August 2010 to 451 in August 2011; a reduction of over 18%.
• Schools judged inadequate are turning themselves around faster than they used to. On average it now takes 18 months to get out of Special Measures; it used to take 20 months. More than a fifth of those coming out of Special Measures went into Good rather than Satisfactory!

This seems to be good news; Ofsted certainly seems to be raising standards at the bottom end.


Raising ambitions.

• "Nearly 800 schools, have been judged satisfactory for at least their last two inspections and have no better than satisfactory capacity to improve. Of the 40 previously satisfactory colleges inspected this year, 22 continue to be no better than satisfactory and two declined."

What they seem to be saying here is that satisfactory providers are becoming complacent. Satisfactory is no longer good enough. There seems to be a particular problem with the FE sector which Rosen highlight's elsewhere in her report.


Improve the quality of teaching.

• "At the heart of every learning institution is good teaching, with a clear focus by the organisation’s leadership on continually improving teaching, which leads in turn to consistently high standards of practice by teachers. However, the quality of teaching in our schools is still too variable .... Satisfactory teaching does not deliver good enough progress for pupils in the most challenging circumstances. Just 3% of secondary schools and 4% of primary schools were judged outstanding for the quality of teaching across the school. .... None of the colleges, adult and community learning providers or prisons we inspected received an overall outstanding judgement for the quality of teaching."

Again, satisfactory is no longer good enough. Certainly a judgement that so few providers are outstanding for this key measure is scary.


Ensure the best services for those who need them most.

• "The fifth of schools serving the most deprived pupils were four times more likely to be found inadequate than the fifth of schools serving the least deprived pupils. Seventy-one per cent of schools serving the least deprived pupils were judged to be good or outstanding this year compared with 48% of schools serving the most deprived." But 85 schools in deprived areas were outstanding: almost all were urban schools and over a third were in London.

I don't think many teachers would be surprised by this finding. It has always been far harder to provide an adequate education to pupils from deprived backgrounds than to those from affluent backgrounds. Many would say that the Ofsted judgement criteria make some allowance for this extra difficulty but not nearly sufficient allowance. 

National scholarships for teachers

On 12th December the UK Department for Education announced that 671 teachers have been awarded scholarships  in the first round of the National Scholarship Fund for teachers administered by the Training and Development Agency (TDA). 

280 were for teachers in the priority subjects of English, Maths and Science. These included applications for funding for a Masters in Applied Linguistics to attendance at a Summer School.

391 were for SEN teachers. The supported activities included a MEd in Autism, MA in Special and Inclusive Education, and PG Diploma in Specific Learning Difficulties Dyslexia.

Any qualified teacher may apply for a scholarship worth up to £3,500. The next round of applications for the scholarship funding is due to open in spring 2012. Further details can be found on the TDA's website..

Pupil premium increased and extended

Children receiving free school meals in the Gambia

On 12th December the UK Department for Education announced that the Pupil Premium will be increased from £488 to £600 per pupil. It is also being extended to every child who has been registered for free school meals (FSM) in the past six years.

In 2009-10 32.8% of pupils who have been on Free School Meals in the previous six years achieved five or more A*- C grades at GCSE, compared to 63.5% of their fellow pupils.  Pupils at secondary school are also less likely to be registered for Free School Meals even when they are eligible and so are more likely to be picked up by this approach.

Schools should encourage pupils who are eligible for free school meals to be registered before the census date of 19th January 2012. 

 £50m is also being spent to support a Summer School programme to help the most disadvantaged pupils make the transition from primary to secondary school.

Schools decide how the Pupil Premium is spent. New measures in the performance tables will capture the achievement of pupils covered by the Pupil Premium. From September 2012,  schools must publish online information about how they have used the premium. 

From April 2012, the Government will provide a £250 per pupil premium to schools with service children – up from £200 this year. Whilst the attainment by service children on average is above that of their peers, they face unique challenges and stresses. The extra funding will help schools  focus on providing additional, mainly pastoral, support.

Trove to search for all things Australian

A great website to find Australian resources is Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/) produced by the National Library of Australia. True to form my first search was for Ned Kelly; on the left is the bullet-pocked suit of armour he wore during his final shoot-out with the Australian authorities. But Trove has over 250 million books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more. 










I rather like this map drawn before they had discovered the southern shore.