Progress 8 is the best measure we have. Here’s why.
I use data to find out what I don’t know, rather than confirm my cherished beliefs
I first posted this on We Are in Beta. I have no affiliation with them - I just hope they lead to the spread of great ideas!
The Problem of Existing Networks
The problem with most networks – Twitter and blogging for example – is the white noise: it’s really hard to find leaders explaining their processes and ideas from great schools. Instead, there is a plethora of good ideas. This is not the boon we might expect.
The difficulty with any educational ideas, as Hattie’s 2009 analysis showed us, is that pretty much everything improves student progress. His premise, that we should only concentrate on ideas with above average effects is half the answer. The second part of his answer is that we can't assume anything will work in our context just because the research says it works generally. Therefore, we have to monitor the impact of what we do. Bloggers and Twitter users in particular are reticent about the second step.
My experience supporting schools is that we are very bad at picking the best bets.
We don’t take the time to think through what the research is really telling us. And then, once we commit to something, we are even worse at measuring the impact in our own school setting to see what kind of a difference we are actually making.
ResearchEd could have been a cure for this. But I came away from that feeling uninformed – lots of ideas about what to do, very few related to measurable impact and HOW to do it. Indeed, it is something of a tragedy that the best communicators in education have no track record of implementing ideas successfully at scale. Heads Round Table? TES? Teacher Tapp daily recommended blogs? All suffer from a lack of P8 credibility.
This is not to denigrate them – it is simply a reflection of the available Progress 8 data. Teacher Toolkit – great books on CPD, no track record of positive P8. David Didau, a fantastic writer, with brilliant books, and something of a hero of mine, but no experience of leading at scale. Teacherhead – great explanation of research – but a poor track record of P8.
The Lack of Attention on Progress 8
For all its faults, P8 is still the best measure we have of school effectiveness. This is a plea for us to seek out leaders whose schools have fantastic progress, and a story to tell of how they might have achieved it. This is much more difficult than you might expect.
Take the girl’s grammar school with P8 of 0.8, convinced that its praise and reward system is transformational. Analysis of its FFT Datalab comparator schools in the top 10, top 20 and top 50 similar schools ranks them in the middle of each. So, yes, the praise and reward system may have lots of benefits, but progress is not one of them.
Take the non-selective girls’ school with P8 of 0.7. Sounds fantastic. But girls nationally achieve +0.23. The average P8 for the 50 similar schools is 0.55. Then consider that nearly 50% of their students come from other catchments – their parents, highly committed to education, have opted in. So, self-selecting – a lot of P8 in the bank there before they even enter the classroom. So, a school I want to learn from about building a school culture and reputation that is so attractive to aspirational parents. But how to improve P8? Tricky, isn’t it?
Take the school with a national reputation for developing oracy, an amazingly innovative curriculum. How will we measure the impact? Well, P8 has declined for each of the last 3 years and is now 0.04, coinciding with the decline of their EAL population. There are fantastic reasons for developing oracy, but if it adds nothing academically beyond the average, would you think again?
We all, myself included, believe that schools offer so much more than P8 and exams. But it can’t be instead of progress. We ought to be looking at schools with great P8, and then find out what else they do.
Who Makes Great Progress?
Now, let’s take a look at the top 20 schools by Progress 8.
Notice how many of them have cohorts of 120 or fewer? How many are single sexed? How many are faith schools? How many are likely to have large EAL cohorts? But perhaps their leaders have already thought about these advantages, and have thought through what might be scaleable in bigger schools, with a different mix of student?
Wouldn’t You Like to Find Out More?
What would you give to know what Wembley High Technology College is doing, and how that might be different to Michaela? (I say this not in criticism of Michaela, but because we already know what they do).
How many of these schools will have a binary behaviour policy?
A centralised curriculum?
Same day detentions?
Students in rows?
Student leadership programmes?
High participation in drama, art and music?
High achieving sports teams?
Competition, league tabling, public speaking?
What is their approach to feedback, CPD, performance management, deploying teaching assistants, IT, online learning, governance, pastoral support, SEND, the role of heads of department, tutor time, assemblies?
How many will have a female head?
What is the diversity mix of its SLT?
I want to find out what I don’t know, from leaders in successful schools who have analysed their impact and think they have a coherent story, or better still, a tentative one. Leaders who have thought about making things scalable, to a school like mine, with 2% EAL, mixed sex, secular and with cohorts of 200, even if this is nothing like their school.
Are You Interested in Networking With Impact?
Or, perhaps you are in a more typical school, yet with great P8, or a fantastic improvement from previous years. You’ve looked at your own impact measures, and you think you know why things have worked. Wouldn’t you like to connect, spread the word and see what impact you might have?
Or perhaps you’ve never looked at your comparator schools, and aren’t sure how well you are doing? Kingsdown sits in 13th place out of 50, the 45th most improved school in the country (6th if we exclude schools with cohorts of 120 or smaller, and take out those where the improvement in EAL students’ results wipes out the improvement overall). Sounds brilliant, but our P8 is only 0.04, about as average as you can be. The average P8 of schools like ours is -0.17.
Perhaps you have more to offer than you think? Or, perhaps your P8 is great, and you are unaware that this is just a by product of your context and intake – you rank quite low against your 50 comparator schools? That would be worth finding out, wouldn’t it? To find out what you don’t know.
Why You Should Network
You may also have so many other worries, over and above a normal year. This is an off the top of my head list. I’ve arranged ideas as follows:
What heads will probably be worried about this year is before the colon: and what I think they should be worrying about comes after. The thing is, I could be completely wrong.
The Coming Year?
Closing the disadvantage gap: raising everyone’s progress, even if disadvantaged students don’t improve as much as others.
Centre Assessed Grades: assessment which leads to greater learning, regardless of what future measures of that learning are put in place by the government.
Improving exam results with interventions: improving the curriculum, assessment and homework so that all year groups learn more.
How to spend the tuition money: finding ex students, parents, people in the community who can tutor in school from January onwards. Develop the use of existing resources, like Tassomai, Show My Homework, GCSEpod, Hegarty Maths and free resources like Quizlet, Brainscape, Kahoot and Oak Academy.
A recovery curriculum: keep the curriculum the same, but use knowledge retrieval systematically to embed what students didn’t learn during lockdown.
How to do mocks: how to do small weekly assessments which build better learning, so that the mock is then placed much closer to the exams. Rehearse the questions which have most impact on eventual results more frequently than other sorts of questions. Get rid of low mark, knowledge questions in the mocks, and replace those with frequent knowledge testing throughout the year.
How to manage behaviour in the new normal: simply apply a fair, binary behaviour approach which nearly all the top P8 schools are using.
Skilling up teachers for remote learning: get every department to use screen record video for all its key knowledge now, while we are still open, so that these videos will be a benefit for years – as long as the curriculum is in place.
Planning for staff absence: planning a different school day when too many staff are off – e.g. 3 hours of KS3 followed by 3 hours of KS4 timetabled so that individual teachers don’t do more than 5 hours per day.
Parental engagement: giving parents live data on attendance, rewards, detentions and performance as often as it is inputted – this would not increase workload, but make sure parents always have a complete picture of their child.
Performance management without exam data: how to improve the schemes of work in the curriculum so that every teacher keeps improving. Likewise, how to make lesson visits 100% developmental.
CPD training: create a system of curriculum development which actually improves teaching and learning.
Praise and reward: league tabling and establishing social norms around behaviour, effort, Attitude to Learning, attendance, test percentages, homework completion.
Resilience, grit, wellbeing, mental health interventions: constructing a whole school curriculum which demands, teaches and celebrates all of these through the daily experiences students have in all their subjects, tutor times and assemblies.
Assessment moderation: comparative judgement, whole class feedback and regular knowledge testing.
Homework completion: a homework curriculum which uses spaced learning, interleaving and dual coding to make learning stick.
Money: writing a curriculum which makes learning the core principle – students will know more, feel successful, and spread good news in the community.
Money: the curriculum again - this will lead to a better Ofsted judgement and spread good news in the community.
Money: get the binary behaviour system working with excellent support rather than exclusions for those who struggle, which will spread good news in the community.
Money: recruit for diversity. The lowest performing students nationally are white British. By actively seeking a diverse school population you will improve the school’s P8, but also benefit from all the other impacts of diverse perspectives and experiences, and also improve your curriculum. This rising tide is also likely to improve the progress of the white British cohort.
Money: develop a centrally planned curriculum in each department so that novice teachers can still deliver really good learning. Recruit cheap, because there will be a glut of new teachers on the market, while many older teachers will be considering early retirement after lockdown.
Money: lay the ground for older staff going part time and then making up income through tutoring in your school. Be proactive in this. Make links within MATs or geographical groups of schools to find existing teachers who could do this across schools.
Resilience and mental health of head teachers: broker SIPs with a track record in school improvement, who can be great mentors and sounding boards. Find leadership coaches with a good track record.
Getting rid of ineffective staff: improving the curriculum and systems so that it is very difficult to be an ineffective teacher, as there is so much support.
If you want to find out how to get great progress from students in any subject, you’ll like The Slightly Awesome Teacher
If you want to be brilliant English teacher, you’ll like The Full English
If you want to pass Ofsted with flying colours, you’ll like The Unofficial Ofsted Survival Guide
If you want a quick guide to How to Improve Your School, click here
Dominic Salles