You've Got Your Students' Results. Now What?
Running a department, running a school, they’re hard. Staffing and finance are outside of your control. In many ways, behaviour and attendance are only partly in your control.
Things often feel outside your control if you’re a class teacher, too.
Excrement is always hitting the fan - your skill is in making sure the fan is turned off except in emergencies and positioned over a bin. Yeah - metaphors can get away from you too.
But school improvement, department improvement, your improvement? That’s simple. They’re the same thing.
This is the Last year of Progress 8
Many leaders object to Progress 8. They say it is not 100% accurate. They’re right.
For years I used to feel the same about BMI. I used to be very large - 6’3” and 21 stone, or 130 kilos. Mostly muscle, but also too much fat. Plenty of mass for lorry pulling and other strong man feats.
So, I would own up to ‘overweight’. But ‘obese’? No way. Yet my BMI was always well into the obese range. So, obviously, I ignored BMI. BMI was not accurate.
But let’s imagine I looked at the BMI of everyone at school. Would it be accurate enough for most people? Of course. (And no one is healthy at 130 kilos - get a grip mate). So, BMI is good enough for me.
So it is for Progress 8.
The progress of the teachers in your department or school can only be measured with the Progress 8 of their students. Knock out any outliers you had no control over - the students with massive absence, or constant suspensions, and the P8 of the class is accurate enough.
Combine more than one class and more than one year, and it becomes increasingly accurate.
Compare parallel classes. Compare boys and girls. It is quite easy to find remarkable differences in how teachers approach their classes, which will fuel experimentation and reflection.
Compare the relative performance of students to other subjects. Compare this to how easy each subject is nationally.
These will help you share good practice, so that every teacher can learn from the most successful.
Compare big exam exam questions, or the different parts of the syllabus. This will help you work out which parts of the curriculum are most successful. Now you know how to tweak the other schemes of work.
If everyone does this, every year, students will make much more progress. It is inevitable and self sustaining.
Sure, too often the fans will often be turned on. Sometimes the excrement won’t be produced by mice, but by elephants. Excrement, as they say, happens.
But, if you focus on these ways of using Progress 8, it won’t stick.
If you ignore the Progress 8, the fan just becomes a fertiliser - sometimes flowers, sometimes weeds will grow, and you won’t know which until it is too late.