Transcript School Tools for Analysis and Research

Within School Variation and School Improvement
Aim of presentation:
•
to examine the nature of WSV
•
to provide a perspective on how measures of WSV
contribute to a view of a school’s performance
•
to look at how simple-to-use tools can support teacherlevel research into comparative achievement.
What is Within School Variation?
Within School Variation
“In schools where overall progress is broadly similar,
there are significant variations in pupil progress
between subjects and between
different pupil groups.” - Fischer Family Trust
"We have always known that there is a difference in performance
between schools. But what can make a bigger difference is the
experience that children have within one school. So a child can do
really well in one subject and not do well in another subject. And
that can make an even bigger difference to children's life chances
than differences between schools."
- Jane Creasy, Assistant Director of Research, NCSL
Within School Variation
Within School Variation is the variation in provision
as experienced by different groups of learners
How big is the problem?
Source : DCSF
Within School Variation is over 4 times greater than ‘between
school variation’.
WSV is over 14 times greater when allowance is made for free
school meals and prior attainment.
“WSV is now understood to be one of the biggest barriers
to school effectiveness and improvement.
In many schools there is not consistency in terms of
learning and teaching across the whole school.
WSV is one of the biggest challenges to school leaders.
“How do we guarantee that every student receives an
appropriate and effective access to learning
across their whole curriculum experience?
“It is not about blanket uniformity.
It is not about blind consistency.
It is about eliminating inappropriate variation.
“In our own private lives we do not accept inconsistencies
in services; in restaurants, in shops, from the doctor, the
dentist, the garage; and there is no reason either why a
school should tolerate inconsistency”.
Prof. John West-Burnham, Senior Research Adviser at the NCSL
speaking about Within School Variation
Is WSV just about teaching?
What is the relationship between teaching and learning?
Teaching
Learning
Teaching and Learning don’t have a direct
relationship. Many contextual factors can hinder
or enhance the impact of teaching on learning.
What is the relationship between teaching and learning?
Teaching
2.
1.
Learning
3.
It is more like this.
1. Learning that occurs concurrently with teaching (planned)
2. Teaching that isn’t making an impact (not good)
3. Learning that happens when the teacher isn’t there (good)
What is the relationship between teaching and learning?
Teaching
Learning
This is the model that schools should aspire to
What is the relationship between teaching and learning?
Context
Teaching
Learning
It is teaching quality, learner disposition and context
which influences the effectiveness of learning
How are schools judged?
A key school inspection question
What does the RAISEonline data say
about the school?
A key school self-evaluation question
Which local contextual circumstances
are influencing learning effectiveness?
What is the better basis on which a school should be judged?
High Standards
High Achievement and
Low Negative Variation
5 A*-Cs
How well every pupil achieves
Some Children Matter
Every Child Matters
Headline figures can hide significant
pockets of underachievement
Headline figures should show how
well every child achieves
Good Leadership = high attainment
Good Leadership = evidence of doing
the best for every pupil
League table position
Measures of Within School Variation
School Improvement = more 5A-Cs
School Improvement = less negative
variation
What advantage does the data-confident, self-evaluating school have?
Without teacher-level research
into pupil performance
With teacher-level research into
pupil performance
Performance analysis is done by the
few and passed to the many
All teachers are involved with
analysing their pupils’ performance
Key evidence = RAISEonline scores
Key evidence = teacher research
into current Y11 performance
Leadership equates to CVA
Leadership equates to successful
intervention across subjects
Judged by official data
Secure school-level evidence of
effectiveness
National aggregate group norms
Local contextual circumstances
A tendency for data to be seen as
an outcome in itself
Aware that dots on graphs equate to
individual pupils and their aspirations
The responsibility for school
standards resides solely with Ofsted
The school takes the lead on QA
“Schools that are proactive in showing
inspectors the evidence of their own
pupil-level analysis and research tend
to do better in their inspection.”
- Dr. Mike Treadaway, Fischer Family Trust,
Naace ‘Making Information Work’ Conference 27.04.07
How should schools judge themselves?
Top Down or Bottom Up?
Data analysis is not just something done
by the few and passed down to the many
– but should involve all teachers finding
out about the impact of their teaching on
different groups of learners.
Two sides to the same coin
Find out how
good every
teacher is at
teaching
Enable teachers to
investigate the
impact of their
teaching
(Top Down)
(Bottom Up)
Investigating the impact of teaching
“Projects which look at differences in the impact of teaching
require a climate of openness, trust and collegiality.”
- NCSL WSV project report
How Data confident is your school?
Take the test at: www.4matrix.org/toolkit
Data analysis tools can support action research into local contextual factors
What are the professional tools of the
teacher’s trade?
• A largely oral tradition
• Where are the equivalent tools to a doctor’s
stethoscope and blood pressure monitor?
What have headteachers said about
this approach?
"Wow! We have been bowled over by the power of the data and the
information 4Matrix has given us just in the first few hours today.
“My data manager was so impressed that he insisted on taking over the
first part of our meeting this evening with a presentation of what 4Matrix
told us about our data. I only gave it to him at 11.30 this morning!”
“All my team who saw it immediately realised its potential and were
asking probing questions about pupil performance.”
- Ged Ward, Headteacher, Macclesfield School, Cheshire
"4Matrix is a brilliant product.
It has helped take the sweat out of working with student data
and its level of interactivity is superb.”
“We have been able to research differences between comparative
performance for student groupings of our choice in a way that our
school's information management system simply can't.”
“The use of 4Matrix has helped us plan coherent change to make a
difference to teaching and learning and hence standards“
- Allan Foulds, Headteacher, Cheltenham Bournside School
"Attainment scores on their own don't do justice to schools
successfully working with disadvantaged students,
refugee children or non-English speakers.
4Matrix levels the playing field between schools with
differing profiles of attainment by looking at
comparative student achievement.”
“Using this approach, a school that has a higher-than-normal profile of
disadvantaged students can feel confident that its efforts
to raise achievement will be properly recognised in
the system that judges schools.”
- Barbi Goulding, Principal of Paddington Academy
What have teachers said about this
approach?
"Wonderful system! Paints a very clear picture of ability compared to
achievement."
"An amazingly simple-to-use-for-us-technophobes piece of software - which is
highly informative and an extremely useful tool in analysing exam data.
Really recommended." - MFL Dept
"An easy-to-use tool that enables department evaluation and the opportunity to
develop strategies for improvement."
"4Matrix has provided us with a very useful tool in evaluating our pupils'
examination performance. It has helped identify our strengths and weaknesses
and should enable us to improve teaching an learning."
"4Matrix provided me with a clear, no-nonsense evaluation of my results." Geography Dept
How can we measure variation?
A drag and drop tool
Data tools like the above can measure
comparative achievement and group variation
as well as support action-research
How might this graph be explained?
Automatic commentaries turn the visual picture of comparative
achievement into a numerical commentary
In the new version of 4Matrix the group residual
for every teaching group can be displayed.
Data Confident schools don’t wait for Ofsted to judge
them. They know themselves well and will have key data
about the performance of the current year 11 – not just
about pupils that have now left the school.
We can use tools that can show the impact of teaching.
We can use an action-research approach to school
improvement.
We can find out what specific local circumstances impact
on the work of particular groups of learners.
We can use tools that don’t make us feel you have to be
a statistician to use them.
We can make ICT talk our language.
Some thoughts about using performance data
“Having lots of data is not what selfevaluation is about. What counts is
having the right tools to make top-level
judgements on that data.”
- Barbi Goulding, Principal, Paddington Academy
Questions
1. How important is WSV as a focus for
standards in school?
2. What are the key characteristics of the
data-confident, self-evaluating school?