Subject Improvement

Over the years I think we’ve overlooked the role that subject improvement plays in school improvement. Perhaps in the days of retakes, early entry, coursework, ECDL etc we could use generic management approaches to raise outcomes in schools. No longer!

With increasing numbers of pupils following a general academic curriculum, and with reforms to assessment leading to longer, terminal exams, school improvement now requires pupils to demonstrate a good understanding of their subjects, an understanding that can only really be gained through 5 years of a coherent curriculum and good teaching in each subject.

It’s for this reason that subject improvement is at the heart of our approach to school improvement at United Learning. I explain our school improvement strategy as follows:

Our Regional Directors ensure that the basic foundations are in place in all schools: leadership, curriculum, behaviour and teacher development. With these foundations in place, our subject advisors ensure that subject specialism thrives in each school.

I manage our team of subject advisors who all have the same objectives:

• Raise standards in your subject: We believe that the most important thing we can do for our pupils is to send them out into the world with a good set of grades. We therefore provide sharply focused guidance to heads of department and teachers so that pupils make good progress over the 5 years and end up with good outcomes
• Build the capacity of teachers and leaders in your subject: For our subject advisors their team is their Heads of Department – they meet with them regularly and visit them in their schools to support their subject leadership.
• Develop curriculum and assessment resources in your subject: As a large group of schools we are able to develop a central bank of teaching resources that ease teachers’ planning and ensure that all of our pupils benefit from a consistently challenging classroom experience.

Underpinning these is a fourth point about communication: the advisor is the advocate for their subject and communicates clearly and confidently so that headteachers and line managers know what they can do to support the subject in their school.

We’re currently recruiting a third advisor in each of the core subjects: English, maths and science. Details HERE. If successful, you’ll see parts of the country you never knew existed. More importantly, you will be immersed in school improvement while retaining your subject specialism, restoring subject improvement to its rightful place at the heart of school improvement.

Still Fighting the Last War?

They say that we over-estimate the impact of big changes in the short term, but under-estimate their impact in the long run. So in the 90s those who thought that mobile phones were going to change the world might have initially doubted themselves. And those who now scoff at the impact of driver-less cars might want to wait twenty years before getting too smug.

We’ve had our own ‘big change’ in education in recent years, as reforms to curriculum and assessment have increased the amount that pupils need to know in each subject. Back in August 2015, a few days after a volatile set of GCSE results in schools across the country, I wrote the post below. The post argued that some schools and heads were still seeking improvement by squeezing kids over last year’s grade boundaries, rather than gradually gaining a proper understanding of their subjects over five years. The low hanging fruit within reach of tactical approaches to school improvement (early entry, ECDL, iGCSE etc) gradually ran out, and schools that relied on them suffered.

The 2019 Ofsted framework opens up a new front in the war against tactical school improvement. With the outcomes judgement now subsumed within a broader ‘quality of education’ judgment, Ofsted has placed more weight on what pupils learn over 5 years, rather than the grades they walk away with. Last month at the Wonder Years conference The Chief Inspector suggested that ‘getting a grade 3 in history GCSE may ultimately prove more beneficial than a Merit in a BTEC’. She might have completed this sentence with ‘even if the BTEC makes the school look better in the league tables’.

A few years ago if you went to a headteachers’ conference you would hear talk of the latest quick win that could be shoe-horned into the curriculum late in Y11 to score a few league table points. Times have changed. Last week in our headteachers’ meetings we discussed how to give more time for departments to meet together to share subject knowledge, and how to organise our curriculum to ensure that pupils revisit prior content. Earlier in the year we heard from educational psychologist Paul Kirschner on how our knowledge of how we learn should affect how we teach.

Longer, tougher exams that can’t be retaken didn’t change our education system overnight. But like mobile phones and driver-less cars, their impact in the long run is proving to be profound.

 

Fighting the Last War – Reflections on 2015 GCSE Exam Results

August 27, 2015 steveadcock81

National measures might have remained stable in last week’s GCSE results, but this stability hides significant volatility amongst schools serving lower attaining intakes.  Many schools that have become accustomed to strong outcomes based on intense intervention struggled to get students over the line this year.

As I reflected on these results the line that stuck in my head was that too many schools are fighting the last war.  In too many classrooms, teaching Year 11 involves helping students to pass the previous year’s exam.  In too many revision sessions, students are coached to creep over thresholds based on the previous year’s grade boundaries.  This approach might have worked in the past but it’s ill-suited to the new landscape in which we find ourselves.

This new landscape includes longer exams with tougher questions; questions which require students to have a solid foundational understanding of their subjects.  It’s easy to say, but we need to nurture mathematicians in our schools, rather than spend our time helping students hunt around for the easier marks to scrape a C grade on a GCSE Maths paper.

In this new landscape there’s no place for the props on which so much GCSE ‘success’ was built: early and repeated entry and a strong reliance on vocational equivalences.  Even iGCSE English is no longer the safe bet that it was.  It’s a shame that so many students’ apparent success in English was actually based on meticulous preparation for speaking & listening and controlled assessments, followed by a few easy marks in the final exam to take them over the line.  This had become a trusted method for securing C grades with challenging students, but this year it failed to deliver.

Meanwhile in Maths, a rise in the grade boundary for a C grade at one popular exam board was met with consternation by many teachers who felt aggrieved that they had done their bit to get students over the line, only for the exam board to change the rules at the last minute.  Laura McInerney was right to tweet “a higher grade boundary does not mean it was harder to get a certain grade; that’s not how it works” but the sad reality is that many students had been taught how to score a C grade against last year’s grade boundaries.  The sense of entitlement felt by many teachers that a score which gained a C last year should gain a C this year shows the paucity of assessment awareness in our profession.

The last war was fought by directing a huge proportion of a school’s energy on Year 11.  The best teachers, the best classrooms, the best heads of year were allocated to Year 11.  Schools opened their doors after school, at weekends and in the holidays to deliver intervention for Year 11.  Some schools paid for the whole year group to attend residential boot camps, while others brought in external tutors and swat teams for holiday revision programmes.  One company guarantees to raise every student’s maths grade in a week, or you get your money back.

The law of diminishing returns is now dampening the impact of Year 11 intervention.  These tactics, tips and techniques to get students over the line have become a victim of their own success in the (almost) zero sum game of national exams.  While schools will always pay close attention to the fine tuning that gives students the best chance to do well in exams, we need, at last, to play the long game and invest in high quality teaching in every subject and every year group.

No longer should a forensic knowledge of exam tactics be a prerequisite for school leadership.  In turn, school leaders need to be given time to turn their schools around, rather than feeling pressured to make superficial year-on-year gains based on intensive coaching of borderline students.  The introduction of Progress 8 is an opportunity to re-focus on every student and every grade.

Year 11 intervention is becoming our Trident nuclear defence system – a costly relic of a war that is no longer relevant, and a distraction from the threats and opportunities in the here and now.