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June 13, 2011

Teach First ‘Ambassadors’ call for a bigger focus on school ethos

Filed under: 2011 — Tags: , , , — admin @ 9:51 pm

A bigger focus on school ethos could produce ‘huge benefits for little financial cost’, according to a paper from Teach First ‘Ambassadors’, individuals who have been through the Teach First Programme.

‘Our experience,’ the authors say, ‘is that not enough schools adequately value ethos and culture and that, where they do value ethos and culture, their efforts are not as successful as they might be.’

The paper ascribes this failure to the short-term focus on academic achievement that results from league tables, and the way these create ‘the impression that focusing effort on long-term, relatively intangible projects such as ethos and culture is an unaffordable luxury.’

The authors also note that schools find it difficult to work out how to build a positive. ‘Whilst it is fairly simple,’ the report says, ‘to establish a behaviour policy and a new badge, it is harder to constantly monitor the experience of over 1000 pupils to ensure that their experience is consistent with the school’s stated ethos and culture.’

Involving students, though, is crucial. ‘Pupils need to be a central part of influencing the culture,’ says one Teach First Ambassador, ‘to give them ownership and make them proud of something that they have contributed substantially to.’

The report also argues that senior leaders, teachers and pupils should ‘be able to collaborate and communicate with each other, and they should model the beliefs and values of their school and see them modeled in each other.’

Responding to the report, Education Secretary Michael Gove agrees that ‘the most successful schools are those with a strong ethos led by an outstanding head supported by enthusiastic and dedicated staff.’

Ethos and culture in schools in challenging circumstances: A Policy First Publication can be downloaded from here.

October 19, 2010

Power needs wider distribution

Filed under: 2010, October — Tags: , , , — admin @ 1:00 am

Antidote today publishes a report, which uses evidence gathered from the PROGRESS Programme to argue that giving school communities the freedom and power to stimulate change from within can be the cheapest and most effective way of bringing about a step change in academic achievement and behaviour.

The report urges policymakers to explore ways of assessing how much money is wasted on implementing strategies which are ineffectual because they do not address the issues for staff and students.

It also questions whether the measures currently proposed for giving freedom to schools – enabling teachers to set up ‘free schools’ and for maintained schools to become academies – can work without a wider distribution of power.

The report is built around 8 case studies from schools that have taken part in the PROGRESS Programme, and describes how the Programme enables schools to dig deeper into why certain things are issues and the ideas that staff and students have for addressing them.

‘Our experience,’ the report says, ‘is that when young people can articulate what does and does not work for them, and when these statements can be heard and thought about across the whole school community, it becomes possible to shape more dynamic learning environments and the results can be profound.’

The report suggests that this work is relevant to the government’s aim of building the Big Society because it shows that, when people are given the power and freedom to evolve strategies that improve their communities, they develop the necessary tools and skills.

The report contains recommendations for school leaders, policymakers and school inspectors.

You can download Freeing Schools: Shaping the Big Society from here or request a hard copy by emailing anna@antidote.org.uk

February 22, 2010

Creative learning is possible

Filed under: 2010, February — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 2:35 pm

Ofsted has produced a response to those who argue that the National Curriculum is too narrowly prescriptive to allow creative approaches to learning to flourish.

Describing creative approaches to learning as characterised by questioning and challenging; making connections and seeing relationships; exploring ideas and reflecting critically on ideas, actions and outcomes, the report’s authors argue that there is ‘no conflict’ between such approaches and the National Curriculum.

They recognise, though, that teachers need to feel confident that ‘the aims and objectives of creative approaches to learning are worth pursuing’ and that they provide a successful preparation for external assessment.

Creative approaches, the report argues, are effective in breaking down the barriers to learning and improving achievement because ‘the emphasis placed by staff on learning being a collaborative business, founded on investigation and first hand experience, encouraged pupils to feel safe in contributing their ideas, being inventive, making connections and experimenting with practical approaches to problem-solving.’

Learning: creative approaches that raise standards (080266) can be downloaded from here.

January 19, 2010

Report on the conditions for authentic student voice

Filed under: 2010, January — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 1:35 pm

Central to Antidote’s PROGRESS Programme is the creation of an environment in schools where students have an authentic voice and engage in real dialogue with adults.

Many of Antidote’s goals are echoed in a report by Professor Michael Fielding on the research he has done with Perpetua Kirby into student-led reviews. In particular, he emphasises the importance of:

1. School-wide enabling conditions: the school must develop and support positive relationships; must involve students in their learning and give all students (not just the most motivated and articulate) formal opportunities to be involved in decisions about the school.

2. Leadership and supporting staff: school leadership must be clear about the school’s core values and vision; they must listen to staff and value staff members equally; and encourage a professional learning culture. The leadership must also understand that there are no quick fixes.

3. Leading and supporting students: positives must be celebrated and followed up quickly with action; students must take ownership of their reviews and be involved in the preparation and facilitation of their meetings, where ability permits.

4. Involving parents and carers: developing parent/carer involvement in their child’s learning is important for raising the child’s confidence around learning and also improving parent-child relationships.

5. Shared responsibility: the key factor in enabling a supportive context for developing student voice is the acknowledgement that the success of such an endeavour is the shared responsibility of staff, students, and parents/carers.

For more information on this research, please contact Michael Fielding at m.fielding@ioe.ac.uk

November 23, 2009

Calling for Dialogue

Filed under: November — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 1:46 pm

The Cambridge Review of Primary Education argues that we need a proper debate about how to evolve:

  • a curriculum underpinned by a coherent set of aims, values and principles that integrates literacy and numeracy with other domains, so enabling high standards in all areas of learning
  • abandonment of teaching strategies that dent the confidence of young learners and cause long-term damage to their learning
  • a focus on fostering in teachers their capacity to enhance children’s learning through collaboration, challenge and purposeful talk
  • more space for the kind of learning in all subjects which requires time for talking, problem-solving and the extended exploration of ideas
  • concern for children’s emotional health and wider well-being pervading every aspect of the curriculum (rather than just being placed in the domain of ‘physical and emotional health’)
  • approaches to summative assessment at the end of primary schooling that are ‘broader’, more ‘innovative’ and conducted under ‘entirely different conditions than the current system’
  • teachers taking back control of pedagogy from ‘bland’ and  ‘prepackaged, government-approved lessons.’
  • the student voice becoming embedded as an inherent part of school life

‘As the old assumptions about where authority should lie in a school are being challenged and knowledge has been democratised by the internet,’ the report says, ‘there is a recognition that transmission teaching, top-down school organisation and government micro-management of the classroom are simply no longer appropriate.’

Children, their world and their education: Final report and recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, edited by Robin Alexander, is published by Routledge at £35 and can be ordered from http://www.routledge.com  A summary can be downloaded from http://www.primaryreview.org.uk/Downloads/Finalreport/CPR-booklet_low-res.pdf

October 14, 2009

NICE Presents Evidence for Organisation-Wide Approaches to Emotional Health

Filed under: 2009, October — Tags: , , , — admin @ 12:16 pm

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has issued guidance on how secondary schools can ‘provide an environment that fosters social and emotional wellbeing’.

The evidence gathered by (NICE) demonstrates the importance of:

  • Fostering an ethos that promotes mutual respect, learning and successful relationships among young people and staff
  • Creating a culture of inclusiveness and communication that ensures all young people’s concerns can be addressed
  • Providing a safe environment which nurtures and encourages young people’s sense of self-worth and self-efficacy
  • Systematically measuring and assessing young people’s social and emotional wellbeing, and using the outcomes as the basis for planning activities and evaluating their impact
  • Developing partnerships between young people and staff to formulate, implement and evaluate organisation-wide approaches

Social and emotional wellbeing in secondary education is NICE public health guidance 20 and can be downloaded from here

September 5, 2009

Assessing for learning

Filed under: 2009, September — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 12:11 pm

The central message of the TLRP report  (see ‘Giving expertise a chance’) – that holding schools to account for exam performance may detract from the central purpose of improving learning – also runs through a research report on ‘self-regulated learning’.

Curriculum strategies that improve self-regulation, the report notes, tend to be occasions when students have an opportunity to:

  • pursue goals they find meaningful
  • select their own activities
  • engage in challenging and collaborative learning experiences

‘Even low-achieving students,’ the authors note, ‘exhibit relatively high self-efficacy – they believe they can learn to improve, and they do not shy away from the more challenging tasks – in classrooms where teachers engage students in complex, open-ended activities, involving them in evaluating their own and others’ work’.

Where the Centre for Policy Studies wants to abandon the focus on wellbeing, the researchers argue for the need to ‘make stronger connections’ between programmes that are focused on learning strategies and thinking skills and the wider wellbeing agenda in schools.

‘Self-regulated learning: a literature review’, by Kathryn Duckworth, Rodie Akerman, Alice MacGregor, Emma Salter and John Vorhaus from the Centre for Research on the

Wider Benefits of Learning at the Institute of Education, can be downloaded here

Promoting diversity by narrowing range

Filed under: 2009, September — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 12:04 pm

A proposal from the Centre for Policy Studies to save £633 million a year by abolishing agencies such as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) was presented as a strategy for liberating schools from ’stifling central control’, ‘reducing the bureaucratic burden’ and encouraging ‘diversity’. But it was clearly also driven by a desire to cut back on the promotion of:

    * pupil activity and involvement

    * citizenship

    * personalised learning

    * the every child matters agenda

In the interest of promoting ‘didactic teaching’ and ‘rigorous subject-based teaching’, the report proposes abolishing the Department for Children Schools and Families and replacing it with a government department ‘solely responsible for schools.’

‘School quangos: a blueprint for abolition and reform’ by Tom Burkard & Sam Talbot Rice is published by the Centre for Policy Studies and can be downloaded here

July 5, 2009

On not excluding infants

Filed under: 2009, July — Tags: , , — admin @ 11:51 am

Ofsted’s report on what differentiates the small number of schools that exclude children under the age of seven from those who do not, highlights the wide range of support available for children in the latter schools, and also the engagement of children in organising children’s social time.

‘In many cases,’ the inspectors found, ‘children were involved in defining the class rules or expectations based on the whole-school rules, and designing rewards and even sanctions.’

‘The exclusion from school of children aged four to seven’ (Ref. 090012) can be downloaded from: www.ofsted.gov.uk

Defending National Strategies

Filed under: 2009, July — Tags: , , , — admin @ 11:47 am

The government has defended National Strategies against the charge from the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee that they offer a ‘one size fits all’ approach. In a response to the committee’s report on the National Curriculum, the government dismisses its arguments that:

  • government should focus on sharing the results of research so as to inform teacher practice rather than getting teachers to deliver ‘best practice’
  • there should be a cap on the proportion of time teachers spend teaching the National Curriculum
  • there should be more attention paid to student voice in order to understand how the National Curriculum was experienced by young people

‘All of our reform programmes,’ the document says in response to the latter point, ‘have been developed with a wide range of stakeholders, including a large number of people who are experts in their fields and we believe the Committee does them and the Department a disservice by suggesting that attention has not been paid either to the needs of young people or to continuity and coherence.’

‘National Curriculum: Government Response to the Committee’s Fourth Report of Session 2008-9’, can be downloaded from: www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmchilsch.htm

April 5, 2009

Select committee urges DCSF to adopt intelligence-gathering role

Filed under: 2009, April — Tags: , , , , , , — admin @ 11:33 am

A report on the National Curriculum from the House of Commons Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families urges the DCSF to shift its focus from monitoring and compliance to intelligence gathering and dissemination.

Teachers, the report says, have become de-skilled as a result of an approach that prescribes through the National Strategies how they should teach. And there has been a failure to address the National Curriculum from the perspective of learners.

‘Despite the Department’s emphasis on pupil voice in schools,’ the report says, ‘nowhere in the evidence submitted to us do we get a sense that the Department particularly concerns itself with how the National Curriculum is experienced by children and young people.’

The report recommends that the DCSF should:

  • Prescribe ‘as little as possible’
  • Make the freedoms currently available to Academies available to all schools
  • Cap the amount of teaching time allocated to teaching a National Curriculum

‘National Curriculum: Fourth Report of Session 2008-9’, House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee (HC 344-1) is available from: www.publications.parliament.uk

Steer highlights importance of communal ethos in schools

Filed under: 2009, April — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 11:30 am

In his final report on behaviour in schools, Sir Alan Steer observes that a recent report by Ofsted is one among many that reach the same conclusion; young people behave well and learn well in school cultures where staff enjoy a culture of collegiate professionalism and students are actively engaged in decisions.

‘While schools are communities of individuals with individual needs,’ he says, ‘the impact of the communal ethos on pupils cannot be exaggerated. A positive ethos does not happen by chance, but is the result of hard work over a long period of time by all those connected to the school.’

The solution, he suggests, is for the DCSF and the professional associations to work together on disseminating these understandings.

‘Learning Behaviour: Lessons Learned – A review of behaviour standards and practices in our schools’ by Sir Alan Steer can be downloaded from: www.teachernet.gov.uk/publications

‘Characteristics of outstanding secondary schools in challenging circumstance’ (Ref 080240) can be downloaded from: www.ofsted.gov.uk

March 9, 2009

Consistency in learning

Filed under: 2009, March — Tags: , , — admin @ 11:24 am

The latest report from Sir Alan Steer’s ongoing review of pupil behaviour emphasises the importance of ensuring ‘consistent high quality learning and teaching practice’ so as to promote pupil engagement.

This can only come about if staff work effectively as a team and are mutually supportive of each other and the pupils. The report recommends that schools should have a written policy on teaching and learning that identifies the strategies to be followed by all staff.

www.teachernet.gov.uk/wholeschool/behaviour/steer/

September 4, 2008

Schools need to focus on relationships

Filed under: 2008, September — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 9:41 am

If schools are to tackle educational inequality and raise levels of achievement, they need to be re-designed with a focus around relationships, according to a paper written by policy advisor Charles Leadbeater for The Innovation Unit at the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).

“Children learn,” he says, “when they have the right relationships.  Those relationships make them feel cared for; give them recognition for who they are, where they come from and what they have achieved; motivate them to learn and engage them to be participants in learning.”

Leadbeater says the consequence of adopting such an approach is to promote the importance of:

    * learning in a wide variety of settings from a wide variety of people,

    * giving pupils more say over what they could learn, how, where and when,

    * providing an experience of learning that is collaborative and experiential, encouraging self-evaluation and self-motivation.

What’s next?  21 ideas for 21st century learning by Charles Leadbeater can be downloaded from

www.innovation-unit.co.uk

October 17, 2007

Give power to pupils if you want to improve your school

Filed under: 2007, October — Tags: — admin @ 2:52 pm

Schools can improve their performance through pupil consultation, but only if they genuinely transfer some power and influence to young people, according to a report designed to inform the development of updated government guidance on pupils’ participation in decision-making.

The authors warn policymakers that they should not view pupil voice as merely a means for implementing the changes they want to see. ‘On occasions,’ they say, ‘pupil voice may challenge government and teacher priorities.’

Policymakers and headteachers, it says, have to accept that when power is transferred to young people, the outcomes will be ‘unpredictable.’

Real decision making? – school councils in action (DCSF-RR001), by Geoff Whitty and Emmy Wisby can be downloaded from:

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/RRP/u014805/index.shtml

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