5 Great Reasons to Take More Control

As Headteachers and school leaders begin to consider the new school year, thoughts now begin to turn to the prospect of ensuring quality teaching and learning. This presents different challenges that require a shift in how we assess our daily school provision, and how we capture and support improvement. Whilst we can say that risk assessments and safety have been a priority, we know that teaching and learning has to always be the number one job. Let's talk about leadership and let's take a moment to park the risk management.

Now is a great time to re-evaluate our school improvement processes. To do this, I have identified five areas of consideration focusing on how we may traditionally observe, identify and collate our views of everyday provision. These five areas are an invitation to our school leaders to take control of how they can move their schools forward, at a time when they have been bombarded with so many external management directives. We know that school leaders are very good at taking the positives from adverse situations, because they are wired to be solution focused in challenging situations. I have confidence that schools can now create much more flexible and collaborative approaches that can enable provision to actually strengthen and grow. I'm going to share these points with you because I recognised them over recent years in the schools where I was the Headteacher. I now see how we can apply critical improvements in reaction to the current logistical agenda, with a clear, valid and justified rationale. Some of the familiar and yet limited aspects noted below actually took our school an awful long way, and so now we can take the opportunity build on these foundations. What we need at this moment in time are improved methods which allow the Headteacher and leadership team to have a clear view of school provision, on any given day. This allows leadership teams to make the right strategic decisions, with confidence, and the increased likelihood of success.

1. The School Calendar.

Schools have often been rooted to calendar dates to perform certain tasks. We know that September is the date when the school improvement plan is always presented, largely because of the previous school years data outcomes. This means that we could create detailed and significant strategic interventions, without any real certainty of success. School leaders know the fragility of summative data sets and yet are expected to perform this exercise, quite often for the external eye. This is the first opportunity to improve our systems so that they can reflect an ongoing process and not an annual event.

Reason number one derives directly from an emphasis on test analysis, and yet we do not have, and may not have this year, statutory testing.

2. Appraisals.

In 2012 the government ramped up the expectations with regards to performance management. This was a political reaction to the previous process, where teachers could be seen to progress through the pay scales unless there was a competency issue. This was never about helping teachers to teach better, it was much more about accountability and expectations, or even a lack of trust. This means that lesson observations became a bit of dirty word, because teachers often perceived them as a pass or fail process for the benefit of career progression.

This is a great second reason to re-work and re-articulate how schools can focus more on individual professional development.

3. Lesson Observations.

Don't get me wrong, I have seen some great, detailed and well implemented systems of observing teachers. But if we take a step back, there are no doubt improvements to be made. On Twitter, we can see a recurring theme of uncertainty, with schools unsure of how best to combine this process with the new norm. Again, observations tend to be diary driven to fit with appraisal cycles and governors validation meetings. School leaders can be seen spending hours, writing a report stating what happened in the lesson, when both members of the report audience (the observer and the teacher) were in the same room. This report would more than likely conclude with a few areas for improvement. The teacher in question would often be relieved that the observation was over, because of its perception to be directly appraisal related. Each observer involved in the cycle will probably have required non-contact time because of the work involved, with little time to follow-up and work alongside their colleagues afterwards. What we really should be doing is performing lighter touch, skilled, shorter and more frequent drop-in observations across the school. With increased time for follow-up coaching and feedback. This way we may see slightly less of our more secure teachers, whilst dedicating more time to working with staff who require more support and collaboration.

This is our third opportunity. Let's make feedback the focus for our observations and not 'judgement'.

Now we're starting to improve because this process represents 'business as usual'. Anything less has little point or credibility...see below.

4. 'Fireworks Lessons'.

OK so this is an OFSTED term, and so forgive me for its use, but we know what this means. It's worth bearing this concept in mind because it can be dangerous. These are the lessons especially prepared for observation purposes. These ones don't necessarily reflect the day to day classroom provision. Instead, they tend to occur largely because of worry, and because a 'good' outcome could signify that there would be no reference to the dreaded 'RI'. If you can pull this one off, you could take a few points for improvement, close the door, and be left alone for another term. Once again this takes us back to the unfortunate perception of appraisal.

If our observation outcomes reflect such lessons, then any actions following would more than likely not be effective in helping the teacher to develop a sustainable daily practice. As a Headteacher, it can be reassuring and valuable to see 'good' outcomes, however this in itself is not going to support improvement. We have to be wary of the 'halo' effect and ensure that the view of learning that we gather is consistent with what is happening throughout each day.

Reason four is an obvious one, but it still exists because it serves to satisfy rather than to improve.

5. Learning Walks and Book Studies.

Learning walks and book studies/scrutinies/looks can all provide a head teacher and their leadership team with the insight required to self-assess provision. Once again, they can be pretty clunky affairs at best. Learning walks for example can often lack focus and objectivity, and can do little to impact. Instead, this can be seen to be a quality control exercise, falling somewhere in between formal observations. Headteachers can be left with multiple documents following the walk, layered with feedback, which can either lack an agreed focus or intent, or require careful collation. This again serves to make them impractical, labour intensive and time consuming. Learning walks can all be a little hit and miss, and yet they have so much potential to capture provision if performed well. Book studies, book looks, book scrutinies are all one and the same and are highly significant. Or they could be, if they were reconsidered. Our pupil books should tell us exactly what the children are learning, they should reflect the schools curriculum and the teachers knowledge and application of this. They are also our best indicators of progress. The unfortunate thing about these is that they are time consuming, and so they are again largely occasional.

Reason five could be great couldn't it? These processes could be so much more flexible and well executed, with more staff involved, more often.

So What Next?

I looked at all of these systems in great detail and decided to implement methods that could be more collaborative, valid and credible. I worked to identify any limitations and to reduce them to the minimum. As a Headteacher in a school in a challenging corner of town, I have always been aware of my big external conversations and so making sure that we could be seen to clear on our methods, and to have answers to any questions, has always been advantageous. And so we decided to give more weight to the methods that focused on knowing more, accuracy, transparency, collaboration and subsequently improvement.

You will now note the casual inclusion of our Ofsted inspection quotes. I make no apologies for the fact that I think we did a really great job of improving some significant areas of our school provision. To have external validation can serve to create confidence and direction.

‘The headteacher has been inspirational in improving the school’s performance. He has had a strong impact on improving the quality of teaching and raising the achievement of all pupils.’?

To do this we created a set of observation and learning walk descriptors that could be used on an ipad or tablet. At every meeting and in every Headteacher's office, we now see this kind of technology. Largely used for communication and note-taking, there has to be a place to better utilise these devices. Once we integrated this technology in its simplest form, this concept revolutionised everything that I have identified. Here's why. Let's say that we put four significant, core focus lesson areas on an ipad survey tool. Attitudes to learning, management and organisation, pupil contribution, and learning value. These terms are non-specific and allow the observer to insert their views and thoughts on any number of aspects of classroom provision, without deviating from the most important elements. They can also serve to directly support observer consistency. If we now put in some descriptors for each, that can then indicate success. For this we could either use Ofsted style descriptors, or these could be simply switched to RAG ratings in the interest of focusing more on growth rather than a perceived pass or fail.

'The systems in place to assess pupils’ progress are meticulous. Pupils who are identified as underachieving can, therefore, be quickly identified and given extra help.'

We then made sure that we had a common language, by sharing all of the descriptors with the team. We put windows in our diaries where the learning walks and observations would take place and we emphasised that we wanted to capture business as usual. Any member of staff could perform drop-ins focusing on their subject or in the interest of their own CPD, and because they all wanted to, we established a culture of trust with an agreed purpose. We also made clear that we could give regular, quick and simple individual individual and staff feedback. So we now have a process that can be performed at any time, can capture the learning more accurately and can give quick feedback. Now we can really strengthen our system further, by significantly increasing credibility. To do this, we hosted collaborative learning walks and drop-ins that involved pairs or teams of teachers, middle leaders, learning partners and Headteacher colleagues. We found that we could visit multiple classrooms in a morning session. For example, if four people were observing, and visited five classrooms each, we generated a single report on that morning that captured forty observations. All of the information entered, would be sent in real-time to the online Headteacher dashboard. This means that for every descriptor, I could see the strongest areas of provision and any areas for improvement. Another PDF report presented every detail of every observation and all of the feedback entries as well. As a Headteacher, knowing your school can sometimes feel dependent on your last data set. With this process, I could be confident in my knowledge of what we did well in each classroom and where we may need to intervene and support.

‘Pupils’ achievement has improved from requires improvement to good since the last inspection. Pupils are currently?making sustained and rapid progress.’

And so we then created ipad survey frameworks for book scrutines, with twenty or so teachers looking at three books from each class in staff meetings, logging in their laptops and then feeding back. This would then give us one report with sixty entries, capturing exactly what the children were taught, and how well they had learned. For our Governors, we could take learning walks looking at behaviour and attitudes on the corridors and playgrounds. We could also focus our learning walks on pupil premium children or children with SEND, with the SENDco and the responsible governor working together.

‘The governing body is knowledgeable about the school and fully involved in raising the quality of teaching and pupils’ achievement.’

To Conclude

There is no doubt that our current adversity has the potential to allow Headteachers some unexpected freedom to shape the future of how we evaluate and improve standards in teaching and learning. We don't have to lose what we have already implemented, but we can add to our repertoire, which is all that we did. We know that the accountability remains on standards, and we now have to re-think how we assess this. It makes sense to return to focusing on individual teachers and how well they provide in their classrooms. This way we have an invitation to help them to improve and reflect. We can talk more about 'growth' and less about 'performance'.

We must also create systems that can be effective and sustainable in our current climate, where we know that there are now a significant number of barriers to consider. Can we really be expected this year to observe how we used to? Do we expect to have, or to use the pupil data in the same ways that we did previously? And will we really have the continuity to work with termly cycles and diary dates? We know that there are many more questions than answers at the moment, but I also know that we can use this opportunity to dictate how we proceed to evaluate and strengthen our schools. With a greater spotlight on teaching and learning, combined with a lack of statutory data, this is where our great and innovative school leaders can now begin to determine and control the direction of their school improvement.

David Rushby @DavidNautilus1

The Nautilus school improvement tool is an online school self-evaluation platform designed by a Headteacher to give primary Headteachers and school leaders the most efficient, accurate and credible overview of their school provision.

Create your free school account and take a learning walk or observation today. Visit nautilus.education or book a demo today.subscription prices start from ￡300 per school, per year.

'The headteacher is unwavering in his vision to ensure that all pupils have a happy, healthy and positive start to their school years. All leaders and staff commit to this vision. Staff morale is high. Many staff comment on the positive atmosphere within the school, and when one teacher said, ‘I love this school – this is the best job I have ever had!’ many others enthusiastically agreed.'