Closing the Gap and Pupil Premium
As John Dunford (newly appointed Pupil Premium Champion) said at an event this week, closing the achievement gap is proving to be a difficult problem to get any traction on (thought we managed to do so very successfully when the gap was girls' underachievement). He also pointed out that schools now receive a very substantial resource (now over £2Bn annually and as much as £1,300 per primary pupil from next year). We governors have a responsibility to ensure that this money delivers and we will be subject to more scrutiny about that (not least from Ofsted).
Many schools have raised the attainment of their vulnerable pupils but fail to close the gap (which is still 20% even in the relatively high performing London schools). There are many reasons for this (some of them deep rooted in the psyche of teachers) but one of them is the perceived lack of interventions which actually help solve the problem. This is where the new Closing the Gap: Test and Learn programme comes in.
Testing targeted interventions
The National College has launched a major new research programme of large scale field trials testing seven different interventions with promise in helping to close the achievement gap for young people. Over 180 teaching school alliances and 750 individual schools are involved in a randomised controlled trial running for around two years. The last of four launch events concludes this week and more detailed training starts shortly thereafter. The trials include two interventions targeting literacy, two targeting numeracy and two which broader leadership objectives. The interventions span the entire schooling age range.
You can find out more about the programme on the DfE website here or on CUREE's here. There will also be some dedicated resources on the National College's website soon.
If the project achieves its aims, we will have up to seven ways of approaching the 'gap problem' with very strong evidence about their usefulness. The whole project runs over two years but we should see quite a lot of valuable evidence in about a year's time
Why tell governors?
This is an important project - probably the biggest of its kind in education ever - which governors should know about. More specifically, if your school is one of the 700+ participants, you might want to find out how its going. The participating schools stand to benefit a great deal but they also have to contribute quite a lot too. In particular, they have to organise some on-line testing of a target group of pupils, staff have to participate in training and then they have to try the new approaches out with those children consistently over a period of weeks (typically 8 - 12 weeks). And all this has to be set up at breakneck speed (or, at least, a lot faster than schools are used to) while the school continues to run as usual. This can be hard and some positive reinforcement and a bit of monitoring from the GB can help counteract flagging morale
I'm certainly going to be watching this myself as the school where I am Chair is likely to be trialling one of these interventions.
Paul Crisp