In this issue:
- The latest research in CPD
- Is your curriculum ready for the challenges ahead?
- The future of teaching; Responsibility or Regulation?
- In other news
Welcome to the CUREE Christmas Newsletter
You are all no doubt all busy with Nativity plays, Stars in Your Eyes competitions, reading the hundreds of analyses of the White Paper etc while trying to find a few moments to make preparations for your own Christmas celebration.
The White Paper contained much that was welcome but it did contain much (as Gerard Kelly said in his TES Editorial “No views are expressed on school pets or blocked toilets, but it can only be a matter of time.”). It will be some time before we understand what this all means in practice. Heads will have received the ‘budget letter’ from Mr Gove but this doesn’t yet tell you what your budget will actually be. We do know that the pupil premium will be rather less than the £2,000 per head the Liberal Democrats trailed in their pre-election promises.
But in CUREE we see some Christmas cheer to be extracted amid all this uncertainty:
- there is a robust and growing body of evidence about what works to improve teaching and learning in schools. What’s more the evidence which is high quality, practical and usable is now available in teacher and school friendly formats. The government has committed to continue to make the evidence available to schools and others for free. This matters: in a tough financial environment schools cannot give up improving but nor can they risk wasting money on approaches which only might work. Borrowing an idea from your next door neighbour (classroom or school) feels good but might be poor value for money. Looking at the evidence in user friendly forms can help you work out what will be efficient and effective (see our Route map for directions);
- for 10 years, an army of consultants and advisers have spent their time beavering away at school improvement. As a result, they got to see practice in many different contexts, work with evidence from practitioners and had chance to build an expert overview and some theories about what connects different approaches - but you didn’t. We know, from our work on coaching, that the coach often gets even more expert in the process than the people he/she is coaching ( there’s nothing like learning to teach something to speed up learning). Now, you have the opportunity to repatriate the benefits of supporting practice development - to bring it in-house – if you actively seize the opportunity and remember the importance of external as well as internal contributions;
- there is no more doubt. Only eccentrics and naysayers think otherwise. Whatever else there might be to learn from Tesco or the Harvard Business School, the key to good education is good teaching and good teachers. The Government accepts this. But they are focusing almost entirely on new teachers and it will take a geological time to reap the benefit. Meanwhile schools (and CUREE) have to focus on the professional community as it exists. Our recent CPD workshop (mentioned below) and the studies we explored there, for instance, offer a strong and settled evidence base about how emerging teachers become good and good teachers become outstanding and what’s involved in embedding this in day to day practice.
You can already access our new review of what makes a difference when teachers engage with other research and do their own (see below). Very soon we will be able to show you how this works as an integrated element of curriculum development - watch this space for our synthesis of the evidence about Building an Evidence Base for a Curriculum for the 21st Century in our next e-Newsletter.
Finally, as I write, the Met Office are promising (!) yet more cold snowy weather and a probability of a white Christmas. It sounds lovely and it’s great to look at on the TV (cue Bing Crosby) but it can, as we know, be very disruptive – particularly if you have to travel anywhere. I will be travelling between the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales myself so it’s excitement and trepidation for me!
I wish you the weather you want over the Christmas break and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.
Philippa Cordingley
The Latest Research in CPD
CUREE held a highly successful seminar on 3rd December which focused on exploring the latest research in CPD. Three studies were considered. These were the Building the Evidence Base project, the Teacher Professional Learning and Development review , and the Professional Practitioner use of Research Review. We were also fortunate to have Professor Helen Timperley (pictured left) with us sharing some of her work on the leadership of professional learning. The key findings were presented and delegates discussed the implications for their practice. A particularly successful feature of the day was the opportunity to think about the connections between the three studies.
A number of key messages emerged which included:
- the importance of CPD;
- the need to link CPD with school curriculum development;
- the importance of basing CPD on analysis of the students’ learning needs; and
- the vital roles that peer and specialist support play in CPD.
Further details about the findings from the three studies and the implications for schools can be found here.
Is your curriculum ready for the challenges ahead – why not ask your learners?
Would you say your learners are stretched or coasting? Do some find lessons too hard and others too easy? Or are your strategies for differentiation working well? All good questions, but how do you get the answers and how do they compare with pupils or students elsewhere? An excellent way to find out is to draw on recent nation-wide three-year long research of how learners experience the curriculum . The survey of more than 8300 primary and secondary learners provides a national picture of the levels of challenge, engagement and support pupils feel they receive – broken down by subject, gender, age/phase and region.
You can take advantage, as others have already, of a structured survey for your school. It can provide you and your colleagues with detailed information about how your students experience learning across your school. The survey is a quick and inexpensive way of finding out not only which cohorts feel stretched, and which want more help, but also where support and challenge are taking place most effectively in your school. You can find out more by following this link.
The future of teaching; Responsibility or Regulation?
As we reported in our October newsletter, CUREE co-hosted an event with this title at the Conservative Party Fringe. Philippa Cordingley, our Chief Executive was joined by Nick Gibb, Schools Minister; John Bangs, now Visiting Professor at Cambridge University; and the co-host, Philip Blond of ResPublica. A series of short presentations was followed by a lively and challenging question and answer session. Contributors included many of the leaders of the professional associations, local councillors and academics. Philippa argued that there was now a substantial body of reliable evidence about what works to improve pupil and student learning and school performance. We also know how that evidence is best used by and for teachers and school leaders to bring about those improvements. We worried that unleashing the market on CPD in the context of austerity would result in cheap, faddish evidence-free CPD and poor value for money. While outlining the main thrust of schools’ policy, Nick Gibb was firm in claim that it was based on the evidence of what works and drew particularly on the international evidence. He reasserted the importance of good teaching and teachers. Pedagogy was, he said, was a matter for teachers’ professional judgement, based on the evidence.
You can read a 2 page summary of CUREE’s arguments here and you can view short videos of the presentations by Philippa and the other contributors here.
In other news...
Sing Up
94% of primary schools have registered with Sing Up, a national singing programme which started in 2007 and which aimed to make Britain a ‘Singing Nation.’ What makes it all tick? CUREE is conducting an evaluation which aims to how and where unique Sing Up approach has contributed to the learning of pupils, adults and leaders across the system.
GTC RfT Video Clips
Philippa Cordingley has recently been interviewing educational researchers, including Dylan Wiliam and Sir Jim Rose to support the use of the GTC’s Research for Teachers (RfT). Clips from the interviews will support practitioners in using the RfT resources and will soon appear on the GTC’s website.