December ENewsletter

Contents

• The Philippa Blog
• Closing the Gap
• License to create
• Collective approaches to professional learning across a MAT
• The Three Letter Acronym rides again
• Maths Workshop
• Film Club Inclusions Project
• Teacher Supply
• Route Map To Go
• Exceptional and strong schools and those wanting to accelerate progress
• High quality CPD and professional learning opportunities available in the Spring 2015
• Out and About
• Innovative Approaches in Maths

 

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The Philippa Blog - gazing into the middle distance

The Autumn term is passing like a whirlwind, partly because of the number of conferences that seem to be taking place here and overseas. The home grown variety seem to be linked to the impending election; pretty much everyone wants to offer dos and don’ts to the incoming government of whatever stripe. This e-news explores practice and evidence about some of the more interesting ideas I have come across.

Future of the profession – there is a lot of support for focussing on this – and some frustration about the lack of government  willingness to fund the inception of and infrastructure for a national (Royal or otherwise) College for Teachers. At the OECD event in Paris, where this was a hot topic for every country, there was a widespread international thirst for putting evidence informed practice at the centre of such developments. You can see both my presentations on this here.

Yes it is great that smart people are trying to raise charitable funding and to put a business model together for a National College to build such a future. But Government also needs to show the way by telling us about the powers it will give up. Defining standards might be a good starting point. Certainly ours look very thin compared with the vibrant ones developed in Australia. See my blog for more news and what this has to do with John Hattie.

The other themes emerging from lots of conferences are future related too. See for example, David Putnam’s thought provoking piece on helping to develop citizens who can develop social, economic, psychological and social identities in whatever world turmoil they find themselves – a fabulous presentation at OECD.

This more rounded picture of education is another prevalent theme. In the FE and Skills sector the world class skills competitions have all been won by students whose employers focus not just on skills but upon helping students develop as citizens and family members as well as employees. Similarly, in the exceptional schools we worked with for Teach First, the central focus is on understanding students’ lives deeply and creating educational experiences that are meaningful and challenging to them.

 

In 1988 a headteacher described the narrowing of the curriculum based solely on metrics thus “I used to know what my job was. It was to help young people become wise and good. All I am asked to do now is make them clever.” A lot of us are worrying now about how to avoid such traps and about the absence of an infrastructure to help our many powerful leaders create a whole bigger than the sum of what have become increasingly small parts...

Philippa Cordingley

Chief Executive

Follow @CUREE_official

Follow @PhilippaCcuree

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Closing the Gap

We are excited to be running the new RTI trial for Closing the Gap.  Although there is lots of analysis still to be done before we can get a strong sense of what happened during the pilot phase we are thrilled that those who took part in the intervention were able to track impressive progress in both reading and writing.  It was also brilliant to have met with the seven schools already embedding RTI and we would really like other schools who are carrying on with the intervention and are interested in becoming a part of our RTI network to get in touch so we can help you all pool resources. 

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License to Create

It was fun, if a bit challenging, to be asked to write “an essay” in the License to Create series commissioned by RSA. I still think we will be missing a trick if new forms of accountability only focus on teachers as individuals.  We know teachers who transform lives do it together. Why can’t we recognise that? See my blog (follow this link to the full publication including essays from Dylan Wiliam, Alison Peacock and Tristram Hunt – and a cartoon of yours truly). 

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Collective approaches to professional learning across a MAT

In Singapore the average size of primary schools is 2,000 pupils! We don’t have many primary schools that size so it has been a huge privilege to work with one approaching that size in east London along with the other schools in the MAT. We have been creating a SKEIN overview of how well staff and pupil learning is being connected across the MAT and identifying ways of making this ever more effective and efficient.

 

Operating at this scale makes very explicit the depth of thinking and systems development primary colleagues are capable of; something that can sometimes be obscured by the more intimate and informal approaches that prevail in smaller settings. It isn’t that being systematic doesn’t happen in small schools. It can and often does. But there is less to prompt colleagues to make their thinking explicit and their learning visible (and less resource for doing that). So we are especially enjoying helping 4 schools at very different stages of development take each others’ development forward in connected, but also differentiated ways, through our action research, Research Lesson Study tools and Route Map resources.

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The Three Letter Acronym rides again

CUREE’s support for the school-led self improving system acquired a new dimension in September when we became part of the new Teaching and Leadership Adviser team of the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL).  Paul Crisp, Jill Wilson and Lisa Bradbury (pictured above) are the designated Advisers working directly with schools in the West Midlands region supported by Emma Culey back in the office.

We will be working mostly in the southern part of the region – Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Solihull, Coventry and Warwickshire. Our role is to help the College take forward its objectives for the self improving system with a particular emphasis on initial teacher education, school to school support and professional and leadership development and learning.

It is exciting to be working with lots of teaching school alliances (TSAs), National and Specialist Leaders (of Education and Governance) and with School Direct providers but also with local authorities, academy groups, diocesan authorities and other groups and networks. This term we have been concentrating on establishing relationships, meeting with system leaders in various roles, particularly with heads of teaching schools and school direct providers. Key activities have been start up meetings with newly designated teaching schools focussed on action plans and helping larger School Direct providers assess their readiness to recruit in what promises to be a more competitive environment as the job market improves for new graduates.

We have already learned a massive amount about the work the region’s schools are doing and the challenges they face. Here are some early impressions of themes emerging across the region:

1. a)   The perceived ‘threat’ of Ofsted inspection continues to dominate particularly in primary schools and even in schools currently holding a good or outstanding grade
2. The growth in the number of teaching school alliances across much of the sub-region is increasing staff and leadership development provision but the ‘market’ is confusing to potential users. Some TSAs have individual websites promoting their services. Others have collaborated and bring their programmes together in one common website. Even so, school leaders are struggling to a) track down what’s on offer, b) evaluate its potential usefulness to them and c) compare and choose between the alternatives
3. At the same time  providers point out just how difficult it is to know what other schools need of them as schools have been more in the habit of responding to offers made, shaped by national policies than using their own goals and vision to identify  development needs.
4. Something similar operates in the school-to-school support area where the traditional monitoring and brokerage role that LA staff used to have is diminishing under pressure of resources. New networks of relationships focussed on identifying early warning signs and brokering pre-emptive support are necessary and some are emerging.
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Common across these issues is the need for some joining up of individual effort for mutual benefit: to provide coherent information for potential users and to reduce wasteful effort by providers. So if you’ve got a good approach to this you’d like to share or see the need but don’t quite know how to move it on, get in touch. We would be pleased to help.

 

Paul, Jill and Lisa can be contacted at CUREE, via their DfE email addresses or by phone at 024 7652 4036

Paul Crisp	paul.crisp@curee.co.uk	Paul.CRISP@education.gsi.gov.uk
Jill Wilson	jill.wilson@curee.co.uk	Jill.WILSON@education.gsi.gov.uk
Lisa Bradbury	lisa.bradbury@curee.co.uk	Lisa.BRADBURY@education.gsi.gov.uk

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 Maths Workshop

At the start of the new school year the media spotlight was very much focused upon the new National Curriculum and in particular the increased demands of the Maths curriculum. Equally the Learning and Skills sector is wresting with the requirement for 16-18 year olds to continue working towards GCSE Maths and English. We were therefore delighted with the very timely visit of Dr Roberta Hunter from New Zealand at the end of September. At a symposium hosted by CUREE she shared the work she has undertaken with 

Primary teachers around the development of Mathematical Communities of Practice and we heard about the experience to date of Primary teachers form Willenhall Community Primary School who visited Roberta in New Zealand after we showed them her research and are beginning to develop the approach.

 

Her work draws from the Iterative Best Evidence Synthesis (BES) Programme, established by the Ministry of Education in New Zealand. The synthesis represents a systematic and credible evidence base about quality teaching in mathematics and explains the sort of pedagogical approaches that lead to improved engagement and desirable outcomes for learners from diverse social groups.

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Film Club - Inclusions Project

CUREE were delighted to work with Into Film over the past year to find out more about their Inclusion Projects. These projects aimed to use film to help specific groups of students. These projects targeted:

• newly arrived students and their peers;
• students with SEN and their peers; and
• students in rural areas who rarely travel outside of their community.