Leaders need a holistic view of their school if they are to set priorities that will truly accelerate learning for all of their pupils and especially for the most vulnerable, says Philippa Cordingley
Beyond Data
As a school leader you have lots of data and information at your disposal. But new research exploring what helps schools to build momentum and become exceptional suggests that leaders who want to accelerate progress need more than data: they need a holistic, evidence-based, bird’s-eye view of their school, organised around questions capable of firing everyone’s commitment and imagination.
Our new research for Teach First (www.curee.co.uk/files/shared/GSM_report_public_version.pdf) explores the challenges facing schools needing to build momentum and the practices of exceptional schools. It points to two powerful organising questions:
- What are the barriers to learning that our pupils are experiencing?
- What can we do to remove them?
Answering these questions means looking not at the data alone. In the current system, schools are often data rich but also, frequently, evidence poor. Data sets certainly help point leaders towards potential barriers to progress. However, it is qualitative and quantitative evidence – not just what people do but also why they do it and how they feel about it – that helps us pinpoint key questions and ways forwards.
Making use of a broader range of evidence for a small number of strategic purposes helps school leaders prioritise for accelerating learning, especially for their most vulnerable pupils.
Factors in exceptional schools
Some schools are truly exceptional in transforming life chances. In these schools, all pupils make rapid curriculum and cognitive progress and develop social skills and cultural capital.
Such schools have several key measures in place to align everybody’s efforts and use evidence to ensure that those efforts are focused where they can make most difference. They provide, model and support intensively a single, evidence-informed model of pedagogy designed with the needs of vulnerable learners in the foreground to ensure they can genuinely benefit from more complex approaches. These approaches enable teachers and leaders to concentrate on:
- getting to know their pupils in the round
- understanding how pupils experience the curriculum in life outside school so they can make lessons meaningful
Exceptional schools also develop a sophisticated mix of systems, professional skills and attitudes designed to synthesise different kinds of evidence about pupils in order to identify and remove barriers to learning, pupil by pupil.