Just Great Teaching: How to Tackle the Top Ten Issues in UK Classrooms 1472964233, 9781472964236

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Just Great Teaching

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Praise for JUST GREAT TEACHING ‘Just Great Teaching is an excellent synthesis of evidence-based pedagogical methodology that is vital reading for all teachers. Now is the time to improve standards, workload and wellbeing in one fell swoop.’ Leah Crimes, Head of Sixth Form, @LeahCrimes ‘Just Great Teaching provides an honest, solution-focused account on the current state of teaching in the UK. For teachers determined to make lasting improvements to their practice, this book is an outstanding point of reference supported by evidence-based research findings.’ Fabian Darku, Further Education Teacher and Blogger, @DarkuFabian ‘Essential reading for anyone involved in teaching and learning, at any level. Ross reminds you what is actually important in the classroom and provides evidencebased strategies to enable these aspects to be effectively implanted. Case studies from real schools lend credence and valuable references for when you implement the ideas yourself. Everything presented is justified, assessed and evaluated by Ross, giving you the confidence to put it into practice in your classroom.’ Chris Fletcher, SCITT Director, Yorkshire and Humber Teacher Training, @sciencefletch ‘The details of education research and the case studies create a resource suitable for any teacher, and they can discuss with their team the ideas that will make for great teaching in their context.’ Allana Gay, Headteacher of Vita et Pax Preparatory and BAMEed Co-Founder, @AllanaG13 ‘A book that starts from the position of inclusion, valuing every child and member of the school community. Practical and easy to read, it speaks to an audience across the education community. Its content – particularly around wellbeing – provides useful background and advice for parents, charities and others working with schools.’ Anita Kerwin-Nye, Lead, Every Child Should, @anitakntweets ‘Ross provides both practical and evidence-informed suggestions to the main challenges in education. This is underpinned by real examples from schools across the country as case studies to provide context, balance and ideas. This is a mustread for all educators, from teachers to senior leaders, tackling the challenges we all face with practical solutions that can make a real difference to students.’ Stephen Logan, Deputy Headteacher, @Stephen_Logan ‘Bursting with fresh ideas, packed with practical tips, filled with wise words, this is an inspiring guide for all teachers.’ Lee Elliot Major, Professor of Social Mobility, University of Exeter and Co-Author of What Works?, @Lem_Exeter ‘Rooted in relevant research and backed with practical examples, Just Great Teaching provides clear solutions to the everyday issues encountered in teaching. Whether you are about to start your teaching career or wish to reflect on your current practice, this book will support and challenge you in equal measures.’ Chris Moyse, Head of Staff Development, Bridgwater and Taunton College Trust

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‘Another masterpiece from Ross that speaks to the hearts and minds of teachers and leaders alike. Importantly, it provides practical solutions to the challenges faced in schools on a daily basis, and is a call to action for teachers to own their own classroom practice whilst prioritising their own mental health and wellbeing.’ Patrick Ottley-O’Connor, Executive Principal, Coach and Leadership Development Consultant, @ottleyoconnor ‘This book is a celebration of schools that are meeting the challenges all teachers and school leaders face, celebrating diversity and individualism. Ross McGill weaves first-hand stories, views and research into a manual that starts with thoughtful provocation and then incorporates the testimony of practitioners in a multitude of different contexts and guides you through the application of these ideas within your own.’ Pran Patel, Outward Facing Leader, @MrPranPatel ‘Just Great Teaching weaves a path through the key issues relevant to teaching in the UK at the end of the 2010s. It knits together the historical context and the research prior to providing practical advice for the present, occasionally offering a glimpse of a possible future. Just Great Teaching is a hugely useful reference guide for new and experienced teachers and school leaders – it’s one to read and use time and again!’ James Pope, Director, InspirEDucate, @popejames ‘Ross McGill’s book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in improving their teaching practice. This is a powerful working document for a better education system.’ Bobby Seagull, Maths Teacher, University of Cambridge Doctoral Student, Author and BBC TV Presenter, @bobby_seagull ‘Ross McGill does it again. Taking a problem-solving approach to key aspects of teachers’ work – marking, assessing, planning and pedagogy – he provides a research-informed, practical set of suggestions to ensure “just great teaching”. This book walks the talk of teacher and student wellbeing.’ Stephen Tierney, CEO, Blogger and Author of Liminal Leadership, @LeadingLearner ‘An absolute must-read for all educators! Ross seamlessly presents a clear, simple, research-led approach to improve education. He captures every question school leaders, middle leaders and teachers are asking about ten areas of practice, by questioning educators who are faced with difficulties in the current heavily inspected, political and technological climate.’ Shafina Vohra, Psychology Teacher and Head of Faculty, @ShafinaVohra ‘This is a great new book that goes beyond tips for teachers. The recommended approaches will enhance teachers’ learning because the book provides details of how to adopt research-based strategies and explains why these approaches support students’ learning.’ Elaine Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Education, University of Cambridge, @egwilson

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BLOOMSBURY EDUCATION Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY EDUCATION and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain, 2019 Text copyright © Ross Morrison McGill, 2019 Illustrations copyright © Polly Norton, 2019 This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Material from UK Government documents used in this publication are approved under an Open Government Licence: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/ Ross Morrison McGill has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: PB: 978-1-4729-6423-6; ePDF: 978-1-4729-6425-0; ePub: 978-1-4729-6426-7 Text design by Marcus Duck Design

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Just Great Teaching How to tackle the top ten issues in UK classrooms

Ross Morrison McGill

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Dedication Every book has a journey, full of high and low moments for the author, yet there is one thing that I have been blessed with while writing each of mine: my family. When my first book was published in 2013, my son Freddie (then aged two) began his love of reading and writing, chewing on the corners of the book cover as I asked him to hold a copy aloft for a photograph. In 2015, as I proofread the 200-page proof of book two on the living room floor, Freddie would happily crawl over the draft, using this as an opportunity to ‘play cars’. Book three sparked his interest a little more. He would recite ‘Mark. Plan. Teach.’ in the back garden as I shared the occasional video broadcast with the world; the words ‘like’, ‘follow’ and ‘subscribe’ would pass his lips as his confidence grew in front of the camera. For book four, once the concept was in place, Freddie (at age eight) was adamant that this book would be called ‘Teaching Around the World’ because ‘that’s what Daddy does’, illustrating the front cover of the book with a drawing of Planet Earth, fully engaged with the process. Today, Freddie (now going on 16), thanks to his mother, Ms Taylor and Ms Hancock, has developed a love of reading and writing. Despite a heavy workload at times, I hope that I may have influenced his love of literacy in some shape or form as an educator and as a parent. Freddie is the person I take inspiration from on a daily basis. I watch as he learns and as he copes with the day-to-day challenges that life brings, observing his tears of sorrow and his unique sense of humour develop. He is brutally honest and highly critical, but at the same time my biggest fan, and he keeps me grounded at all times. As a parent, a teacher and an author, finding out what questions need to be asked and sharing the answers with others is what I do in my daily life. I hope some of the questions I ask in this book will help make our schools a better place for all children in the United Kingdom, including my son. This book is for you, Freddie.

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Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................viii About the author ...............................................................................x Foreword by Lord Jim Knight ...........................................................xi Introduction .....................................................................................xii

1. Marking and assessment .... 1

6. Behaviour and exclusions .. 117

2. Planning ........................... 26

7. SEND ................................. 138

3. Teaching and learning ..... 49

8. Curriculum ........................160

4. Teacher wellbeing ........... 70

9. Research-led practice ......180

5. Student mental health .... 97

10. CPD ................................. 203

Conclusion ..................................................................................... 222 Bibliography .................................................................................. 223 Index .............................................................................................. 235

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Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express a written thank you to each of my ten case study schools for their trust when allowing me to visit them with the intention of sharing their stories. I wrote this book with the intention of highlighting the issues all schools are seeking to improve and of celebrating the schools that are dealing with one of the issues as best they can. I hope that this book shines a light on the wonderful work that you are achieving. It is the passion, commitment and expertise that each of you is already providing to our young people that our media and politicians fail to recognise. Secondly, I must thank Tom Sherrington for the inspiration behind this book title. When we both made the decision to become full-time travelling teachers, we did our first job together in South London at a self-designed teacher training event. On a sticky, hot summer’s day in July 2017, we gathered around 70 people in a room to work with some of the ideas we have developed over our 50 years of collective work within education. Our goal was to strip back a lot of the nonsense that has emerged across the system, with the rise of EdTech, assessment and teacher workload contributing to mental health issues and flawed accountability metrics, which result in many of our teachers leaving the classroom prematurely and continue to blight our profession. Tom and I were both victims of the latter at a leadership level, yet I still believe we both had a good ten- or 15-year innings left to do within schools. Although our work today is increasingly at a global level, and, arguably, our impact is much wider than working within just one school, we are both by-products of an accountability system that fell short of what it was designed to achieve: hold schools to account and make recommendations for improvement, but keep the people we are evaluating working within the school because we need those qualified professionals who already know the answers. We called our training event ‘Just Great Teaching’. I would like to say thank you to Holly Gardner, John Dabell, Dr Helen Woodley, Daisy-May Lewis, Steven Robertson, Hollie Anderton and the large number of teacher bloggers who have been working behind the scenes on my website. Without these people, www.teachertoolkit.co.uk would not be supporting teachers around the world. Much of the information that has been published on my own website has contributed to my own professional development. Recently, Professor Pooja Agarwal said to me on a @TeacherToolkit podcast: ‘There is a special place in hell reserved for teachers who do not share ideas with other teachers.’ There is a message in this for everyone: it is important to share, collaborate and learn from one another, even if we disagree. Thanks to Hannah Marston, Helen Diamond, Laura Beveridge and Rachel Lindley – the team at Bloomsbury Education who have kept me on track and applied the necessary pressure where needed, at times presenting me with book title suggestions, cover designs and various deadlines to meet, all with smiles, cakes and coffee!

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On my fourth attempt, this book has probably been the happiest piece of work that I have written to date, and it has been a real pleasure to collaborate with the schools and the individual teachers who have submitted online data. To each and every one of you who reads my website, to the tens of thousands of educators who contact me through social media, and to the thousands of teachers I’ve had the honour of working with in my teacher training sessions across the UK, in other parts of Europe and in the Middle East – all of you have been part of this journey with me and I hope that this book provides a small shift in national dialogue about the issues in our education system we can fix together. To headteacher Maire Thompson, working in Northern Ireland, and to the colleagues I’ve been in touch with in Scotland. These people have offered valuable insights into the challenges that teachers are facing in these areas of the UK and have allowed me to ‘pick their brains’ as part of developing the research within the book. Finally, a special thank you to each educator who has provided an end-of-chapter summary and has taken a moment out of their busy schedules to read various sections and provide some experience and insight to conclude each theme. I highly recommend connecting with each of these individuals because I draw inspiration from each of them. If this book inspires you, then I suspect their evaluations of the issues will also. These educators are: Priya Lakhani OBE, Raj Unsworth, Dr Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel, Adrian Bethune, Dr Sarah Vohra, Jules Daulby, Angela Browne, Andria Zafirakou MBE, Mark Martin MBE and Professor Andy Hargreaves. And last but not least, to charismatic Lord Jim Knight, a man I met accidentally through social media in 2014, and whose deep passion for education I have since learned to understand. Some of our politicians do get it right and do play their part in developing a system for supporting all children, including the most vulnerable. Jim is one of the rare breeds of people we see in politics, using his position in the House of Lords to help make the world of education a better place. In a House of Lords speech in November 2018, Jim spoke out on school funding. I was moved by what he said as he summed up the real issue for all schools and teachers: ‘Without the necessary support and without a sufficient number of teachers available for work in the pipeline, as a result, the school suffers declining teacher quality, results suffer, the high-stakes accountability system kicks in, followed by parental choice and a collapse in budgets and the end of the headteacher’s career. This is the spiral of decline, and school and local authority funding cuts are often at the heart of that story.’ As a consequence of this speech, I asked him to write the foreword and have asked him to take a moment from his busy schedule to offer a policy-level insight to this book. For this, Jim, I am eternally grateful. Readers, I ask you to watch Jim’s speech given in the House of Lords and carefully read his words of wisdom in the foreword of this book. If we had more Jims in our cabinet offices, we could actually become world-leading. The shame of it all is that the work teachers and schools are already doing across the UK is worth celebrating, and all of our politicians need to unlock the true potential of our education system. Let’s focus on Just Great Teaching. ix

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About the author

Ross Morrison McGill, also known as @TeacherToolkit, the ‘most followed educator on social media in the UK’, is the founder of one of the most popular education websites in the world. He is an award-winning blogger, author and teacher with over 25 years’ experience of working in schools. The Sunday Times listed him as one of the ‘500 most influential people in Britain’. Ross remains the only classroom teacher to have featured to this day. He is the bestselling author of 100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Outstanding Lessons, Teacher Toolkit and Mark. Plan. Teach.

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Foreword Most people I speak to working in British schools just want stability. They’ve had enough of curriculum changes, new accountability, funding cuts and a general sense of moving goalposts on a skewed playing field. The bad news is that the only thing that is certain is uncertainty. There are big pressures for change within the system. The demographic bulge coming through from primary into secondary schools puts increasing pressure on the need to recruit more teachers, especially in subjects like maths and physics. Schools with no specialists in those key areas are starting to become more common. Can we continue with the obsession with academic subject siloes without the teachers to deliver them? The pressures on teacher workload are widely acknowledged. Recent surveying for the OECD TALIS report suggests the working hours of teachers in England are the worst in Europe and not because of long hours in the classroom. Teachers are not the only ones feeling the pressure. Young people are finding childhood increasingly difficult with significant rises in mental health problems as a result. This is for many complex reasons, but schools are the one universal children’s service and need to be able to respond. These internal pressures for change are being matched by some huge consequences from outside education. With acute talent shortages and a need for more diversity of thinking, employers are using analytic tools to improve their recruitment. These tools allow them to see what people can do more directly than a certificate. They are therefore devaluing qualifications as a proxy for skills and moving on from using CVs to sift candidates. This trend has consequences for universities. Student finance in England means graduates leaving with effective rates of taxation at 48 per cent. Students want change and if their qualifications are increasingly devalued in the jobs market then they will opt for apprenticeships instead. Earning whilst learning has an attractive ring to it. Schools have been assisting universities with selection for years. Our qualifications are designed to help admissions tutors and prepare students for onward study. Our curriculum reflects the qualifications and our pedagogy reflects the curriculum. If ambitious students cease to value the university experience, they will cease to value their school experience too. The school systems in the UK are not sustainable and must change. The curriculum changes in Scotland are a good start and the Welsh changes look even more promising, but I am yet to see evidence of any British jurisdiction with a wholesale vision for a new paradigm for whole-life education. In amongst these dynamic forces, teachers need to be able to connect with their vocation and continue to help children realise their talents to lead fulfilling lives. This book is rich with help for the profession and the leaders of teaching. Ross McGill uses his wealth of experience and his connection with the profession to offer some reassurance and hope of survival as we navigate these ‘interesting times’. Lord Jim Knight Chief Education and External Officer, TES Global xi

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Introduction When I set about thinking how to write this book, my starting point was the frustrations with our school system at a national level. There are so many issues that are pouring down from above, impinging on teachers and schools across the nation and hindering them from being able to do the best job they can for our young people. Currently, these challenges include school funding, high-stakes accountability and continually changing goalposts in relation to curriculum and assessment, among many others. Via my social media channels, where I have over 250,000 followers, and my website, which has reached ten million readers, I have been able to develop a wider perspective on educational issues, and I feel frustrated with the current political dialogue. Increasingly, I am receiving messages from teachers across the country who are concerned about how teaching is evolving in the modern era. With more and more demands being placed on teachers, they are finding themselves tied to their desks, both during and after school hours, rather than working on their feet in the classroom alongside students. With every government that comes and goes, teachers and school leaders always seem to find themselves left in the lurch, waiting for the politicians to determine the next ‘quick fix’ or hoping they might provide a new source of funding to help address the latest crisis that schools have been asked to resolve. In Scotland and Wales, perceptions of education ministers are more positive than the current mood in Northern Ireland or England, and I do wonder what we can learn from one another across the United Kingdom rather than searching for the answers on the other side of the world. Personally, having worked in education for over 25 years, I have seen so many education ministers, on both sides of the political spectrum, come into office with new ideas, ambitions and policies, but what difference has it really made to the classroom teacher? Regardless of policy, when the classroom door is shut, the teacher will always be in charge whatever policy or ideology is promoted. It is my firm belief that no government will ever have all the solutions for our education system. If we hang around, waiting and hoping for our politicians to find the answers, we will be forever disappointed. In my view, we must instead search for practical solutions within our own communities – from our fellow teachers and school leaders. As a profession, we are a collective force. We have so much to learn from one another, and we can do more to resolve the issues we are facing together.

The top ten issues in UK education The challenges we experience in our classrooms day to day are influenced by factors in three broad areas: • Macro: politics, accountability structures, funding and socio-economic factors. • Meso: school-level organisation, the school community and local services. • Micro: the classroom, the teacher and the child. xii

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There are countless research articles exploring the political and socio-economic factors that influence what happens in our classrooms. However, the ability to change national issues lies very much on the doorstep of policymakers. A perfect example of this is school funding. In 2019, an online petition calling for increased funding for schools gathered over 100,000 signatures, but this is by no means a new issue. As far back as 1976, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan said: ‘There can be little expectation of further increased resources being made available [for education], at any rate for the time being. I fear that those whose only answer to these problems is to call for more money will be disappointed […] There is a challenge to us all […] to secure as high efficiency as possible by the skilful use of existing resources.’ Does generation after generation simply repeat the same assumptions about education for tomorrow, despite what we know about yesterday and today? Personally, I strongly believe that we cannot have a world-class education system funded on a shoestring, and will go on actively promoting this cause, but it’s clear that this isn’t an issue that’s going to be resolved any time soon. When we are struggling in our day-to-day jobs due to these macro-level factors, we can and should go on protesting and lobbying the government, and making our voices heard. However, at a practical level, these factors are mostly out of our hands as teachers and school leaders. It is at the meso and micro levels that we can have a greater impact. Despite the statutory guidance sent down from on high, there are positive steps we can take to modify our own practice as classroom teachers and to instigate change as school leaders to ensure we are offering our students the great teaching we know we are capable of delivering. To achieve this, we must work together openly to solve complex problems, share ideas and discuss ‘what works’, rather than remain in our silos. Teachers, of course, want to develop a good understanding of neuroscience and ‘how we learn’, and research is becoming critical to informing our practice in the classroom, but ultimately teachers need practical advice from their peers. Neuroscience, psychology and research are all vital to great teaching and do play their part, yet add 30 students into the picture and the work of a teacher becomes much more complicated. For me, the secret ingredient in bringing great teaching to life is translating all of these complex theories and ideas into practical, workable solutions. In this book, I therefore distil what I have learnt from the research, evidence and psychology behind teaching, as well as my own experiences of working within education and the great practice I have seen taking place in schools across the country. I have the privilege of working with schools every week and I speak with fellow educators on a daily basis, discussing the complexities of education and our work as teachers and school leaders. This perspective has given me a broad lens through which to view the challenges we are facing and also consider what we can do both to improve our practice as individuals and to disseminate great teaching ideas across the profession, without fear of high-stakes accountability ending someone’s career or closing down the school. It is my belief that this must be the future model for improving schools.

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Just Great Teaching

From the experiences and discussions I’ve had with thousands of educators I have either worked with or engaged with via social media, I have collated a list of ten key issues for teachers and school leaders to tackle and get right in their practice. These ten issues are: 1. marking and assessment 2. planning, including EdTech 3. teaching and learning 4. teacher wellbeing 5. student mental health 6. behaviour and exclusions 7. supporting students with SEND 8. curriculum 9. research-led practice 10. continuing professional development (CPD). Each chapter in this book explores one of these key areas, discussing why the area in question is a challenging and important issue for teachers and schools across the country, and then offering five ideas for how to tackle the issue, taken from my own practice working with schools that are excelling in these areas across the UK. I hope the ideas in this book provide a starting point for each of us to celebrate the wonderful work that we are all doing in schools, regardless of setting. I hope they will help to uncover, celebrate, analyse and disseminate best practice in teaching across the UK, and open your eyes to how particular problems can be resolved based on what other professionals are doing effectively in a similar context to your own. To achieve anything of greatness requires collaboration with others; no school, headteacher or teacher can achieve Just Great Teaching without the support of their colleagues. It is important to look at other jurisdictions that are doing things well, such as Shanghai, Finland or Japan, but we must also start to engineer a more conscientious focus on what’s working within our own contexts to help shape the narrative. Not only will this enable us to improve our provision for young people in our own settings, but it also has the potential to entice the next generation of teachers into the profession, and entice those who may have left it prematurely, including myself, to come back.

Research methodology The practical ideas offered in this book are supported by case studies from ten schools from across the UK, each excelling in one of the ten areas of practice highlighted above. In choosing these schools, it was not a case of cherry-picking ‘the best’ schools based on accountability metrics, exam performance, political ideology or teaching approaches. Instead, I used my own experiences of working within education to identify a range of settings that are facing the challenges that xiv

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Introduction

all schools across the country face, including your own, and to explore what these settings are doing well in the face of these challenging contexts. As part of my research for the book, I visited each of the ten schools and interviewed a member of staff – the headteacher, a school leader or a teacher leading on a particular area of practice. Before my visit, each representative completed an online questionnaire to identify the areas of strengths and challenges in the school, and the areas of practice in which they felt most and least confident. I subsequently recorded face-to-face interviews with each school representative from September to December 2018, exploring their responses to the questionnaire and steering the focus towards a particular theme that the school had self-identified as an area in which they believed their school was excelling. These interviews entailed nearly ten hours of recorded conversations – a book in itself – and you will find snippets from the interviews, all published with the interviewee’s permission, in speech bubbles throughout the chapters. In addition to the research conducted with the ten schools featured as case studies, I also set up an online questionnaire, open to all educators, which I publicised via social media. Between October 2018 and March 2019, I received 236 responses predominantly from teachers and school leaders across the UK and a handful working in other European countries. There were 12 overall questions in the survey, and three of those were split into 11 sub-questions, giving a total of 42 fields of entry. With 236 responses, this equates to nearly 10,000 pieces of data. Some insights from this data are also provided throughout the chapters; look out for the microscope.

Great teaching Great teaching is not something that can be left to chance or assumption. To illustrate this, allow me to share an anecdote from Graham Nuthall’s (2007) The Hidden Lives of Learners, a study of the complex world of the classroom, which we will explore in more detail in Chapter 1, page 13. Nuthall recounts an incident in a classroom on a typical school afternoon, a scenario all teachers can relate to, where some students take their classmate’s pen away from him during a test. The pen is passed around behind his back and he can’t for the life of him work out who has it. The class are giggling uncontrollably behind the teacher’s back, but she thinks they’re laughing at one of her jokes. The teacher goes on to gather the test papers and sends them off to be scored. As Nuthall says, ‘These scores will be entered into machines where they will be transformed in complex and sophisticated graphs and tables that politicians and newspaper editors will use to berate and praise – you know that story.’ So, let me ask you: do these test scores really reflect what’s going on in that classroom? Our politicians try to measure the hallmarks of great teaching, introducing various frameworks that come and go with the wind, and in my opinion, they continue to miss the mark, blurring their roles and responsibilities of working with schools. Great teaching appears to be a straightforward approach, but it in fact requires years and years of deliberate practice. Much like Beyoncé performing on the xv

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Just Great Teaching

concert stage, teachers must spend hours practising behind the scenes. Beyond the exam scores, teachers hone and refine their techniques and reflect on decisions, before squeezing all this expertise into repeated, focused performances in the classroom. When it comes to teaching, if we do not disentangle the myths from reality, we will remain slaves to a system that inevitably produces failure and widens inequality. We must transform our practice, so all students can leave school with a range of successful qualifications. If we truly want a world-class education system in which all children can succeed and be prepared for the workplace, we must tweak our current approaches. We must give all children the opportunity to thrive, and doing so begins with Just Great Teaching.

How to use this book This book is designed to meet the needs of busy classroom teachers and school leaders. We know teachers are time-poor and professional development is hit and miss in many schools, so I hope Just Great Teaching will offer teachers bite-sized information and practical ideas in an easy-to-use format. To all the school leaders who take on one of society’s greatest responsibilities, I hope this book also offers you some insight into what other schools are doing, so that you can reflect on your own journey and take some of the research-informed ideas and translate them into your own setting.

What to expect in each chapter Each of the ten chapters in this book focuses on tackling one key area of teaching practice that I know teachers and school leaders are keen to get right. This book can be read cover to cover, but feel free to hone in on the chapters most relevant to you and read them in isolation. Every chapter is divided into the following four sections.

1. Why is this an issue? This introductory section offers context about the issue in question. Supported by national statistics and research, it explains why the issue is a particular challenge across the UK at the time of writing. Don’t expect to see the word ‘Ofsted’ in this book, other than in this sentence*. I’ll be referring to the English watchdog throughout this book as the ‘Grim Reaper’. I’ll leave those of you in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to come up your own nicknames for your inspectorates… *and for the purposes of referencing and indexing

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2. How can we tackle it? This practical section is split into five distinct ideas, which I hope teachers and school leaders will find useful in their everyday practice. Each idea begins with a short summary to help you v dip in and out and find the strategies you need. There is a wide range of ideas for both classroom teachers and school leaders to consider. If you’re not yet at leadership level, remember that change can be led from the ground up, and I hope you will feel confident to discuss the whole-school ideas with your line manager and colleagues. As with all ideas, it’s the implementation that matters most and context is key, so please do not take these ideas away as ‘the thing to do’ or something that you should be doing.

3. School case study Each chapter features a case study from a school operating in the UK. There are a range of contexts and locations represented; each school is shown on the map below. The case studies are written by representatives of the schools themselves and explain how their teachers and school leaders are meeting the specific challenge in question well, in their own contexts. I feel privileged to have been invited into each school and for the time each school offered me, helping me to understand their context and practice at a deeper level.

1. Layton Primary School, Blackpool 2. Ysgol Henry Richard, Ceredigion 3. Fettes College, Edinburgh 4.  Parson Street Primary School, Bristol 3

5.  Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall 6. CP Riverside School, Nottingham 1

7.  Homewood School and Sixth Form Centre, Tenterden 5

2 4

8.  Magdalen College School, Oxford

6 8 9

10 7

9.  Slough and Eton Church of England Business and Enterprise College, Slough 10. Trumpington Community College, Cambridge xvii

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4. Why does this work? Each chapter concludes with insights from an educationalist known for their work in the area discussed within the chapter. These contributions offer an explanation as to why and how the ideas in the chapter may work and provide a fresh perspective on the issues discussed.

Get in touch As you read, I would strongly recommend sharing ideas and thoughts with colleagues in your school in your own professional development sessions. You may want to consider starting a book club and using each chapter of this book as a discussion starter for colleagues. If so, please get in touch and I’d be happy to provide the resources you need to get started. I would also gladly take any questions or signpost you in the direction of further ideas and resources. You can find me on social media @TeacherToolkit and tweet me your thoughts using the hashtag #JustGreatTeaching. You can also search for ‘Just Great Teaching’ on my website www.teachertoolkit.co.uk or email me at [email protected].

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I

n my work with schools across the UK and further afield, it has become blindingly obvious that, regardless of context, teachers are struggling under the marking burden. Since September 2017, I have surveyed over 15,000 teachers and have researched the question: ‘What is the greatest burden on teacher workload?’ It will come as no surprise that day-to-day classroom marking is fuelling problems with teacher mental health and wellbeing across the UK. Of course, marking is only one form of assessment and whether its overuse is due to perceptions of effectiveness or the demands placed upon teachers and schools from elsewhere is yet to be evaluated. However, it is my belief that even if a school has a zero-marking or no-homework policy, their best intentions may still be trumped by external forces, for example parental expectations, exam board regulations and 1

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national assessments. Although formal assessment is an annual occurrence for examination purposes, schools can still decide what they do day to day, but even this is often undermined by third parties who visit the school to evaluate teacher effectiveness. Fleeting comments, such as ‘show me the evidence’ or ‘what impact has it had?’, can place a school in difficult circumstances if what they say they do isn’t observed by someone wielding a clipboard. Nevertheless, assessment, whether marking, questioning or testing, is an important tool in the classroom, so what can we do to support schools and help teachers to ensure it has a direct impact on student progress? In this chapter, I will share ideas and suggestions from schools who are doing absolutely everything and anything they can to reduce marking and improve assessment in order to minimise teacher workload and increase classroom effectiveness. I will also consider day-to-day classroom ideas that teachers are using effectively – and those that have no or little impact on learning.

Why is this an issue? Assessment, including standardised tests that are completed in a lesson, is a secure way for teachers to monitor what students can do day to day. However, in a complex world of education, ‘how students learn’ has been narrowed down to a set of numbers. Where assessment has gone wrong is with an ever-increasing amount of testing and reporting, based around school accountability and tracking student progress, with the change in attainment between two points in time becoming a very fashionable measurement in state school education. School leaders and politicians who are keen to measure whether students have learnt over a key stage should understand that these types of one-off, low-stakes tests provide limited inference (Allen, 2018a). Professor Becky Allen (2018b) argues that ‘relatively short, standardised tests that are designed to be administered in a 45-minute [or] one-hour lesson are rarely going to be reliable enough to infer much about individual student progress’. Based on her research with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) into commercially available standardised tests, specifically measuring how well commercial assessments predict scores in Key Stage 2 SATs, Allen concludes that ‘no test measures attainment precisely and short tests are inevitably less reliable than long tests’. Allen’s research raises two major concerns about testing. First, we need to be sure that tests are sat in standardised conditions where students and teachers have standardised perceptions of the importance of the test. For instance, are we confident all students who sit the PISA test in various jurisdictions do so in the same conditions? If not, surely the parameters are questionable. Second, while short assessments designed to be completed within a lesson can help teachers monitor what students can do, they are rarely capable of telling us what sort of progress an individual student has made in the previous year. We may believe that we can meet the needs of children over a longer period of time, and we would obviously aspire to do so as teachers, but to think that measuring this progress is possible in a single lesson is downright ludicrous – and incompetent to boot! 2

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The effect of testing on students Not only are our current methods of tracking student progress ineffective, but our obsession with data sets and testing could also be damaging and limiting our students. In The End of Average, Harvard graduate and author Todd Rose (2017) highlights the work of American psychologist Edward Thorndike, who single-handedly defined education as we know it today. Thorndike believed the purpose of schools and education was to sort students by talent and to predict how a student would perform. Rose writes that ‘it is deeply ironic that one of the most influential people in the history of education believed that education could do very little to change a student’s ability and was therefore limited to identifying those students with a superior brain.’ Thorndike supported the use of quantitative information, such as grades, as a convenient metric for evaluating student performance and deciding whether they would go on to succeed at university and in their professional lives. This notion of ‘those most likely to succeed’ and ‘those most likely to fail’ persists today. I wonder how many of us have been on the receiving end of this metric. For example, we may have been placed in the bottom or top set for maths, or defined by a grade that meant we didn’t reach our first-choice university or college place. Thorndike’s education labyrinth ranks everyone within its walls, and not just the students. Teachers are evaluated at the end of each school year, and this determines promotions, rankings, pay rises and tenure. Education systems of entire countries are ranked based on their performance in international standardised tests, such as PISA or PIRLS! Across the world, our education system operates as Thorndike intended: • Above average = You are rewarded. • Below average = You are likely to fail.

78 per cent of teachers and school leaders think that marking and assessment is a challenging area of teaching practice.

Over the past century, we have perfected Thorndike’s education system and, as Rose suggests, it runs like a well-oiled machine, squeezing out every possibility. Rose has significantly affirmed and shaped my thoughts on the current problem we have in our education system: thousands of children who view themselves as a failure simply because the system is not sophisticated enough to evaluate their individual successes.

School rankings At a system level, some of our education leaders are ranking each other’s schools, and in some cases also inspecting them on top of statutory school inspection, in order to drive performance. This will no doubt be fuelling the retention crisis and teacher mental health in return for a rosy appearance at the top of a league table. P45, anyone? In more extreme examples, multi-academy trusts (MATs) are ranking their schools across the trust in a bid to raise standards by department, team and subject. Can you imagine being ranked lowest for performance if you were head of science in a 3

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secondary school, even though you were being compared to heads of department working in different circumstances? Your department may be performing better than other core subjects in your school, but ranked by subject performance in the lower quintile when compared against another 20 to 40 schools across the organisation. High-stakes accountability leads to all sorts of problems in our schools, including ‘off-rolling’ (see Chapter 6, page 120) and ‘gaming’, which sadly does happen in some of our primary schools where Year 6 pupils are ‘rehearsed’ or ‘over-aided’ in assessments (Busby, 2018). We know school evaluation has its place, but so does intelligent accountability. For schools, the apparent success of moving up the rankings secures more students and more funding – and so the cycle continues, but this measure of ‘value added’ gives a false perception of teacher capability and student progress, as there are many complex factors that impact student achievement, such as socio-economic status (van der Wateren and Amrein-Beardsley, 2018). If we stopped relying on school rankings, policymakers and MAT leaders may feel that they have lost control, but what would actually happen is that this burden and the associated costs would be reduced and the school evaluation system would move to a more local level. Schools would engineer a self-evaluation framework for themselves in a bid to remain a valuable service to their local community.

Making effective use of data In schools across the country, there is a culture of ‘data drops’. In Northern Ireland, for example, this is particularly prevalent in Key Stages 3 and 4, and teachers say they aren’t always reliable and useful and don’t always support learning. In some circumstances, teachers are making over 90,000 data calculations every academic year: Teachers are asked to collect data once per term for every student in their class.

30 students x 3 terms

Wait? We need to enter four fields: effort, homework, current grade, target grade.

90 data decisions x 4 fields

Wait? We need to enter a three-point fine grade on top of a nine-point scale, e.g. A1, A2, A3. That’s a further 27 decisions for each field.

360 data decisions x 27 possible grades

Wait? We have to do this for all ten classes we’re teaching?!

9,720 data decisions x 10 classes

4

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= 90 data decisions = 360 data decisions

= 9,720 data decisions

= 97,200 data decisions

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So, what do we do with all this information? Professor Robert Coe (2018) writes, ‘“Data drops” have come to epitomise a pointless exercise in collecting meaningless numbers and feeding them into a system that can have no possible benefit for learners.’ Coe reminds us that assessment must contain information that could surprise us and tell us something we do not already know, because if we report on what we already know, it tells us nothing new about what to do. Coe continues with ‘accuracy’, saying, ‘All assessment is imprecise and can be wrong’, so you must judge data on its weight, namely how reliable it is and how much information it conveys. The answer to a single question is not a reliable and informative assessment, for example. If you cannot report about the weight and accuracy of the data then entering it into a management information system is not an assessment! Schools must strip back data duplication. Collect less and, as a result, the data will become more accurate and meaningful. In 2018, England’s Department for Education published a report for schools on ‘Making data work’ (Department for Education, 2018a). It was written by the Teacher Workload Advisory Group, which is chaired by Professor Becky Allen. In her foreword, Allen says that given the impact of technological change, ‘it is time to step back and evaluate whether the time spent managing student attainment and pastoral data is proportionate to its educational benefits.’ The report shares the following very helpful recommendations for leaders of schools and trusts in relation to data collection: 1. Have simple systems that allow behaviour incidents, detentions and other pastoral information to be logged during the normal working day, rather than during breaks and lunchtimes, wherever possible. 2. Minimise or eliminate the number of pieces of information teachers are expected to compile. 3. Make sure you understand the quality and purpose of the assessments being used in their school – including details of their reliability and validity in relation to the curriculum. 4. Review your approach to reporting and parental engagement to inform parents of their child’s performance and behaviour at school in a way that is manageable for teachers, and consider how best to set out expectations to parents. 5. Use the data principles set out above to decide what the planned intervention for students is and to minimise the data burden involved in ensuring the students are correctly identified. 6. Do not have more than two or three attainment data collection points a year. Any data collection points should be used to inform clear actions. 7. Avoid making pay progression for teachers dependent on quantitative assessment metrics, such as test outcomes. Based on these recommendations, middle and senior leaders should ask themselves the following questions about their assessment and data collection policies. If you’re not yet at a leadership level, raise any concerns with your managers; change doesn’t necessarily need to be top-down. 5

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• Are both the purpose and use of assessment clear and in line with school values? • What can be inferred from assessment and is this well understood? • Are both the amount of data collected and the frequency with which it is collected proportionate? • When did your school last review its processes for collecting data and for making use of assessment? • Do all data collection windows involve having a conversation with the teacher or team leader? • Do key examination year groups have data collected more than three times per academic year? • Is the data collected easy to understand for teachers, parents and students? • Is there demonstrable evidence to suggest that your data collection adds value?

What about marking? We know marking is part and parcel of what a teacher does day to day, but the question I often ask is: ‘Do you know what effective marking looks like?’ If I’m still trying to find the answer to this question after 25 years in teaching, what hope is there for inexperienced teachers? ‘We don’t call it marking anymore; we call it feedback. It facilitates discussion about learning rather than work.’ Jonathan Clucas, Headteacher, Layton Primary School, Blackpool

When we consider marking, schools can make matters worse with day-to-day classroom policies that require teachers to mark X number of times, every Y period of time to support consistency, and insist that every teacher marks using a specific-coloured pen. This is all engineered to keep the pressure off from external scrutiny, but as soon as it happens, a teacher’s workload shifts from how effective the feedback is towards ‘what colour pen should I use?’ and ‘how often should I mark?’. 6

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The problem is then exacerbated by work scrutinies where school leaders try every possibility to monitor consistency and quality – an impossible ask because we often observe teaching and learning and ‘go fishing’ without all the required information before we start. And if we are still trying to understand what effective feedback is, how to achieve it and what has the greatest impact on learning, then what about parents? Parents may still evaluate teachers on their perception that ‘tick and flick’ is a form of acknowledgement, even though we know that it lacks any impact on learning and, worse, is a total waste of time. Instead, we need to dramatically reduce marking commitments in every school. I hope the ideas in this chapter will help teachers and schools to cut down on the amount of marking they do and to find more effective methods to assess student progress and provide feedback that has a true impact on learning.

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Rethinking homework

Marking homework can be a time-consuming task but is it really the best use of a teacher’s time? In this idea, we’ll look at how to set more meaningful homework that actually supports learning and best of all needs minimal marking – or no marking at all. Does setting homework make a difference? Is homework a meaningful contribution to learning? Does it promote higher achievement and teach study skills and responsibility? These are all important questions to ask about the purpose of homework. Some schools live by setting it and see it as ‘an essential’, whereas other schools have effectively banned it altogether and have gone down the ‘no-homework policy’ route along with ‘no marking’ and even ‘no uniforms’! Many parents say they want homework even though it causes enormous grief and arguments galore in some households – including mine – and many children don’t want it but get it anyway! Some children don’t do it, some lose it, some outsource it to Google and some don’t do it at home, while others commit to it so seriously they overdo it and don’t get enough sleep because of it. If you ask some people, they will tell you that homework is a black hole that tears at the fabric of home life (Kralovec and Buell, 2001); it hinders learning (Creasy, 2015) and it widens the attainment gap (Rosen, 2017). Ask others and they say, romantically, that ‘Great teachers set great homework’ (Sherrington, 2012) and it makes a massive difference to the learning process. Whether homework works is far from simple, but a lot does depend on where you look and what age group you teach.

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What does the research say? There is no evidence of any academic benefit supporting the value of homework for primary-age children (Teaching Schools Council, 2016) and education top-dog John Hattie (2014) says that ‘it has an effect of around zero’ at primary level. Alfie Kohn (2006) in The Homework Myth thinks that schools need to set their default to ‘no homework’. However, Hattie (2014) argues that homework should not be eradicated but focused; he says homework in secondary schools makes a bigger difference primarily because it aims to give students another chance to practise what they’ve learnt in class. I can only agree. It is clear to me that we do need to reframe our thinking around homework, particularly the effects of homework, because most meta-analyses fail to unearth the important variables that can impact on outcomes when determining a positive relationship between homework and achievement. Today, with such a huge debate still to be answered, there has been very little research that tackles the quality of tasks set, responsiveness and amount of work proportional to spare time. Without such conditions being evaluated, the evidence linking homework to achievement will remain invalid. Hattie (2016) argues that when homework isn’t deliberate practice, it is pointless. Teachers must set content that has been taught, is secure in students’ minds and can be recalled easily when required. In essence, any homework has to be relevant, extremely relevant. Even though Hattie (2014) says that five to ten minutes of practising what was taught that day at school has the same effect as one to two hours’ homework does, an OECD (2014) report on data from PISA looked at homework among 15-year-olds and found socio-economically advantaged students and those who attended socio-economically advantaged schools tended to spend more time doing homework than other students, which could perpetuate inequalities in education. It’s important to be aware that setting homework may increase the disadvantage gap, particularly at primary school where students are more reliant on their parents, but for me, homework has its place in school and for children growing up, and it’s how we use it as a teaching tool that makes a difference.

Setting meaningful homework tasks The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2002) coined the term ‘flow’ to describe a state of feeling happy and it reminds me of the informal feedback you receive as a teacher to say things are going well. Indications include a productive working atmosphere or a fleeting comment from a student: ‘Wow! Mr McGill, that lesson went quick!’ Csikszentmihalyi’s research concluded that when happiness or ‘flow’ takes place, five things happen: 1. Learners are intensely focused on an activity. 2. This is usually an activity of the learner’s own choosing. 3. The activity is neither under-challenging (boreout) nor over-challenging (burnout). 4. The activity has a clear objective. 5. The learner receives immediate feedback. 8

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The ‘flow’ model

Csikszentmihalyi concluded that people who are ‘in flow’ not only feel satisfied but also lose track of time and become immersed in learning. When did your students last become immersed in a project or topic in your class? We can use this theory to inform how we set homework. If we set meaningful tasks, which learners have self-selected and which have a clear objective, students are more likely to work between being over-challenged and under-challenged; they can move from apathy to flow. They become immersed in their learning. We can combine this with setting tasks that don’t require marking, for example tasks that can be self- or peer-assessed. This will free up our teachers to provide immediate verbal feedback to their students (see page 17). Context is key, so here’s a set of ideas that are being used across the UK to ensure homework meets these criteria: 1. Try setting no regular homework at primary level and instead provide a termly overview of ideas that families ‘may’ want to try, for example projects or outings. This ensures marking workload is zero and the impact on students results in learning opportunities and more family time. (@HannayJeremy) 2. Use simple online tests for maths, reading and spelling. There is no marking and it takes much of the stress away from collection and checking. Make sure you are specifically targeting content covered in recent lessons. (@jamie2034) 3. Try software such as Seneca, Hegarty Maths, Class Charts, ShowMyHomework, CENTURY (see page 20), Google Classrooms or Microsoft Teams to assign homework. Students can hand in work electronically and receive feedback online. 4. You can also resort to traditional methods: as a year group team or department, collate a termly booklet of tasks so that each individual teacher doesn’t have to spend time looking for appropriate ideas. Preferably include tasks that can be checked for accuracy in lessons, so that the teacher just needs to look at the results. (@MrMattock) 5. Finally, primary teachers should consider revisiting the My Activity Passport, which the Department for Education launched in December 2018 in a bid for ‘children [to] have the chance to try things out, to get a taste of the world around them.’ My Activity Passport is a list of enrichment activities for Years 1 to 6, from going on an autumn walk to performing in a play and keeping a diary. It’s available at www.gov.uk/government/publications/my-activity-passport. 9

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Comparative assessment

Described by some as ‘an elegant solution’ to teacher decision-making, comparative assessment is an approach that promises radical changes to the way we evaluate students’ work. At the heart of comparative assessment is trust and trusting the teacher’s professional judgements – hallelujah!

In a review of the evidence of written marking commissioned by the EEF, Elliott et al. (2016) noted: ‘there is an urgent need for more studies so that teachers have better information about the most effective marking approaches.’ Many teachers spend an inordinately large amount of time marking, with limited evidence surrounding the impact of both the type of feedback given and the time spent on producing the feedback. Marking tests and exams with their convoluted marking schemes that drown you in detail are time-stealers extraordinaire and are defective too. There has to be a quicker, sharper and more reliable approach to student assessment than ‘traditional’ marking. If only there was a way we could make assessments in 15 seconds (Christodoulou, 2017b) with 0.91 reliability (Hutchinson, 2017). And there is… say hello to comparative judgement. Psychologist Louis Thurstone published a paper on the law of comparative judgement in 1927. His method asks the judge (or teacher) only to make a valid decision about quality and therefore ‘offers a radical alternative to the pursuit of reliability through detailed marking schemes’ (Pollitt, 2012). Comparative judgement has largely moved back into the learning conversations of teachers in recent times because of the profession’s current nemesis: workload. Like formative assessment, comparative judgement is neither widespread nor deeply embedded. However, ‘abolish marking’ is gaining traction and symbolises a ‘radical departure’ from traditional assessment methods that could ‘free up teaching in quite a profound way’ (Mansell, 2017). While comparative judgement might not be cutting-edge, its re-popularisation and high profile are very welcome in an era of unprecedented teacher pressures where assessment effortlessly distorts the curriculum and assessment has to be what Chris Wheadon (2017) calls a ‘fine balance between efficiency and reliability’.

So what is it? If we strip comparative judgement back to the bare bones then it is where teachers are presented with pairs of student work and they are asked to choose which of the two is better. You can do this in a couple of ways: • The unsophisticated low-tech approach is to spread pieces of work over a table and move them around like a sliding puzzle until you have them in a rank order you are happy with. We typically see departments doing this for coursework when work is put out on display for moderation. 10

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• Alternatively, you could use a high-tech algorithm, which uses several teacher assessments to arrive at a rank order and provides a score for each student. As Dr Steve Draper (2016) explains, ‘Software assembles these pairwise judgements into a quantitative interval scale (based on Thurstone’s “law of comparative judgement”) […] Finally, if used for assessment rather than only for ranking, grade boundaries are superimposed on the rank order.’ Comparative judgement, also referred to as adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ) or assessment by pairwise ranking (APR), forms part of the ‘no more marking’ movement, which is also the name of software specialists No More Marking (www.nomoremarking. com), where Daisy Christodoulou is Director of Education. No More Marking (2016) say that we should stop marking our assessments and start judging them: ‘the underlying principle of [comparative judgement] is simple, that we are better able to make comparisons between objects than we are at making holistic judgements.’ A No More Marking study of over 1,600 teachers from 199 schools judged the writing portfolios of over 8,500 Year 6 students and found that teachers showed a high degree of consistency in their marking; the reliability of the judgements was greater than 0.84 out of 1.0 (Bloom, 2017). Christodoulou notes that the interrater reliability of the No More Marking method is a remarkable 0.9 (McInerney, 2017). High reliability of relative comparative judgements compared to absolute judgements can be explained because relative judgements involve more judges (teachers). In traditional marking scenarios one or two markers are used whereas comparative judgement requires more than two. Take the Colours Test (www. nomoremarking.com/demo2) to find out more about why comparative judgement works and marking does not. But a note of caution: Tine van Daal et al. (2017) say, ‘Differences between judges in discriminating ability should be taken into account in the setup of [comparative judgement] assessments and in the development of algorithms to distribute pairs of representations.’ Despite this, new technology has the power to transform the way we think about assessment (Christodoulou, 2017a) and as Tarricone and Newhouse (2016) say, ‘comparative judgement delivered by online technologies is a viable, valid and highly reliable alternative to traditional analytical marking.’

What does it look like in practice? Led by Professor Richard Kimbell of the Technology Research Education Unit at London University’s Goldsmiths College, the first application of comparative judgement to the direct assessment of students was in a 2005 project called e-scape. Alastair Pollitt (2012) of Cambridge University refers to his work with Professor Kimbell on this study of the assessment of e-portfolios as an example of the high reliability coefficients that can be achieved with digital assessment and the comparative judgement method. Pollitt suggested that in Kimbell’s study the high reliability coefficient of 0.96 generated by 28 judges assessing 352 e-portfolios with 3,067 judgements was higher than any analytical marking system could achieve. I was one of the judges. At the time, I was Head of DT and ICT at Alexandra Park School in North London – the highest performing school in the world (according to the 2015 PISA rankings; McGill, 2016). 11

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The Goldsmiths College researchers were concerned that the current methods of assessment in DT rewarded a narrow set of approaches, and they wanted to explore the ways in which e-portfolios could be used to capture students’ work, and combine this with a fairer, more consensual method of assessment. They devised an approach that enabled students to draw up their initial design ideas on a personal digital assistant (PDA), record the progress of their design and then take photographs of their finished work, before uploading their projects to a central website where they could be assessed by moderators. In phase one of the project, funded by the Department for Education and Skills (as it then was) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), Goldsmiths developed a proof of concept. Each assessor saw two example portfolios on their screen and made a judgement about which one was better. This project was selected and the software then randomly chose another project to compare it with. Eventually the assessor had ranked the projects from top to bottom, and another person somewhere else in the country would look at the same sample, again completely randomly. Once all the assessors had ranked the projects, an overall ranking of the projects emerged. In the pilot, each e-portfolio was judged at least 17 times by seven different judges, which produced a highly reliable set of results. The Goldsmiths team were ‘ahead of their time’ in predicting that comparative judgement could be extended to other subjects, as comparative assessment has since spread far and wide. As Dan Sandhu (2015) notes: ‘ACJ has demonstrated huge potential in use by awarding bodies and institutions worldwide. So far, pilots delivering significantly improved reliability have taken place in Australia, Sweden, Singapore and the US. The process means GCSE and A-level appeal figures could be dramatically reduced.’ Comparative judgement has also been introduced to assess competencies, such as mathematical understanding (Jones et al., 2015), geography (Whitehouse and Pollitt, 2012), design technology (Seery et al., 2012) and writing (van Daal et al., 2016). At a school level, year teams and departments can collate work in the traditional sense through moderation and sampling, and as long as it is regular and builds in time for training, dialogue and assessment, this is a good and habitual process to instil in any school. However, this method is timeconsuming and with the abundance of technology, there are affordable ways to do this yourself. Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams offer the ability to assess student work online and to share materials with colleagues in order to enable comparative judgement. For more sophisticated solutions that assess and compare, No More Marking and CENTURY are useful alternatives. So why not see which option works for you and your colleagues to save you time and ensure more accurate assessment?

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Whole-class assessment

Adapting to meet student needs in the classroom is the most reliable and effective form of assessment. To do this, you need to have a secure overview of your students and build on your understanding of their learning through techniques such as questioning and plenaries.

Assessment manifests itself in many forms. It’s not just entering data into a spreadsheet. Assessment is about the teacher building a secure overview of the students in front of them. This is not an easy ask for secondary teachers who may teach over 300 students per week, nor primary teachers working with 30 students and teaching them many different subjects. On my travels, I even worked with one teacher in England who had 44 students in her classroom – that cannot be an easy task!

Knowing your students Graham Nuthall’s (2007) book, The Hidden Lives of Learners, published posthumously, covers 40 years of research on learning and teaching and was written with classroom teachers and teachers of teachers in mind. In the 1960s, Nuthall persuaded a group of experienced teachers to let him bring a tape recorder into their classrooms and hang up microphones on bits of string from their light fittings. Nuthall continued recording lessons throughout his career, which spanned four decades. He discovered that teaching was a kind of cultural ritual and as the findings evolved, the very detailed data suggested how little teachers knew about what was going on in their classrooms. Nuthall found that even live observers keeping continuous written records of the behaviours of individual students missed up to 40 per cent of what was recorded on the students’ individual microphones. He began to realise that students live in a personal and social world of their own in the classroom. They whisper to each other and pass notes. They spread rumours about peer relationships; they organise their after-school social life and continue arguments that started in the playground. They care more about how their peers evaluate their behaviour than they care about the teacher’s judgement. Nuthall used not only very carefully developed and administered paper-and-pencil tests, but also extensive individual interviews with students that explored their learning experiences and their knowledge and understanding in greater depth. Despite its apparent objectivity, there is nothing more or less objective about a test than there is about an interview. There is just a different kind of relationship between the tester and the student. What Nuthall found was that a large proportion of each student’s significant learning experiences were either self-selected or self-generated, even in quite traditional classrooms. The more able students talked more among themselves about relevant content. They asked more questions and persisted with problems 13

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for a longer time. The difference was in the way they managed their involvement in classroom activities. Those students whose backgrounds provide them with the cultural knowledge and skills to use the classroom and its activities for their own purposes learn more than those who dutifully do what they are told but do not want, or know how, to create their own opportunities. Differences in intelligence are more likely to be the product of differences in classroom experiences than the other way round. In the late 1980s, Nuthall also interviewed fellow teachers about how they knew when their teaching was going well. Almost every teacher knew their teaching was going well from signs of students’ engagement. It was the look in the students’ eyes, the questions they asked, and the fact that they didn’t stop talking about the topic or problem when they left the classroom. In short, by the feel and sounds of interest and focused busyness. In most teachers’ minds, the criteria for successful learning were the same as the criteria for successful management. What was immediately apparent was that teachers do not talk to students about learning or thinking. They talk about paying attention and not annoying others. Nuthall switched from studying teaching to studying learning, saying, ‘If we are to understand how teaching relates to learning, then we have to begin at the closest point to that learning, and that is student experience.’ Teachers follow very predictable patterns that are only indirectly related to student learning. This is because teachers are very largely cut off from information about what individual students are learning. Given Nuthall’s findings, it is clear to me that teachers need to have a secure overview of their students’ learning. We must find a way to continually assess where all our students are in their learning and how best to help them progress to the next level. The most effective way to do this in a class of 25 to 35 students, all of whom have different knowledge, skills, interests and motivations, is through whole-class assessment methods such as questioning and plenaries.

Questioning One simple and effective form of assessing our students is through checking their learning by questioning. The traditional method is, as Professor Dylan Wiliam (2014) puts it: ‘Initiation – response – evaluation’ (I-R-E). Of course, teachers simply speaking to students makes a difference, but what they do and how they do it really can have an impact. Wiliam critiques the I-R-E method, claiming it ‘doesn’t provide enough information on what most students in the class know and need to learn’. To make questioning more effective, I advocate firstly a ‘no hands up’ approach, where students are selected at random to respond to questions, rather than asked to volunteer answers, to check understanding. Another option is having all students respond to a question at once, by an electronic voting system, a mini whiteboard or a simple show of hands. Both of these solutions will help to assess students’ knowledge in real time and assist teachers in deciding where the lesson needs to go next.

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Plenaries Another way to get a better sense of where our students are in their learning is by using effective plenaries as a form of whole-class assessment. A lot of teachers, often when they are being observed, think that they must include a plenary at the end of the lesson. This should never be to ‘tick a checkbox’ or for an observer’s gratification, but for you and your students to embed and consolidate learning.

‘What we teach teachers to do is make a correct decision and assess in the moment. At the end of the lesson it’s a bit too late; at the end of the day it’s a bit too late. The reason we do that is to make micro-changes to the curriculum as we move along and that’s a skill some teachers find extremely difficult. So, assessment for learning takes place in the moment and there are lots of ways you can do that.’ Jonathan Clucas, Headteacher, Layton Primary School, Blackpool

In 2003, the Grim Reaper stated: • Plenaries were often the weakest part of the lesson. • There was insufficient time for them. • Plenaries were often the least active part of the lesson. Phil Beadle (2013) in The Book of Plenary states three important things to keep in mind when thinking about plenaries: 1. Plenaries have to be planned. 2. You have to have sufficient time for them. 3. You have to get the students to do the work. So ditch the ‘tell me what you have learned this lesson’ and replace it with a more meaningful task for both you and your students.

Effective plenaries There are five key features of an effective plenary: 1. The plenary should allow the teacher to assess the whole class’s understanding at once. This should be its key purpose. 2. An effective plenary should be planned into a lesson where appropriate to summarise learning and this is not necessarily at the end. Mini plenaries can be used as an effective form of assessment at transition points within a lesson, although make sure student learning or consolidation is at the heart of a mini plenary and it’s not just a tick-box exercise (Beadle, 2013). 3. The plenary should be differentiated to the needs of your class. This is tricky! Allowing your class to access the plenary is critical but some challenge is needed so you can assess what they do not know. 15

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4. An effective plenary should highlight the students’ misconceptions; once identified, they need to be addressed either at the time or within the lessons that follow. 5. A plenary should give students an opportunity to reflect on what and how they have learnt and guide them to their next steps to success. Here are some examples of practical plenary strategies that I think are the most effective and why.

1. RAG123 This is a useful self-assessment tool from Kevin Lister (2019). Students rate how much they understand the content from 1 to 3 (3 is ‘misunderstanding’ the work whereas 1 is ‘excellent understanding’). They then also reflect on their behaviour using red, amber and green colour coding (red is ‘distracted from learning’ whereas green is ‘outstanding attitude to learning’). This is a useful exercise to get students reflecting at the end of a lesson or topic and it also allows the teacher to see how confident the class feels from their RAG123 score. Be careful of overkill, but as a teacher you also have an opportunity to give your class scores and to set tasks to act on their plenary to move them towards the next stages of their learning.

2. Exit tickets Exit tickets, emoji exit tickets (Jones, 2016), digital exit tickets: this plenary has been adapted in so many ways. Essentially, it’s a way for students to feed back to teachers what they have learnt. The exit ticket function on the classroom app Socrative (www.socrative.com) is a popular method; it saves paper and it’s easy to see the responses. It takes seconds to set up and the students always get asked the same series of questions: • How well did you understand today’s material? • What did you learn in today’s class? • Please answer the teacher’s question. The teacher’s question is an important assessment opportunity to see whether they can apply their knowledge – remember to differentiate the questions to see whether all your students can apply their knowledge to new situations.

3. Give me five Students draw around their hand on a scrap piece of paper or in their book and write the following on each finger: • Thumbs up: What have you learnt? What do you understand? • Pointing finger: What skills have you used today? • Middle finger: Which skills did you find difficult today? • Ring finger: How did you show commitment to today’s learning? Who did you help today? • Pinkie promise: What will you make sure you remember from today’s lesson? 16

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This is a way of structuring students’ reflection time. It allows the weakest to celebrate what they have done well and encourages the brightest to think about the next steps in their learning. You can also use it as a planning tool by looking at key parts of the hand to see what you need to concentrate on in the next lesson.

4. Key word bingo A classic plenary idea that, when used well, is a good consolidation and assessment tool. Carefully planning your clues and questioning members of the class will allow you to assess how well they have understood the content. It can also allow you to consolidate the key words in the whole topic to assess how much previous learning they have remembered.

5. A quiz Playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or Blockbusters can really engage students and assess their knowledge. Phil Beadle (2013) urges you to use sophisticated quizzes within the classroom for maximum impact. Getting the students to create their own quiz cards will allow them to consolidate deeper knowledge and also allow you to assess their understanding more effectively. Differentiate the task by stating that they need to produce cards with increasing difficulty and then use them to test other classmates.

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Verbal feedback

Imagine a time in the not-too-distant future, where all teachers are trusted to speak to students in class rather than demonstrate evidence of feedback to their students.

Written marking is often for the purpose of external observers. This is a problem that has been driving challenges with teacher workload and mental health for several years. I believe verbal feedback should be the default method in all schools, as it provides immediate, focused feedback to aid students in the lesson, rather than weeks later after they’ve long forgotten about the piece of work or when their learning has moved on. In September 2017, I launched a research project on verbal feedback, which had the potential to reach 99,500 students; 119 schools in six countries across the world signed up. Thankfully this research has been taken on by UCL IoE London Centre for Leadership in Learning to add capacity and to attempt to answer: ‘To what extent does verbal feedback improve student engagement among disadvantaged students in Year 7 or 8?’ As of July 2019, the early signs have been encouraging. One teacher has reported that verbal feedback has enabled her to spend more time on lesson planning, while others have noted changes in their relationships with students because they have more time for one-on-one conversations. 17

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However, in schools where teachers are still expected to keep a written record of verbal feedback, these benefits won’t be evident. It’s still common for a teacher to provide verbal feedback to a student about how they can improve their work, and then ask the student to record in their exercise book what the teacher has asked them to do! Its purpose? To demonstrate evidence and progress; to show that what the teacher is feeding back to the student is meaningful and that the student is acting upon it. It’s essentially evidence for when Mr McGill, for example, conducts work scrutiny or pops into your classroom for an observation and would like hard evidence of students acting on teacher instruction. This cake has now been well and truly overbaked, with the use of feedback stamps and stickers. Although useful for reducing the quantity of written statements a teacher would need to provide over and over, as the sticker enables the student to record what they need to do, it’s essential to ask yourself whether the students are recording an aide-memoire for themselves or for an observer.

What do students want from verbal feedback? It’s also important to consider students’ perceptions of verbal feedback. Katie Kerr (2017) has conducted research into this. Her findings show that ‘students perceived verbal feedback as a form of focused conversation, different to normal classroom dialogue, identifiable by signals such as personal and task goals.’ Kerr also discovered that students wanted clarity through dialogues with teachers and felt that emotion, atmosphere and expectations impacted on their experiences of the feedback process. In light of this, a top tip for all teachers is to create a methodology for providing quick, meaningful feedback in which the student knows it is tailored content for them and they are made to feel special. An idea I’ve used for many years is to create a ‘feedback zone’ in one part of the classroom, where students can come and ask me for feedback on their work. Insist that no other student can interrupt your conversation (not easy, I know) until you are ready to move on. A sign that it is working is when you next look up and three or four students are quietly and politely lining up waiting to ask you a question.

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Live-marking A primary school in Peterborough has abolished marking and introduced a method of verbal feedback called ‘conferencing’ (BBC News, 2018b). The teacher has a one-on-one ‘conference’ session with each student at least once every two weeks, spending time with them to discuss their work in an open and honest way and to edit it together. This form of verbal feedback has reduced teacher workload and given staff more time to spend on lesson planning. One student said, ‘It’s easier because I don’t like going over my work with a red pen’, and the teachers are finding that it encourages students to think about their work in a more critical way. It’s a great idea! My understanding is that this process is simply live-marking: where a teacher selects a small group of students to meet during the lesson and provides them with some form of targeted assessment. What makes this concept from the primary school so special is that the headteacher is making a decision that her teachers should not take any exercise books home when completing assessment. That can only be a good thing. Shouldn’t your school give it a try too?

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Artificial intelligence

A computer will never replace that human connection in the classroom, but artificial intelligence can be an extremely useful assessment tool to help teachers track progress and plan effective interventions. In 2018, the Department for Education published details on how four-year-old children will be tested in England from autumn 2020 onwards (Department for Education, 2018b). The reception baseline assessment will be used to measure the progress primary schools make with their students.

Assessment and testing? Yes. Workload for teachers and schools? In the short term, probably. More importantly, how will this impact on students in terms of their learning and their mental health? And how will it inform parents about their child’s progress? There is no test in the world that has been successfully designed to predict a fouryear-old’s outcomes 11 years later. Instead I believe it’s better to assess students regularly using low-stakes, formative methods so we can continually adapt the learning journey and ensure they receive the best support possible to help them progress. There is a way to regularly assess students without impacting on their mental health or teachers’ workload, which provides live, accurate information at the click of a mouse and can be embedded into day-to-day classroom practice: it is called artificial intelligence.

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What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is the development of computer systems that can perform tasks normally completed by humans using algorithms and data, working on the basis of strategies and inferences. Building machines that can think and act like humans may sound like a terrifying prospect to some, but as Jelmer Evers (2018), Global Teacher Prize nominee and author of Flip the System and Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, writes, the truth about artificial intelligence seems to be more nuanced: ‘[AI] does and will have a major impact on how we teach, live, work and learn, but it won’t be the end of the world. And therefore it will have an impact on education from the student’s point of view – as learners – as well as from the teacher’s point of view – as professionals.’

How useful is artificial intelligence for the classroom? Artificial intelligence can be an incredibly useful tool for assessing students and personalising learning, and there are a number of companies developing apps and software for the classroom using this technology. CENTURY Tech is one such company. Its artificial intelligence platform provides teachers with detailed insights into their students’ learning, enabling them to make informed decisions to create maximum impact in the classroom, all the while spending less time on marking, data entry and reporting. The online platform offers an engaging library of multimedia learning materials curated by teachers and mapped to the National Curriculum; learners can study multimedia content and examination entry courses. Teachers can easily create their own courses and assessments too. Students access the content and artificial intelligence provides learners with an adaptive, personalised learning journey, with constant formative assessment and feedback. CENTURY gathers data on each student’s achievement, skills and knowledge. This insight is fed back to the teacher via real-time dashboards, enabling them to base interventions on evidence. The clever part is the artificial intelligence, which creates a personalised learning experience for the students. Behind-the-scenes, machine learning identifies the best topics to study next based on algorithmic data, analysing to the millisecond students’ behaviour on the screen. Students also receive personalised messages based on effort and achievement, a function grounded in cognitive neuroscience. This is a great solution for teacher workload and offers students instant feedback and a personalised pathway. As a teacher, I’ve struggled for 25 years to be able to give this personalised approach to 30 students in each class, and these data insights provide you with a reliable evidence base to track a student’s effort and motivation over time, through insights into knowledge and skills, strengths and areas for improvement. What better way to facilitate targeted interventions where needed?

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School case study ool School name: Layton Primary Sch Location: Blackpool, Lancashire the centre of Blackpool and Context: Layton Primary School is in the Irish Sea and the

stal district of some distance from the famous coa nearby There are five other local schools 158-metre-high Blackpool Tower. ool sch e stat ary prim l iona -denominat and Layton Primary is a mixed, non ry ent rme-fo thre a is It 11 years old. catering for students aged four to of a very large majority of students with roll, on s ent school with 604 stud ve abo is s ent stud ged nta tion of disadva White British heritage. The propor m. miu pre il pup of children are the national average; 50 per cent and for its tourism between the 1900s In its heyday, Blackpool was famous The 1. Blackpool has declined since 200 1950s, but the local population of n in rate of antidepressant prescriptio town now has the fourth highest be the to Education has found Blackpool England and the Department for ges llen in the country. Despite the cha most deprived large seaside town e urit ol, it remains one of the UK’s favo of living and teaching in Blackpo for ion continues to be a popular reg seaside resorts and the north-west teachers.

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? Assessment for learning, or responsive teaching, is the cornerstone of both what is taught and how it is taught. Assessment impacts on teachers’ questioning and decision-making in real time, on a daily basis, in order for teachers to make adjustments to the curriculum in the moment of teaching, moving through layers of understanding, backwards and forwards, to deconstruct and reconstruct concepts in order for children to develop a deep understanding of the concepts they are learning. Observations of how teachers react to students daily have enabled us to understand how strong this area is within the teaching staff. Through dialogic teaching, teachers enable children to probe their own and each other’s understanding. Oral and written explanations demonstrate strong understanding of the principles of learning. Our tasks are focused on learning and not on completion, and children must demonstrate understanding and explore routes to correcting these errors.

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Mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn and our children have become self-critical and reflective in overcoming barriers to better understanding. Our teachers recognise this and explore ways to embed this in the opportunities provided for children.

How have you achieved this? Initially, developing understanding among all staff was key to ensuring teachers understood how learning happens and what learning was. If you ask the staff in a school what learning actually is, it is likely each teacher will come up with a different answer; teachers are often so busy devising lessons and thinking about what to do, they often do not have the time to focus on why they do it. Our focus has been continually on learning, followed by the teaching methods used to understand how children learn best and how we, as teachers, can respond through classroom inputs throughout the lesson to move understanding forward. In order to do this, we initially focused on how to pose the right questions to develop an understanding of where children had misconceptions, and where in their construct of the learning concept their misconception lay. This took much development in our school. Several years of scheme-led curriculum work had led teachers to focus on delivery rather than developing the craft of embedding deep learning.

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Surface understanding and coverage had been prioritised over adjusting practice to adapt to the needs of learners and work completion took precedence over development of understanding. Building a solid understanding of responsive teaching took over three years; still the school focused too much on task completion and improving work rather than on the learner. We further shifted the focus to independence – what if children could ask their own questions, develop their own abilities to support and identify their own and others’ misunderstandings, justify and prove concepts, orally and in writing, and explain and extend ideas and concepts? In order to do this, we developed methods of dialogic teaching. To ensure this was successful, due to the numerous methods teachers could employ in the classroom, we focused on developing teachers’ abilities to make decisions based upon the evidence and analysis of the learning taking place at any given time in the classroom. Teachers need to collaborate in a low-risk, developmental culture in order to achieve this. They plan together as a team, joined by a member of senior leadership, and team teaching is common; there is an open-door policy. All members of the teaching staff teach and invite others to observe and provide feedback, including school leaders and the headteacher. Teaching is seen as a continual learning experience – nobody will ever crack it; we all make mistakes daily. This collaborative approach has developed teachers who respond successfully in the moment, rather than after the lesson, assessment or week.

How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? Most teachers, myself included, begin planning their lessons as a newly qualified teacher (NQT) with a determined focus on developing a series of lessons to build an understanding of a concept among a class of 30 children. Schemes of work, published resources and National Strategies have all been developed with this concept in mind; coverage will lead to understanding – if only we can cover the right things in the right way, children will develop a good understanding. All of these schemes focus on what teachers should teach, and therefore place teachers in control of delivery. In doing so, we found that teachers had become de-skilled and lacked confidence in understanding and addressing learning. The National Strategies came out in 1997 and 1998, which means this method of developing curriculum has been advocated for around 20 years. We have found that by focusing on developing understanding of learning, assessment for learning and dialogic teaching, improving understanding of why teachers should employ differing methods, developing diagnosis of children’s misconceptions and teachers’ abilities to address them, the curriculum to teach becomes self-evident. Teachers have understood what children can and cannot do; in turn children understand which concepts are secure and which are not. By doing so, the curriculum reveals itself. Teachers have no need of schemes; for no scheme of work can address what both they and their classes have diagnosed – the gaps within their own understanding. 23

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Outcomes have been consistently excellent. Children achieve extremely well; there are no significant gaps between groups of students and there have not been for six years. Results are not teacher-dependent; both Year 6 and Year 2 have not had the same staff for each of the last six years. Pupil premium children often achieve as well as, or better than, their non-free school meal counterparts and value added is significantly high for all students. The culture in school is vital in developing and maintaining those high standards. Over time, observations became learning walks and any judgements became developmental coaching sessions. Working with teachers to plan lessons grew into team teaching, team evaluation and a culture where we observed and critiqued each other. Video vignettes were shared and conversations about learning became commonplace, not only among teachers, but also among students. Resilience and reflectiveness, two of Guy Claxton’s (2002) key attributes of successful learners, did not need to be focused upon separately; this was a key part of the way in which children learned.

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Why does this work? by Priya Lakhani OBE Through my work at CENTURY Tech, I have been privileged to meet thousands of hard-working teachers who all share a genuine passion to change the world for the better. However, this desire to do good has been hindered by a workload crisis that is driving teachers out of the profession at alarming rates. One of the biggest contributors to this crisis is the orthodox approach to marking and assessment seen in schools across the world. Ross is right to identify these areas as some of the most urgent targets for positive reform, which, if solved, would finally fully unleash the talents of our excellent educators. Few would disagree that some form of measurement of progress is desirable, but largely due to external pressures, too many schools treat data analysis as something that happens at a handful of moments in the year. This is not how any efficient industry in the world treats data; data analysis should be a continual, behind-the-scenes process. Analysing data in this way allows teachers to target interventions far more precisely, as they have more accurate data backing up their decisions. Technology can now provide teachers with detailed insights into each student, allowing them to perform timely, targeted interventions tailored to that student’s individual needs. We at CENTURY Tech have been working with teachers to build technology through which the teacher can see the performance and progress of each student in granular detail, while the head of department and senior leaders can compare this across every class and subject, giving a data-led view of wider school performance. At no point does anyone have to fill in yet another Excel spreadsheet – it’s all automatically collected and analysed, and is provided directly to the teacher, empowering them as educators. When combined with insights from neuroscience and learning science, artificial intelligence (AI) can hold the key for solving the assessment dilemma. AI can track how each student behaves with their learning material – not just whether they’re right or wrong, but every interaction or movement, including whether they’re guessing, skipping or hesitating. As the system learns by itself, AI-based assessment can factor in many more variables than traditional assessment, allowing for far more differentiation for each student as an individual. We know that the right data in the right hands can have a powerful effect on outcomes – but combined with AI, it can fully transform education for the better. If it’s acceptable for doctors and engineers to use proven technology to improve their performance, why not teachers? Priya Lakhani OBE is the Founder CEO of CENTURY Tech, the award-winning artificially intelligent teaching and learning platform for schools, colleges and universities.

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Chapter 2: Planning

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eachers the world over will always need to plan lessons. If we take the most basic concept that a classroom teacher is with students for 25 hours every week, and assume, at best, that each one-hour lesson takes five minutes to ‘think’ about, that’s over two hours every week, on top of the day job – direct contact time with students – before we even consider marking, data, meetings and behaviour as part of what a teacher needs to do. Every teacher will tell you that lesson planning takes more than five minutes. Preparing resources, materials and equipment, even for a lesson you have taught before, can take much longer! If it’s new content, it will require deep planning time outside teaching hours. If we do the maths, that’s a minimum of six and a quarter hours every week just for planning. This almost takes us up to the agreed number of hours that teachers are contracted to work in English state schools: 32.5 hours. There’s not much scope left for the other key tasks a teacher needs to do.

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Why is this an issue? Planning is a huge drain on all teachers, even at its most reasonable, and in recent times, expectations around lesson planning have become far from realistic or acceptable. Firstly, with curriculum reform, teacher workload has increased as examination boards have modified specifications and teachers have had to adjust schemes of work and classroom resources with no time dispensation. Although it is necessary to update curriculum content with the latest research and knowledge about what we want students to learn, this has implications for day-to-day lesson planning for our teachers. With the English, Scottish and Northern Irish teaching professions all working with a new curriculum framework since 2014, 2010 and 2009 respectively, and Wales due to follow suit in 2022, teachers have often told me that they lack exemplar materials or are only a few weeks ahead of their students with their planning. Teacher workload is also impacted by school leaders who insist that their teachers complete detailed plans for every lesson or for schemes of work. This is then exacerbated when external visitors, observers or inspectors visit a lesson and insist on a lesson plan script to help them get up to speed with where a particular class may be. Although this practice is largely debunked, it still exists, and many of us revert back to these die-hard habits for appraisal purposes, even if it’s no longer required in our day-to-day routines. Why? This is simply not helpful for the teacher. ‘Don’t be set in stone; you’ve got to be willing to evolve and willing to change because your requirements change and your cohorts change.’ Huw Bonner, Deputy Headteacher, Ysgol Henry Richard, Tregaron

Excessive workload is increasing the number of health-related issues among teachers and can lead to reduced wellbeing, which ultimately and unavoidably has an impact on teacher performance (through stifled creativity in creating engaging lessons, less energy in the classroom and a reduction in the ability to address student differentiation). If the situation is bad in secondary schools, where teachers are protected with planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time built into the teaching timetable, things may be even worse in primary, where, although PPA time does exist, it is often not a regular feature because capacity is more limited, joint planning is needed and teachers are often playing just one term ahead of students. The charity Education Support Partnership conducted a health survey in November 2018 of 1,000 UK education professionals, digging into the details of physical and mental health issues. The survey found that 67 per cent of education professionals describe themselves as stressed, with this figure rising to 80 per cent at senior leadership level. In 72 per cent of cases, workload was cited as the main reason for considering leaving teaching. Student learning, management of poor classroom behaviour and relationships with colleagues are all impacted negatively by teachers’ stress levels, but which elements of teaching are most affected? You’ve guessed it: 27

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lesson planning and marking. Almost a third of teachers (30 per cent) said having to cope with workplace stress and anxiety adversely affects these particular aspects of their job. We find ourselves therefore in an extremely difficult situation, where the pressures of lesson planning increase teacher workload, and the levels of stress and anxiety this causes affect teachers’ ability to plan effectively. Effective planning is of course critical and underpins good-quality teaching. Without it, teachers have no direction and this increases anxiety and affects delivery in the classroom even further. I would therefore never advocate abolishing lesson planning but, to have any hope of resolving this vicious cycle, we do have to be much smarter about how we plan as teachers and what school leaders require from their staff. To understand how we can achieve this, it’s helpful to break lesson planning down into three levels: long term, medium term and short term. Let’s look at each in more detail.

Long-term planning Long-term curriculum planning can give us an idea of the likely sequence of lessons we will follow. Curriculum planning maps out key aspects of the knowledge and skills to be taught to students. These can range from annual planning to key stage planning, which provides an overview of the curriculum to be taught over two or three years. At a whole-school level, curriculum intentions are mapped out across all subjects and age groups. Imagine working in a school where everyone knows what one another is doing? These schools do exist. Former deputy headteacher and researcher for the EEF Alex Quigley predicted that 2019 will be the ‘year of the curriculum’. Quigley (2019) said, ‘If you are considering your curriculum, you are likely questioning if your curriculum is “knowledge rich”.’ Knowledge rich means there is clarity around the invaluable knowledge that teachers want their students to know. On the opposite side of the coin, American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist and learning scientist Roger Schank (2019) writes, ‘We need to move from teaching knowledge to instigating inquiry.’ Schank argues that adults shouldn’t just accept what they are told and we need to be teaching children to ‘wonder about things’. It is easy for us all to be influenced by our prejudice and bias when it comes to the knowledge versus skills debate, but one primary headteacher who has really made a difference to my own thinking is Clare Sealy. In a post called, ‘What’s all the fuss about a knowledge-rich curriculum?’, Clare responded to a tweet I shared about ‘ironing a shirt in a hotel’ (Sealy, 2018). I asked whether ironing a shirt was about knowledge or skills. Clare responded with a reply and link to her blog post explaining the difference between knowledge – particularly declarative knowledge – and procedural knowledge: Declarative knowledge = to know that. Procedural knowledge = to know how. (I suspect the latter is what many would classify as skills.) Declarative knowledge includes concepts and rules as well as facts and allows people to recognise things, make judgements and identify similar concepts. 28

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Procedural knowledge is knowledge that produces action, that enables us to do stuff. I think this is an important distinction between knowledge versus skills. Declarative knowledge is ‘skills’; it’s knowledge that just sits in our long-term memory, waiting to be of service. Procedural knowledge – to know how – is goaldirected information that produces action. And here lies an important distinction between knowledge rich, or at least knowledge, and skills in the classroom. In terms of long-term planning, schools that do this well are mapping out the key knowledge they want students to know in dynamic curriculum maps that are linked to fundamental British values as well as significant events in our history. This is no easy feat to achieve with a crowded National Curriculum, but there are schools that have designed what students need to know (intent) and how they are doing this within the constructs of their timetable (implementation), and at a fluid level, evaluating the impact of what is being taught throughout day-to-day reflections.

25 per cent of teachers and school leaders believe lesson planning is a weakness in their school, while 32 per cent consider it to be a strength.

It is critical that schools consider what students should be learning, translate this into their own context, and then consider what it means for students to know this information. What each school must then do is bring a curriculum mapped out on paper to life by considering the psychology of teaching and learning. The schools that are bringing their teachers together in weekly pedagogical discussions, sharing how they will get students to learn, remain at the forefront of long-term planning and quality teaching and learning; these two elements are very much interconnected.

Medium-term planning Following on from long-term curriculum planning, it is critical that individual year teams and departments have medium-term plans mapped out for students. Personally, I believe this is where the hard work lies for teachers, not in annual key stage overviews or day-to-day lesson planning. Medium-term planning relates to schemes of work for the immediate term ahead. Schemes of work should be continually adapted and inform the teacher what has been taught and what is coming up next. Without this roadmap, teachers would treat each and every lesson as a one-off experience, leaving students with little sense of the purpose of what they are learning and why. This information is crucial for day-to-day dialogue with colleagues, students and parents, so it is essential that all the details are refined and coherent. There should be sufficient content for a teacher to foresee what lies ahead over the next two to three months, and teachers should access the plans on a weekly basis. The plans should provide an array of resources and options for the teacher to follow or veer off from as students respond to the content being taught.

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Short-term planning Once we have our long-term and medium-term plans in place, they can inform us about what precisely needs to be learnt in class on a day-to-day basis. Individual lesson plans can support us in planning for this, but lesson plans don’t have to be incredibly detailed. Planning is critical and fundamental, but some lessons are just planned to death. ‘When it comes to setting up a curriculum, get as many people involved as you can. Share the problem with the staff and see if they have any ideas just to try to get them more involved and have ownership over it. There’s no one model that’s the best. It’s got to suit the needs of your school.’ Huw Bonner, Deputy Headteacher, Ysgol Henry Richard, Tregaron

Not that long ago, tortured teachers with zero work–life balance were required to write very detailed lesson plans (two or three A4 pages) for every lesson and then ‘submit’ them to their senior leaders or inspectors for lesson observations. There are still some hapless souls spending their Sundays writing plans for out-of-touch senior managers who won’t even be in the lesson!

The Department for Education’s (2016) report, ‘Eliminating unnecessary workload around planning and teaching resources’, identified planning a sequence of lessons as more important than writing individual lesson plans. Their summary couldn’t be any clearer: ‘Creating detailed plans can become a “box-ticking” exercise and create unnecessary workload for teachers, taking time away from the real business of planning, while offering “false comfort” of purpose. These burdensome and unhelpful practices have arisen due to the real and perceived demands made by Government and [the Grim Reaper], and how school leaders and teachers have reacted to them.’ No senior manager should be asking for detailed lesson plans, not unless they want their staff to be taking extended sick leave. Detailed lesson plans are a monster burden and a compliance tactic for external accountability. If there is any expectation that these plans serve a useful purpose then challenge your senior leaders. How can you plan in detail for a lesson when learning and understanding are so messy, unpredictable and organic? Learning pays no attention to a lesson plan. The ‘weather conditions’ mean you have to change course regularly unless you stick to the bullet points of a detailed lesson plan, which will take you into the eye of the storm. A detailed lesson plan does not translate into a quality lesson. A quality lesson is formative in nature and responsive to learning needs. Some say that with experience lesson plans aren’t really needed at all and lessons can be ‘wholly improvised and tailored to the specific needs of students as the lesson unfolds’ (Clarke, 2015).

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Personally, I am adamant that lesson planning should be a process of thought, not a formfilling exercise, and it needs to be treated that way by teachers, school leaders and inspectors alike. Short-term planning should be for a teacher’s own benefit and they must have the autonomy to find the method that best suits their needs, whether that’s scribbling their thoughts in their planner, producing a written lesson plan that helps them structure their ideas or perhaps using an online tool such as the five minute digital lesson plan (see www.5minutelessonplan.co.uk). This flexible approach is an absolute necessity if we are to have any chance of reducing teacher workload and ensuring effective short-term planning.

Trainee teachers and lesson planning For 20 years, I’ve mentored PGCE, Teach First, QTLS (qualified teacher and learning skills), BAEd and OTT (overseas trained teachers) trainees. I’ve dealt with almost every pathway into teaching and every piece of paperwork required for a trainee teacher and school to ensure success. I’ve also had some experience of failure and can assure you that each pathway has systems in place for dealing with a ’cause for concern’. As a visiting university tutor, for years I’ve advocated that trainees must be taught that lesson planning is a thinking process. Of course, this stance may not apply to everyone I have mentored, nor each context in which a trainee teacher is working. Context is key. New teachers do need to learn how to plan for effective lessons and often a paper template can be helpful, but the fact remains that it is the thinking that goes into lesson planning that counts, not the number of words written on a form. For trainees, ‘detailed lesson plans’ means explicitly lesson plans that are for observed lessons and for someone else’s benefit. However, to be able to reproduce this for observed lessons (which may happen at least weekly), trainee teachers are required to plan lessons in more detail even more often than they are being observed. Why? Well, to develop and practise so that a trainee is ready for a formal observation in which the stakes will be higher, it is important they seek feedback through trial and error. In worst-case scenarios, some schools and mentors will insist that to develop good habits, they should write detailed lesson plans for every lesson ‘just in case’ someone comes to observe them. This detailed lesson planning does not correlate to practicalities in the classroom. In November 2017, I challenged the Grim Reaper to update its guidance for trainee teachers. At the time, the most up-to-date guidance was from September 2015 and read: ‘Inspectors would normally expect to see a detailed written lesson plan for every lesson they observe taught by trainees.’ This was 31

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not due to change until 2019 when the framework was due for a review. Fastforward four months and the Grim Reaper thankfully updated its guidance. Sean Harford (National Director, Education) explained on Twitter in April 2018: ‘We are removing the need for inspectors to see [detailed] lesson plans of trainees [or any other lesson plan when a trainee is observed for inspection]. Changes will be in the updated handbook ready for the summer term Inspections.’ To all the initial teacher training providers: I suspect you will more than likely wish to avoid being ‘beaten over the head’ by the Grim Reaper. On the ground, this will mean that lesson planning must be observed by tutors and is also quality controlled. If the lesson plans lack explicit detail about the lesson, then I suspect this will be commented on by the tutor. If the observation form to be completed in the lesson is detailed, I also suspect that the observer will have their head down scribbling notes rather than their head up observing the lesson. If the lesson plan is detailed, I also suspect they are having to read the details on the plan and will therefore not be actively supporting the trainee in the lesson. I appreciate this is a generalisation and won’t happen each time. Still, tutors, even though they don’t believe in what’s written in the Grim Reaper guidance, will insist that their trainee teachers write ‘detailed lesson plans’ for every observed lesson. Worse, they go on to record the details of every Teachers’ Standard on a form during a one-off lesson. Madness. The reason why we have the Teachers’ Standards is because we all want qualified professionals; we want our teachers to be able to plan lessons and, more importantly, to be able to assess systematically (both before and after a lesson) the learning that will take place. The Standards offer professional pride and honour, and any experienced teacher will tell you that this takes years to achieve. They were not designed to be a tick-box process – that’s what we as a profession have turned them into. The Standards were designed for guidance or best fit.

Learning objectives Having a secure understanding of what you want your students to take away from your lesson is essential and an absolutely crucial part of short-term lesson planning, but who said that a teacher has to explain two or three intended learning objectives (LOs) and then have students mindlessly copying them into their books? Where and how did this nonsense ever gain traction? Was it the Grim Reaper? No; in fact, in its report ‘Mathematics: made to measure’, it (2012) highlights an example of good practice that involves a teacher purposely not sharing the LO ‘until later in the lesson at which point they challenged the students to articulate for themselves what they had learnt’. The framing of LOs is still commonplace today and for many almost a non-negotiable; worse, the ‘All students will; most students will; some students will…’ trend means that some teachers are still recording three variations of their lesson aims. This issue is exacerbated when setting LOs on paper that then have to be re-written on the board in the classroom and displayed on every resource, worksheet and knowledge organiser to ensure success criteria stick. 32

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It’s a workload issue and a poor proxy for learning. Sharing a LO is important but unless you want to use the opportunity for a student to develop their handwriting, don’t get students entering into the charade of copying and pasting what you’ve written on the board each and every lesson. Why spend the first ten minutes of a lesson getting students to write LOs down? Will you be marking their ability to copy accurately? No, thought not. Some students can copy an LO in seconds but others take a very long time and then ‘get it in the neck’ for not being quick enough (that’s not great teaching). If it takes an average of three minutes for students to copy down LOs at the start of a lesson, we can waste eight school days (40 hours) per year! It’s more important to get down to business as soon as possible. Short-, medium- and long-term planning all have their place in teaching and it’s important to know the differences and where and when each should be used. In the current climate, where we are struggling to recruit and keep teachers in the classroom and as we become more immersed in the science behind memory, cognition and retrieval practice, well-mapped-out curriculum plans that feed into medium-term schemes are the essential bread and butter for every school, and must be supported by a sensible, measured approach to short-term lesson planning. Schools should be free to decide how to plan, but what works? Which processes best support teaching and learning and reduce teacher workload? Allow me to share with you a set of ideas to help inform what you think and how you and your colleagues can go about planning more effectively in your school.

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Understanding how students learn

For a teacher to fully understand what knowledge, understanding, comprehension, familiarity, command and skills need to be learnt in the classroom, and how these can best be taught, they must first have a secure grasp of what is going on in the classroom from a learning perspective. This will enable the teacher to become aware of how curriculum plans can be translated into individual lesson episodes most effectively. If I think back to my teacher training years, or even the professional development sessions I attended more recently, little or no training was given as to how students learn. This was often left to a keynote speaker on a stage where I heard, as a teacher, how psychologists understood the brain. How students learn is fundamental to the business of teaching, and a secure understanding of memory and cognition is essential for all teachers to plan effective lessons. In the fantastic book Stop Talking, Start Influencing, Dr Jared Cooney Horvath (2019) suggests that ‘we must move beyond simple recipes and dig deeper into the mechanisms behind why each recipe works.’ 33

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How memory works is extremely complex; as Robert Epstein (2018) says, our brains are not computers and therefore do not ‘store’ data to be retrieved on demand. To prove this, Epstein asks students to draw a one dollar bill from memory, and then asks them to draw it a second time, now with a bill in front of them. The first drawing is extremely basic, whereas the second is beautifully detailed. I’ve recreated this experiment with a bicycle. I asked a volunteer to draw a bicycle by memory. You will see her first attempt below. Then, I spent a moment sharing with her a photograph of a bicycle and also scripted instruction, for example describing what the chain wheel may look like. She then produced the second drawing. It’s a simple exercise, but I hope it demonstrates the point.

The difference is stark! Our brains do not store an image of a bicycle to be recalled on demand. When we try to draw a bicycle from memory, the brain visualises a bicycle and tries to ‘re-experience’ seeing it. This is far less accurate and much of the detail is lost or inaccurately recalled. If we require students to master the details of our curriculum, we must plan lessons that specifically enable this. Knowing how to do this begins with understanding more about memory.

More about memory Keeping it simple, memory can be divided into two parts: short-term (working) memory and long-term memory. We can divide long-term memory into explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) memory. These two subcomponents can then in turn be divided into further areas of how memory and information operate. 34

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How do you remember students’ names? In the classroom, you will be given many opportunities to practise using those names over and over again and they will form a part of your short-term, or working, memory. How do you remember something you did several years ago? This is a question of long-term memory. Sometimes, our long-term memory and short-term memory interfere with one another. Information that is similar in format can interfere proactively or retroactively. Proactive interference occurs when past information holds us back from remembering new memories, for example not being able to remember a new phone number because an old number you had for years interferes with your recall. Retroactive interference occurs when new memories hold us back from retaining old memories, so, for example, you can’t remember your old phone number because your new one interferes with your recall.

What does this mean for teaching and learning? Theories of why humans forget have been tested for decades. What we do know is that learning itself is not harmed by the amount of verbal material studied, but the retrieval of that material becomes more difficult as the number of items tested increases. Research into interference and memory (Malmberg et al., 2012) suggests that we must not assume that ‘forgetting is the result only of changing context’. Memory is of course essential for learning and recall. In a compelling blog, ‘In defense of memory’, Yana Weinstein (2017) writes, ‘Some claim that now that we have The Internet, we no longer need to worry about memory. While there’s a lot of hype about the internet replacing our memory, humans have actually been relying on external memory systems for years.’ Examples offered are books, memos and lists. This is something academics and scientists would call ‘cognitive offloading’. A sure sign you’re suffering from ‘cognitive overload’ is when you write lists for lists or make silly mistakes during the simplest of tasks. I find myself doing both of these things countless times! But, as Weinstein says, to remember how to obtain information from external sources, whether books, lists or the internet, ‘still requires memory’. So, the next time a student says, ‘Sir, can’t I just use a computer?’, the answer to that question is obvious: ‘You can’t use a computer without using your memory first.’

How do we make learning more memorable? What do you remember from school? Is it lessons inside the classroom or lessons outside the classroom? What can we do to make learning more memorable based on what we know about how memory works? Here are some ideas to get you started.

Plan memorable moments Let’s imagine you are in my biology class; I am teaching you about the plant life cycle and we are unpicking what ‘photosynthesis’ means in practice. To support the learning – or at least to hook students in – I have dressed up as a large sunflower. Immediately your brain is racing with colours and images, thinking how silly I look! However, if we were actually there, together in the classroom, with my visual cues as well as the term ‘photosynthesis’ being shared, examined and 35

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then tested – and revisited in a series of future ‘check the learning’ lessons moving forward – it is much more likely that you will remember not only me dressed up like an idiot, but also what photosynthesis is in practice. Many studies report that large areas of the brain are involved in mundane memory tasks (Gilboa et al., 2004). When emotions are involved, the neurons in our brains ‘ping’ into action and become more active. Sometimes this can be achieved by simply using a concrete example – providing students with a medium to access abstract information. So plan for these memorable moments in your teaching to help students remember and recall the key learning points. See also dual coding (Chapter 3, page 56) for more about how using different methods of effective instruction can support memory and recall.

Chunking content In their fabulous book Psychology in the Classroom, Marc Smith and Jonathan Firth (2018) ask whether learning is more than just thinking. They remind us of the importance of how our memory works, through practical examples such as ‘chunking’: making meaningful words from random letters to help us remember them more easily. It’s useless if the information is not linked to learning, yet brilliant if the words are decoded (or chunked) into memorable, bite-sized pieces of knowledge. You may also wish to read up on the power of ‘mnemonics’ as a strategy for supporting students to remember in a similar way.

Quizzing Psychologists call forgetting ‘transience’ – the tendency to forget over time. Try a ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ approach in your classroom by regularly planning time for quizzing students on key terms, spellings and definitions every lesson! This way, content is regularly used rather than lost. Current dialogue suggests multiple-choice questions are good for reducing teacher workload and improving assessment for our students. However, could multiple-choice questions actually discourage longterm retention by giving students a reminder of information, rather than forcing them to exercise their recall? In ‘Thinking, fast and slow’, Kahneman (2014) writes, ‘If a ready answer is supplied it often takes an effort to question it.’ Try conducting the same test with and without the multiple-choice responses available and compare your students’ performances. You can find out more about retrieval practice and spaced practice, both essential for memory and recall, in Chapter 3, page 58.

Finally, be conscious of motivation Research led by Nagoya University in Japan (Ikeda et al., 2015) found that masteryapproach goals (developing your own competencies) enhance memory when learning new information. Performance-approach goals (comparing yourself to others), on the other hand, create questionable connections in the memory. Therefore, something for us all to consider when planning to provide feedback is whether we should provide students with a grade that compares their performance to that of another student or a grade based on their own progress.

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The science of storytelling

Use the five key elements of storytelling – surprise, structure, simplicity, specificity and subtext – in your lesson planning to help make learning stick. If we consider all forms of teaching, whether primary, secondary, or further and higher education, to truly have a broad and balanced curriculum, lesson planning must be coherent. When lesson planning lacks coherence, it is very difficult to understand what key information you wish to teach students. Over the last decade, there has been much dialogue about ‘making learning sticky’ (Brown et al., 2014). John Hattie (2009) calls this ‘teacher clarity’ in his meta-analyses, which he says has a positive influence on student achievement (with an effect size of 0.75). Personally, I prefer the term ‘stickability’. We all mean the same thing: communicating clearly with students when discussing the intentions of the lesson, as well as the success criteria, namely what knowledge, skills and understanding students must leave the classroom with and bring back to the next lesson. From this starting point of ‘what sticks?’, lesson planning can remain coherent. As we’ve established, planning is a thought process and certainly not a detailed document, and this process reminds me of the science of storytelling, which uses building blocks as part of a narrative to convey information clearly and memorably. A student must believe that they are the hero of the plot in any lesson, similar to how we live our lives day to day. If a teacher is not communicating a story within the guise of a lesson plan, then they are not communicating effectively. Communication, or effective teaching and learning in my opinion, is storytelling and stories are a powerful driver of emotions, which, as we learnt on page 36, is a key component of how we learn. Here is a simple ‘storytelling’ example: ‘Once upon a time, there was a teacher. Every day they would mark books and often burn the midnight oil. One day they discovered that verbal feedback had a prominent role to play in the classroom and that it was more meaningful. Their school leader believed it did too. They stopped day-to-day written marking and replaced this with bite-sized, meaningful conversations. Because of this, the teacher and their colleagues got a workload-free evening and students were more immersed in their learning. It led to teacher happiness and student progress. The end.’ Using the hallmarks of an effective story, I have constructed a simple narrative that is interesting and memorable. In the classroom, I could apply this same technique when delivering information and instruction to students. I could thread each part of the story throughout the lesson to keep students engaged, sharing various parts as we moved through the curriculum.

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The five elements of storytelling There are five elements of storytelling, and I would argue that these could be replicated in developing an effective lesson plan to help make learning stick: 1. surprise (and its ramifications) 2. structure (cause and effect) 3. simplicity 4. specificity 5. subtext (what’s happening beneath the story). If we translate these storytelling elements into the classroom, they may appear as: 1. Surprise: An interesting hook or starter activity. 2. Structure: Theory and practice in the classroom. For example, this is the knowledge and this is how to apply it using XYZ. 3. Simplicity: This comes from the teacher’s ability to translate complex ideas into engaging and stimulating content that is easy for students to access. It’s probably the most difficult part of a teacher’s day-to-day existence. 4. Specificity: We know our working memory is limited (see Chapter 3, page 53). We like specific things and our preferences are influenced by our bias. Cognitive scientists would suggest a more effective approach is to ‘dual code’ information (see Chapter 3, page 56). 5. Subtext: All the above are the ingredients for a good lesson plan, but it must be underpinned by the subtext of our medium- and long-term planning and objectives. If a teacher can consider these five elements as part of their lesson planning process, then it is my belief that, with practice, detailed written lesson plans will become a thing of the past, simply because we will naturally start to think more coherently and therefore more efficiently about the knowledge, skills and understanding we want our students to leave the classroom with and how to communicate this in a more meaningful, memorable way.

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Collaborative planning

Collaborative planning reduces the burden on individual teachers and ensures a consistent, joined-up approach that will benefit students. This idea will help you to introduce collaborative planning across your department or school.

I’m still shocked to discover that some schools require their teachers to submit lesson plans one week in advance. I understand why this approach is required in some contexts: the primary curriculum demands so much of a teacher and requires 38

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them to be an expert in a wide variety of specialisms, so it is often helpful for a subject leader to take a look at teaching plans. Also, if two teachers are working with the same class, they will need to prepare parts of the lessons in advance so that the other can see what else they will need to teach. So, I do appreciate why planning in this way is needed. The problem with this approach is that a teacher will continue to assess learning and then any plans on paper will need to be revised. This is disastrous for teacher workload. What should we do to improve lesson planning between colleagues teaching multiple subjects or working together with the same class? Good schools allow teachers to organise their planning and preparation more efficiently and clearly so they can get on with the job, allowing them to plan what the students need in an easy-to-create planning format. These schools encourage and enable collaboration, organisation and prioritisation in professional development sessions that are frequent and support teacher autonomy. This is hard to achieve, particularly in a challenging context or under the pressures of external scrutiny, but here are some tips to help you make collaborative lesson planning a reality in your school: 1. Provide weekly or termly planning sessions for all teaching staff in your department or school. 2. Pair up year teams and subject specialists to prepare schemes of work for teachers who are delivering the content. 3. Reduce the burden on teachers by no longer asking for detailed lesson plans and scripts. 4. Spend more time on creating resources that will actually aid the teacher and support students in the lesson. 5. Map all teaching and learning content to a key stage curriculum map using free mind-mapping tools, or use Google Sheets or Microsoft Teams to create a curriculum overview. Grant teachers various editing rights to be able to comment, tag and share details as and when required. 6. Use Google Forms to create questionnaires and tick sheets for collating responses and data that can be automatically analysed. 7. Most multi-academy trusts share their resources on an industrial scale. If you find yourself in an isolated school, simply connect with a nearby school that is working within a similar context and arrange a time to visit and swap schemes of work. Of course you could use social media, but you’ll gain more from seeing the content ‘come to life’ in the school itself and being able to talk to other teachers.

Using technology for collaborative planning Another way to improve collaboration when it comes to lesson planning is by investing in technology. On my travels, I have discovered various online tools that have supported teacher workload and curriculum planning.

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One of my many favourites is a lesson planning tool published by InfoMentor (www.infomentor.co.uk), which seamlessly integrates lesson planning, student assessment, progress reporting and parental engagement at a whole-school level. Their curriculum coverage tool is the perfect solution to quickly and accurately record and monitor your curriculum coverage, and subject leaders can use it to allocate certain parts of the curriculum to specific teachers, so they can see what they need to teach their class. The tool encourages cross-curriculum planning as teachers can add curriculum statements from different subjects to their topic and lesson plans. This automatically updates so that curriculum coverage can be reviewed at any point. Not only does this save time but it also gives clear and accurate visibility of what parts of the curriculum have been planned and covered, meaning any gaps in learning can be quickly identified. While there are many tried-and-tested digital products to improve lesson planning in your school, they essentially contain very similar hallmarks. Remember that if you are considering investing in a piece of technology, you should ask yourself the following questions: 1. Is it simple to use and affordable? 2. Is there a single sign-on through your main, day-to-day computer login? What this means is: can all your teachers log in once and then connect to all the pieces of software, rather than logging in to ten or 20 different pieces of software with 20 different usernames? 3. Can the software be used in a busy classroom efficiently and accurately? 4. Does the platform offer features that allow content to be shared quickly? 5. Are the software demands manageable? 6. Does the platform provide meaningful and motivational feedback – for students, parents and teachers? 7. Is there scope for medium- and long-term planning? While it’s important to shop around, remember that too many choices may lead to poor decisions (see Chapter 4, page 82), so be sure to identify what you need and keep your options limited.

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Lesson planning for observations

Use coaching dialogue to revolutionise lesson observations so teachers don’t feel pressured to produce detailed lesson plans solely for the benefit of the observer.

For over a decade, teachers have been bombarded with requirements to produce detailed lesson plans for observations – and the time spent on their production often far outweighs the length of a lesson! However, this isn’t the case in all settings and in every region of the UK. Slowly, coaching dialogue is beginning to immerse 40

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itself into lesson observations and teaching conversations in many schools, but we are not there yet. Why? Because for those schools who have not put in place an infrastructure to support regular coaching conversations, they still rely on an observer visiting a classroom for a one-off, snapshot performance review, which demands that the teacher offers some context to the lesson, often in lesson plan format, before or after the lesson takes place. While I understand that seeing a plan allows the observer to understand the full context of a lesson in order to make a reliable evaluation of what is happening, instead of asking a teacher for a detailed lesson plan, or any lesson plan for that matter, why not ensure that the teacher benefits from the observation rather than just the observer? This can be achieved through a regular discussion between the teacher and the same individual who visits the classroom. First, the observation should be carefully planned: 1. The observer and teacher meet to agree a focus for the lesson observation. 2. The teacher must set their own focus for the observation. 3. Perhaps the observer may steer the teacher towards a suggestion, selected from a range of choices narrowed down through simple questioning techniques. 4. The exact time and place of the observation lesson is agreed. The above four steps can be achieved in five minutes using the PPIPL technique conceived by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo (2012) in Leverage Leadership: P = Praise: First, validate a teacher’s previous efforts. P = Probe: Ask a probing question to narrow down the focus of the observation. I = Identify: Decide what the issue is and what action needs to be taken, including the levels of possible support. P = Plan ahead: Set a timeline to fit the observation in with a future lesson. L = Lock it in: The teacher should leave the conversation knowing exactly what will happen next. On the day of the observation, follow these simple steps: 1. The observer arrives with a blank piece of paper. This ensures that they keep their eyes up, looking at the teaching and learning taking place, rather than describing detailed thoughts on a checklist formed on a piece of paper with their eyes diverted from the action. 2. A set of questions is agreed in advance, so the teacher knows what the observer will be asking of students. This avoids the teacher feeling vulnerable and significantly reduces the ‘guess what’s inside my head’ approach, with observers annotating evidence and leaving the teacher distracted. 3. Data is collected throughout the observation. And I mean data in its broadest sense, capturing photographs, sound files and video recordings or student responses to agreed questions. (This is best captured on a device to speed things up and ensure the observer is keeping their head up.) 41

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4. After the lesson, the observer uses a coaching script to ask questions about the teacher’s decisions. These questions should steer the teacher’s responses to reflect on pedagogical approaches used in order to increase teaching and learning effectiveness. 5. For the time-poor teacher, this conversation following the lesson does not need to be longer than 15 or 20 minutes. Anything longer becomes cognitive overload. This approach enables observations to become an opportunity for teachers to build on and develop their strengths, rather than feeling like they are being judged or criticised. Research by CIPD (2017) shows that ‘interventions promoting strengths-based performance conversations can have a measurable impact on what conversations take place between managers and their staff and on the usefulness of one-to-one meetings for employees’ learning and development and performance.’ I would wager that taking this approach to lesson observations in your school would not only improve performance but also save teachers a huge amount of wasted time, stress and anxiety preparing detailed lesson plans for observations. Amen.

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Curriculum forward-planning

As one term ends, give yourself some time to look ahead to the next to make sure you know what needs to be taught and how you plan to teach it. The end of term can be a perfect time for looking ahead. Taking a little time to plan for the next term before you break up can make the holidays much more relaxing and enjoyable, as you will feel confident that you are prepared for the coming term and you’ll know that you won’t need to spend the last few days of the holidays in panic mode! If you can’t get everything done before you break up, spend one late night at work during the working week to avoid planning at home.

1. Know the curriculum you are teaching from Spend some time on your long-term curriculum planning. If you are teaching a new year group or class, knowing what your students need to aim for by the end of the year will help you with planning the content that you are going to teach them month by month.

2. Get to know your class Take a look at your students’ data. Who do you need to be aware of? Who will need extra support or intervention in the term ahead? Knowing this now will help you with your medium- and short-term planning, and will also enable you to decide on groupings and timetables. If you are in primary, find out whether any new children are joining the school; make them feel welcome by having their labels prepared for 42

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when they start. Simple rehearsal strategies to learn students’ names, quick afterclass conversations and targeted seating plans are the basics for every teacher, and I’d argue they are the essential components for day-to-day great teaching, even for experienced practitioners.

3. Plan your first week’s lessons It sounds like an easy thing to do, but the days slip away and before you know it it’s the start of a new term and your class are arriving at your door. If you have colleagues in your year group or department, make sure everyone is clear on the classes they are assigned to so you all know what you have to do. Feeling confident before you return will really help you get off on the right foot with your students.

4. Create knowledge organisers Recently, many teachers have been creating knowledge organisers to support students with their learning. If you have not discovered this concept before, in essence these resources are a student-friendly scheme of work covering key concepts, knowledge and skills to be learnt over a term or academic year. These resources could be printed in a large, coloured format, laminated and provided to each student on desks. Not only is this useful for students who miss a lesson due to absence, but knowledge organisers also become a self-regulation tool during the lesson to allow students to refer to prior learning. Knowledge organisers provide students with a clear, coherent summary of the key information they need to know and presenting this to them in an organised way assists long-term memory, which has a positive impact on student attainment. As Mark Miller (2018) writes, ‘Our working memory capacity is limited, so by storing more in our long-term memory, we can free up working memory capacity (Paas et al., 2004). With careful design and use of knowledge organisers, we can construct schemas, complex architectures of knowledge stored in long-term memory, with a view to automating their use (Paas et al., 2004).’ There are pedagogical approaches 43

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that can take this further and these must be integrated into a teacher’s habits alongside using knowledge organisers, for example by providing retrieval practice (see Chapter 3, page 58). Be aware, however, that knowledge organisers are not a silver bullet and although they support any curriculum, I do fear in some contexts they are a repeat of what already exists: examination specifications, a whole-school curriculum plan, department or year-team schemes of work and so forth. We should be careful not to increase teachers’ workload by simply regurgitating the same information and reinventing the wheel, so it’s best to coordinate knowledge organisers across a department to share out the workload and provide students with the key concepts.

5. Order any stationery that you need Getting the basics right is essential for all teachers. This is something that can easily be overlooked, especially if you are starting in a new school, but knowing what stationery will be available is essential for your lesson planning. Not being able to find the coloured pens that are crucial for your carefully planned group activity is stress we could all do without five minutes before a lesson starts. If you are new to the school or teaching a new subject or scheme of work, find out as soon as you can whether there is a budget, what you are responsible for and what will be on your desk before the students arrive. No one wants to walk into a lesson and panic about where the pencils are! Without the basics in place, curriculum content can be hindered.

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School case study School name: Ysgol Henry Richard es Location: Tregaron, Ceredigion, Wal gual Welsh state school, located Context: Ysgol Henry Richard is a bilin t of West Wales called

a beautiful par in the market town of Tregaron in n half ion, Welsh is spoken by more tha reg this In . ion) Ceredigion (kere dig e. stlin coa ul utif bea a with mainly rural the population and the county is 688 g erin cov ion, ulat the local pop The 2011 UK census has 75,900 as eeze the city of Cardiff and its one squ can you ply, square miles. Put sim side ... 12 times. Think roaming country million residents into the same area and then add a few more hills. here, it nearby school and when it snows You will be hard-pushed to find a threewith and students. The school works really is a ‘snow day’ for teachers ught bro ary school building, which has to 16-year-olds and has a new prim ents stud . The school currently has 314 three school sites onto one location t of cen in the secondary phase. 57 per on-roll – 131 in the primary and 183 are s ent homes and 88 per cent of stud students come from Welsh-speaking for e uag sh. English is an additional lang taught through the medium of Wel ool t of students are eligible for free sch very few students and ten per cen are m who s of teaching staff, a number of meals. The school has 29 member um icul Henry Richard is to bring the curr part time. The challenge for Ysgol to life with limited resources.

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? Due to the current financial climate, small rural schools are finding it increasingly difficult to provide students with a broad, balanced and enriched curriculum, especially at Key Stage 4. As a school, we have been successful in providing a wide range of valuable learning experiences across all key stages and we have ensured that creative and flexible arrangements are in place, enabling students to benefit from a wide range of learning pathways that meet their interests and abilities. We work effectively with external providers, nearby schools and local colleges to meet all students’ vocational needs, offering, for example, an accredited course in blacksmithing and agriculture. Opportunities for students to follow these courses, to work on farms and in local hair salons, support our strong focus on employability, which strengthens community links. In 2014, it became apparent that change was needed. From the outset, the primary focus was to find a solution that would meet both the needs of each individual learner and the needs of the school. The education system continually demands 45

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schools to show improvement and development and another key driver for change was in response to the Welsh school inspectorate Estyn’s recommendation of ‘providing a more cost-effective curriculum and timetable’, and thus securing the long-term sustainability and success of the new three-to-16 school. Other important factors to consider were the government’s statutory guidance whereby all schools must provide learners with a choice of at least 25 course options (including three vocational) for study during Key Stage 4. Schools record this information on Careers Wales Online. Offering these 25 courses can be problematic in a small rural school, especially in the current economic climate. This has resulted in the number of teachers employed falling over a six-year period. With this falling trend, staff retention and careful replacement become critical to ensure that there is the necessary expertise to effectively deliver these 25 courses. Another difficult and contributing factor was ensuring sufficient numbers within each subject, which in a large comprehensive is often not a significant consideration, to make courses viable and funding well-matched to our teaching strengths and the needs of our students. However, in a small rural school with a cohort of 32 students, courses have been pulled from the curriculum on an annual basis; this has resulted in the departure of both staff and students, which becomes a vicious spiral. On a student’s journey through secondary school, often the first key decision made is what subjects to study at GCSE level. In the majority of schools, this decision is made at the end of Year 9; however, it can be made at the end of Year 8. It became evident from the outset that this would be our intention and therefore the implications of providing the students with this decision prematurely needed to be considered. The choices that young people make in school, both at 16 and at the end of Key Stage 3, can have a significant impact on their future educational, aspirational and occupational opportunities. Therefore, the importance of the school leadership team and the curriculum in ensuring that students are provided with a fair and broad selection of choices is not a decision to be taken lightly.

Planning To create an effective curriculum model and timetable, it’s important that the students’ viewpoints are considered from the outset. Every student cohort is different and there is often a differential bias towards certain subjects year on year. Where possible, it is important that there is flexibility to accommodate this bias. Consulting students and teaching staff from the outset should also minimise problems and clashes once the curriculum and timetable have been created. The hallmark of a good curriculum in action is when there are little or no areas of the school that are over- or underused; class sizes are balanced and teaching staff are working productively. If things aren’t working, you will soon know about it. The success of our curriculum was dependent on each stakeholder buying into the rationale behind the proposed changes. One of the key factors in ensuring students positively engaged was carefully planning the option blocks – securing a variety of subjects, both academic and vocational, within each block. Alongside this, we provided a support mechanism to aid the students in the decision-making process. Examples 46

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of this included meeting with a careers officer, completing a questionnaire and offering time for students to discuss their options with teachers.

Curriculum design Taking into account these processes, an initial Key Stage 4 curriculum model was created (see the figure below). Despite the majority of schools dropping to a threeoption block model to accommodate the now compulsory Welsh Baccalaureate, we opted to continue with four option blocks. However, as identified below in the figure, Block 1 (B1) and Block 2 (B2) would be biannual option blocks, while Block 3 (B3) and Block 4 (B4) would remain as annual blocks. This enables both the staggered completion of all GCSE courses and the flexibility to accommodate any curricular reform. The new annual and biannual blocks Academic Year 1 Academic Year 2 Year 9

Year 10

Year 9

B1 B3

Year 11

B2

Year 10 B4

B2

Year 11 B3

B4

B3

B4

B3

B4

B1

Curriculum model One of the benefits of the curriculum is that a staggered completion challenges the more able and talented students to complete a GCSE course a year early, while providing an opportunity for less able students to study a subject over a period of three years. At this stage, another essential consideration was to ensure the sustainability and longevity of this complex system; a scenario where another cohort may be disadvantaged needed to be avoided. Consequently, a thorough analysis of the options available to each year group was analysed from 2015 to 2022. To date, the revised curriculum remains a success, enabling us to sustainably offer 25 subjects at Key Stage 4.

How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? Although we have adopted this model partly in necessity and it’s inherent to the context of our school, other schools could adopt such a model as a vehicle to overcome a variety of challenges: poor attendance at Key Stage 4; limited provision for more able students and overcoming financial and staffing constraints. 47

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Why does this work? by Raj Unsworth This chapter sets the scene by explaining why planning, which is an essential aspect of teaching, has become a workload issue that can impact teacher wellbeing and ultimately teacher performance. Ross discusses common practice, notably in lesson and curriculum planning, and shares five research-informed ideas with many practical tips to help support and contribute towards effective planning in schools, which we all know underpins good-quality teaching. Education is a partnership between the school and home, and all those involved in education, including parents, governors and trustees, benefit from understanding how students learn. This enables parents to better understand how to support their child and helps governors and trustees to understand decision-making around teaching and learning. In a period of time where teacher workload is sky high and teacher recruitment is a challenge, collaborative planning is an idea that particularly resonates. Good schools encourage and enable collaboration, supporting teacher autonomy while also reducing the need for compliance or rigid consistency. Whether you are a multi-academy trust with ten schools or you are working in a single school, you will find some excellent tips here to support workforce collaboration. Included in this is the often neglected area of technology. With investment in the right tools to support workload and curriculum planning, this can pay dividends for schools in attracting and retaining teachers. Ross challenges the need for detailed lesson plans for observations, instead advocating that all schools move quickly towards a step-by-step approach to observation, underpinned by a coaching culture. If implemented well, this can support teachers to reflect and improve rather than feel ‘judged’. With teacher wellbeing at the top of the agenda, schools that do not put in place genuine work–life balance and wellbeing strategies for both teachers and school leaders will soon be left isolated and will struggle to find people to work with them. Research tells us that excessive teacher workload is the main reason cited by many when leaving the profession and we must address this if we are to avoid a deepening recruitment and retention crisis, which will only heighten many of the issues highlighted in this book. Raj Unsworth is an experienced governor and trustee with 23 years in the education sector in a diverse range of settings and structures. She is passionate about every child having access to a good education and uses her professional expertise in HR, business and IT to support schools. Raj is also an adviser to the Headteachers’ Roundtable think tank.

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Chapter 3: Teaching and learning

S

olutions to improve teaching are often facile and the complex world of the classroom is difficult to define. I do not pretend to know the answers, but I am willing to have the conversation here.

I always argue that teaching is an art, a craft and a science, and it takes years to master. A research paper written by Alexander Makedon (1990), when he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Chicago State University, aims to unpick the meaning of the terms ‘art’ and ‘science’ when it comes to defining teaching as one or the other, and also identifies the difficulties involved in such a discussion. I agree with Makedon when he says that ‘whether teaching is an art or science depends on which definition of teaching we adopt’. 49

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As Makedon says, if we define teaching as an ‘attempt to help our students learn’, then teaching may be perceived as the application of learning research. Given the current climate for research- and evidence-informed methods, trying to help students learn based on how we have observed them learning makes teaching more a science than an art. If, on the other hand, by teaching we mean simply ‘the act of conveying information’ with no particular emphasis on how well students learn, then teaching lends itself more easily to a teacher expressing their feelings – despite learning effectiveness – and therefore teaching is an art form. Whether a teacher decides to teach using one or the other approach may depend on their overall educational or teaching goals in any one particular lesson. Professor Andy Hargreaves agrees. In April 2019, he discussed whether teaching is an art, craft or science on a panel ‘You have to move mountains and do whatever you can to ring-fence time at the Albert Shanker Institute, concluding that teaching is all for teachers to be able to discuss learning and teaching and reflect, three of these things, as well as ‘a service’, ‘a calling’ and ‘a job’. because it has to be absolutely at the top of a school’s priority list. If it Teaching is, of course, much isn’t, then you have to put it there.’ more nuanced than two binary definitions, whether that’s ‘art’ Alastair Armstrong, Assistant Headteacher, Fettes College, Edinburgh versus ‘science’ or ‘progressive’ versus ‘traditional’. In fact, it’s an extremely complex art, craft, science, service, calling, job or whatever else you may wish to call it. This chapter will look at some of the current debates in teaching and learning, including the rise of evidence-informed approaches, such as cognitive load theory, the importance of teaching critical thinking and the growing need to ‘prove’ the effectiveness of practice through progress data and lesson observations. It will then look at five ideas that I believe will help teachers to navigate these issues, all the while making sure they’re doing what’s right for their students.

Why is this an issue? Teaching and learning is a complicated business, and the increasing levels of accountability and the need for teachers to ‘show progress’ mean that it is becoming an ever more pressurised business too. Add to this the development of the field of cognitive science, particularly cognitive load theory, and the pressures on our teachers to teach critical thinking skills, and it’s clear that teaching and learning has become even more complex and nuanced for our schools and professionals in recent years. Let’s look at each of these issues in turn.

Accountability: evidence and progress Without question, the most fulfilling part of working within education is in the classroom itself. However, the complex task of teaching is becoming increasingly challenging, as the demands placed on a teacher to demonstrate evidence and 50

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progress over an academic year are becoming unsustainable. The key issue we have is that teachers are judged on their performance in the classroom, even though many of the factors that influence outcomes happen outside of school. Some schools may grade individual lessons, while others will grade their teachers by the quality of their teaching and examination outcomes over the academic year. At a higher level, many school systems still rely heavily on data to determine the quality of teaching, and while we are all working with less funding per student and are struggling to recruit, accountability targets have appeared to remain the same or the bar has been lifted even higher. For many years, I’ve argued that teachers and schools will jump through hoops because of how they are evaluated by external frameworks, potentially impacting the quality of what they do in the classroom and most certainly increasing their workload. I’ve seen first hand how the two simple words, evidence and progress, are becoming increasingly challenging in every school, regardless of context. Both of these terms are systematic with our school accountability system, driven by external audiences visiting a school to gather as much information as possible to be able to write a report on its effectiveness. Let’s start by defining these two words: Progress: The Oxford Dictionary definition is ‘Forward or onward movement towards a destination’ or ‘Development towards an improved or more advanced condition.’ Find me a school that does not want to be better. Find me a school in which teachers are not, on the whole, working tirelessly. But at no point does this equate simply to progress in a one-hour lesson or a student moving from a grade D to a grade C. Evidence: The Oxford Dictionary definition is: ‘The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid’ or ‘Signs or indications of something.’ In a period of time where evidence is important, why have we allowed ourselves to seek evidence for every decision and intervention a teacher is required to make? Very few jobs ask all their employees to show demonstrable evidence for 30 other people.

‘I personally think it’s not about paying lip-service to a policy document but about actually trying to create a culture and environment of practitioners enquiring, getting as many staff interested in those teaching and learning issues as possible, and trying to encourage the idea of staff reflection, progress and improvement in their teaching.’ Alastair Armstrong, Assistant Headteacher, Fettes College, Edinburgh

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In 2018, the NFER published a review of accountability systems across the globe (Brill et al., 2018). What was most fascinating was that other OECD countries that are often cited by our politicians as performing better than us are in fact doing less with assessment and school evaluation. Countries such as Finland and Singapore – who rank relatively high in PISA tables – have external evaluation, yet choose not to publish inspection outcomes. In the UK, we seem to have developed a position, at least in England, where state school teachers have to backtrack and evidence all the work that they have done throughout the year. This is to justify performance-related pay decisions or, worse, to prove ‘what they have been doing’ to external visitors who may visit their classroom for 20 or 30 minutes. What a mess we’ve got ourselves into. When did we accept that we would allow other professionals to come into our classrooms and judge years of teaching experience in a snapshot moment? Many things in our schools are simply too hard to measure. Teachers make thousands and thousands of idiosyncratic decisions in their classrooms, many unobserved, which, at a whole-school level, make a collective difference to the lives of children. Yet, our system chooses to analyse the complex world of teaching, postcode demographics, funding and accountability by assessing the individual teacher. If we view school accountability at its most altruistic, teachers speaking with students in class is evidence, but the thousands of daily conversations happening in the classroom day to day are missed. A student may act on what feedback a teacher provides, and then make immediate progress, yet this can rarely be directly linked back to the final data capture, and this ‘eureka’ moment is often missed. Teachers ‘evidence’ all the work they have done for an academic year, just in case an observer may speak, gather or view required evidence. The Grim Reaper (2018) states that inspectors are expected to use a considerable amount of first-hand evidence to determine the quality of teaching and learning, for example observing students, talking to them about their work, scrutinising their work and assessing how well leaders are securing continual improvements in teaching. However, much of the journey will be missed. 97 per cent of teachers Our obsession with ‘evidence’ and ‘progress’ is a and school leaders huge burden on our teachers, distracting them feel confident or very from their core duties in the classroom, increasing confident with their workload and impacting their morale. If we teaching and learning, strip away all accountability for our teachers, what although 55 per cent are we left with? I have advocated for some time still consider it a now that all teachers simply need to focus on in challenging their day-to-day work is: marking, planning and area of their teaching. Of course, we do need to hold schools day-to-day to account for the work they do with children, but practice. we must develop a more reliable and intelligent way of evaluating what we do. Within every school, we need a common framework so that students move between classrooms and receive a degree of consistency in line with wholeschool values, but I believe that success lies between the extremities of high-stakes accountability and a loose model where nothing happens at all. 52

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Cognitive load theory With the development of cognitive science and the growing interest in educational psychology in schools, cognitive load theory has become the ‘next big thing’ in teaching (Shibli and West, 2018). Even the school inspection framework in England is now being informed by cognitive load theory and how this impacts on learning in the classroom – specifically memory and the brain (Muijs, 2019). Cognitive load theory is essentially the idea that our working memory can only process a limited amount of information at any one time, and if the amount of information needing processing exceeds the limits of our working memory, learning is negatively impacted. Of course, we already know that teaching content alone, and simply overwhelming students with too much information, is not likely to lead to anything proficient. As Kirschner et al. (2018) say: ‘Where transactions are either unnecessary for or detrimental to learning […], the cognitive load incurred could negatively impact learning.’ What the most effective teachers do is break the information down and regularly check the learning. We may also be able to teach students certain metacognitive strategies that will help them to think scientifically about their own learning and progress. In an article published in 1997, Professor Barak Rosenshine discusses ‘The case for explicit, teacher-led, cognitive strategy instruction’, researching cognitive strategies from 1970 to 1990. Instructional procedures, supported by concrete prompts and scaffolding, support the notion that teachers should use heuristic methods to get the best out of themselves and their students. As Robbie Coleman (2017) writes in a blog published by the EEF, based upon Rosenshine’s review of 56 studies, teaching thinking strategies as a type of explicit instruction appears to be a successful approach. However, explicitly teaching in this way only tells students what they should do; it does not provide the knowledge to actually do it. So it’s clear that one must not ‘eschew teaching facts’ (Coleman, 2017). We cannot dispute the power of cognitive load theory and its impact in the classroom – there have been over 8,000 research articles about its impact on Google Scholar in the first half of 2019 alone. However, for teachers to be able to assess 30 students’ cognitive load on its feet is highly complex, and it’s just as difficult for observers too. It is very useful that the Grim Reaper highlights that cognitive load theory has been used in its research methods as part of the new framework for English schools, yet there are many other ways to support students in lessons, for example dual coding (see page 56) and helping to improve memory and retrieval (see page 58); we should assume that cognitive load theory will be different in many different subjects and teaching and learning age groups. If we place cognitive load theory at the heart of policy and evidence, there is a danger that it will have significant implications on national pedagogy. As the Grim Reaper rightly points out, ‘CLT does not dictate a specific teaching method’ (Muijs, 2019). Although I welcome any watchdog to be research-informed, the concern is whether the Grim Reaper will be advocating this theory as a pedagogical approach for all schools to adopt, and whether it will form part of the ‘quality of education’ judgement in inspection. Another challenge for everyone is how these approaches can be translated into practical ideas for time-poor teachers with 30 challenging 53

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students sitting in front of them – and what this means for the broad range of education provision that our teachers work within. What does cognitive load theory look like in the classroom when teaching four-year-olds or when teaching 15-yearolds who have been permanently excluded and are now thriving in a pupil referral unit? We need to be aware of cognitive science but, most importantly, we need to know how we can use these theories practically in the context in which we teach.

Critical thinking Critical thinking enables us to make difficult decisions and solve complex problems, so it’s no surprise that employers and higher education admissions tutors are demanding that schools find a way to improve their teaching of this skill. Teachers are under increasing pressure to develop their students’ critical thinking, but it is notoriously difficult to teach. ‘Why is [critical thinking] so hard to teach?’ is a question posed by cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham (2007) in a paper published in American Educator. In the paper, Willingham asks whether critical thinking can actually be taught. He answers, ‘Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really.’ A student may be able to answer a question on one particular scientific problem, but not the next, even though scientifically both problems are the same. Knowing that people should think critically is not the same as being able to do so. Willingham (2007) argues that ‘domain knowledge and practice’ are required, for example deploying the right type of action (or thinking) at the right time, but what does this mean for teachers who wish to develop their students to be able to ‘think critically’? Firstly, teachers must teach students ‘what critical thinking is’ and then offer a great deal of practice. As with all aspects of teaching and learning, it’s important to be specific about what is being learnt. We must specify the type of critical thinking being taught: analysis, inference, explanation, decision-making or problem-solving, for example. Teaching students these metacognitive strategies offers explicit methods for knowing ‘how to think critically’, but this is not the same as being able to do so. Therefore, teachers must teach students the range of skills, but also teach them how to select the right type of thinking at the right time. To do this, students must be taught critical thinking in the context of subject matter. Two simple examples can include an individual student designing a new kitchen utensil to suit an arthritic person or a group exercise where students must work out how to cross a river with only so many components and so much time being available. For the first example, deciding the size of the material to use for this person’s needs will allow the student to create a bespoke design through analysis. In the second example, students may need to collectively use all types of critical thinking and decide which type to use as and when. The secret, in my opinion, is making students aware of what skills they are using and why, so they can then select them appropriately when they are needed, without a cue from the teacher. In the schools that I have visited and the case studies threaded throughout this book, you will find a mixture of schools, each with their own challenges, who are striving to achieve high-quality teaching in classrooms, regardless of context. Of course, some will find this harder to achieve than others – having ten or 100 54

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teachers makes this an interesting discussion in itself. The challenge for every teacher in every school is how they can increase their effectiveness, offering a high-quality set of lessons throughout the academic year, without it impacting on workload, mental health and wellbeing. I hope the ideas in this chapter will give you some suggestions as to how this could be achieved.

How can we tackle it? ea 1

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The hallmarks of great teaching

What does great teaching look like? In this idea, I offer eight attributes of effective teaching based on Professor Barak Rosenshine’s research and my own observations of what happens in classrooms day to day.

Throughout my 25 years in teaching, I’ve observed thousands of lessons. It’s been a constant learning curve to develop the skills required to be able to do this effectively for the benefit of the teacher, especially when working outside of my specialism. Since I started blogging and writing over ten years ago, I have also been researching teaching and learning, unpicking various pieces of research that not only influence education policy and explore what effective teaching looks like from an academic perspective, but also translate this into what works in the classroom for teachers. All of this combined has led me to a more informed position to understand the hallmarks of great teaching. One paper that has influenced my thinking in particular is Professor Barak Rosenshine’s (2012) ‘Principles of instruction’, which identifies what effective instruction looks like in the classroom based on his work over four decades. In Rosenshine’s research, a wide range of teachers were observed to identify the differences between the most effective teachers and those who are less effective. Applying Rosenshine’s academic research to my own practical experiences, these are what I consider to be the hallmarks of great teaching: 1. First and foremost, teachers must be passionate about their subject and children. 2. They must be up to date with the latest pedagogy, research and curriculum content and know their children inside out (see Chapter 1, page 13). 3. Effective teachers own their classroom domain and can break down barriers to learning with good discipline, routines and rigour. This can be achieved with compassion, but clear boundaries are required and must be used every day. 4. Successful teachers are well organised so that they can think on their feet to pre-empt potential problems. They ask a lot of targeted questions and never make assumptions about what students know. They regularly assess. 55

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5. Good teachers take risks in their own classroom and accept no excuses. They hold themselves to account but they expect the same from the students, providing a bank of material through modelling and scaffolding practice. 6. To achieve a high success rate, these teachers are highly reflective, embrace challenge and are open to feedback. They make learning attainable using systematic feedback and corrections, as well as monitoring independent work. 7. More than anything else, they seamlessly interconnect topics with old and new material, building a narrative between connections of knowledge and how to apply it. When doing so, they are consistently consistent, and their students often thank them for it. 8. They are also highly effective at switching off and saying ‘no’ to students. I am sure that you know a teacher like this. It may even be you! But if not, go and have a conversation with that colleague today. I hold the belief that teaching is very complex, but on the surface it can appear to be like a swan gliding across the water: it’s calm, in control and aware of its surroundings, but behind the scenes there are many decisions being made below the surface that we cannot see. To offer cognitive support for one another, it is critical that we articulate our decision-making processes when observing each other’s practice. A collaborative, reflective approach to teaching is essential if all teachers are to develop these hallmarks of effective classroom instruction. The University of Southampton published a report (Fish, 1994) to investigate how teachers may build and maintain students’ self-confidence in articulating scientific ideas. The research focused on a science department in a boys’ comprehensive school in England, and one of the key findings was that the success of the department depended on how the team worked together with ‘an atmosphere of collaboration and support’. This enabled teachers ‘to develop and adapt their own preferred teaching styles in the light of the perceived needs of their individual classes’ and ‘adapt the agreed methodology to suit their own personal style’, which was significant for reducing teacher stress and ‘facilitating the ownership of the content and methodology’.

ea 2

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Dual coding

Every teacher disseminates knowledge, but very few have ever been taught how best to impart it effectively so that students can understand and apply it. Having an awareness of what dual coding can do will help with this and will make you a better teacher.

What is dual coding? First hypothesised by Allan Paivio in 1971, dual coding theory – a theory of cognition and how we think – uses the idea that the formation of mental images, 56

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and the use of verbal and visual coding, aids learning. Note this is not learning styles, which is still prevalent but in fact has no direct correlation to learning. According to the theory, our brain codes written and spoken words once only, but images of words are coded twice – both visually and verbally. This verbal and non-verbal processing ‘enables you to access more working memory capacity’. It also increases the traces of this information in your long-term memory because ‘two connected traces are stronger than one single trace’ and you are able to remember or recognise the information in two different ways. (Kirschner and Neelen, 2017) As an example, think about a time when you left your house and two minutes later wondered, ‘Did I lock the front door?’ Next time you leave the house, when you are locking the door, say aloud, ‘I am now locking the front door.’ You may think it’s silly, but the power of dual coding verbal and physical information will help you remember the act of doing something more clearly.

Why is dual coding important for teachers? I firmly believe that teachers need to do less, not more, to work more effectively, and this can be achieved through greater awareness of cognitive science and how various methodologies, such as dual coding, impact on teaching and learning. This is particularly crucial at a time of insurmountable workload and when the default mode of teaching is a never-ending juggling act. We should be developing teachers’ repertoires by immersing them in cognitive science principles, which will improve classroom delivery no end. Using dual coding conscientiously in our teaching enables educators to access more working memory capacity in students and increases the chances of information entering into students’ long-term memory for recall and recognition. Try adapting the techniques of dual coding to tweak your content and delivery in class in a much more effective and meaningful manner. Consider spatial and verbal working memory, as well as how these translate into classroom resources for students and how this information influences your teaching style. When providing cognitive support for simple tasks such as writing on the board, for example, one simple technique all teachers should be conscious of is to face the students as much as possible and read out aloud the word so that students can lip-read and learn how to pronounce key terminology. This is a subtle and incredibly simple technique to use, but using this method provides vital non-verbal cues (the things we don’t hear but see – mouth and lip positions) as much as verbal communication (the things we hear). It is important for all teachers and school leaders to streamline their thought processes and expectations in order to work more effectively. For the classroom teacher, this process is essential and even more critical to achieving effective content delivery, especially when given a short amount of time to plan and deliver meaningful lessons day to day. Try this simple metric when planning your content delivery: ‘What. Why. How. What if.’ Think about the information you are sharing and how you should present it verbally, visually and literally. The explanation on the next page shows how this works in practice. 57

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1. What: I want my students to learn X. 2. Why: They need to know X, not just for the exam, but they must learn what X is and why X is important to ABC so that we can connect back to W and move on to Y. 3. How: I will do this with one student by doing 456. With all 30 students, I will do this using 123 and offer 456 as a scaffold. 4. What if: If 456 doesn’t work, I will plan to offer 789 as an alternative to help connect W to Y. To give you an example, if you want students to learn about photosynthesis, you can ensure students a) know how to spell the word; b) know how to say it out aloud; and c) understand what it means. Coding this information with speech and objects such as a sunflower or a camera (or at least a physical hand gesture to connote ‘taking a photo’), alongside an image of the sun, water and light, will help students retrieve this information more easily – with practice, of course. A word of caution, however: it is easy to overload working memory, and it has been proven over and over again that even you and I will have trouble learning when this happens. This is called the ‘redundancy effect’ and occurs when, for example, text on the board is read aloud. If a student’s brain must decode the same information in two different ways simultaneously, the working memory gets overloaded. This, therefore, requires us to provide only ‘useful’ information; additional images or sounds for engagement are simply distracting (Kirschner and Neelen, 2017).

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Retrieval practice

Retrieval practice is possibly one of the most powerful strategies you will already be using in your classroom. The question is whether you are consciously aware you are doing it. It helps students store the things they learn more permanently in their long-term memory.

Retrieval practice should become a regular part of a teacher’s repertoire and it should be a common term in teacher professional development. Put simply, retrieval practice is about trying to remember information without it being in front of you. Consider a dynamic classroom environment where students are regularly quizzed versus a lecture hall where students are simply spoken to. Which do you think would support memory better? Either environment may work, but the strategies used are critical. Part of the learning process is about being assessed, as well as forgetting information, in order to dig deeper into short-term (working) memory and longterm memory too. A teacher must use every means possible to keep students engaged and provide opportunities where all these habits can be developed and shaped. It’s a bit like riding a bike: to become more balanced, to ride more quickly or even to understand how to fix it when it breaks down requires engagement with all the parts and regular practice. 58

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There are many ways you can integrate retrieval practice into your day-to-day classroom practice, including simple questioning and revision strategies.

Questioning You should never assume students have grasped the knowledge and skills you are teaching them. Regularly test them by making sure you have a wide repertoire of questioning techniques that you can deploy at any given moment and that will keep all 30 students engaged, working in the palm of your hand and ready to provide you with an answer! Professor Pooja Agarwal and Patrice Bain’s (2019) book, Powerful Teaching, unpicks the effects of retrieval practice with students using questioning techniques, such as think – pair – share and no-stakes quizzes (meaning quizzes that don’t contribute towards a final grade), both of which are valid forms of retrieval practice.

Think – pair – share I’m sure you will have come across this popular strategy by now, but just in case you haven’t here’s a quick overview with something new to consider. Teachers pose a question and each student first works independently, thinking how they might answer it. They then pair up with another student to discuss ideas before sharing them with their peers in a whole-class discussion. While this strategy can be really effective, it’s important to make sure students are actually thinking about your question. Whether students are sitting or standing, talking aloud or sitting quietly, how do you really know that they are thinking about your question? A simple strategy to combat this is to ask students to write down their responses on paper before sharing them with another student. As simple as it sounds, it is a direct way to ensure all students have thought about an answer and are prepared to provide you with a response.

Quizzes You may want to use software such as Kahoot, Quizlet, Memrise and Socrative for no-stakes quizzing. Alternatively, use low-tech options, such as asking students to answer using a thumbs up or thumbs down, or by writing their responses on a mini whiteboard. These are all fantastic strategies to deploy regularly and speedily in your classroom to help students retain information.

Revision strategies Teachers have been using revision techniques with students for decades, so in some respects, retrieval practice is nothing new. However, with the birth of social media, teacher blogs and access to research, teachers can now back up strategies they may have always used with science and research. This puts teachers in a stronger position in their classrooms. Let me share with you a set of revision strategies, all backed up by the cognitive psychology we have explored in this chapter. 59

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1. Suggest students use self-marking revision websites as part of their homework in the run-up to exams. 2. Find some subject-specific YouTube tutorials – the right ones, of course! 3. Teach students how to plan their time effectively, creating a revision timetable to break their revision into manageable chunks. 4. Have students draw a sketchnote relating to the key concepts of a specific topic. 5. Can students say key ideas and information aloud, either to themselves or to a friend? Even better, they can voice-record themselves and play the recordings back to themselves at regular intervals. ‘We did a whole-school questionnaire and asked students what we do well and what we could improve. Students came back and said they’d like more in the way of revision skills and study skills and we acted on that. We’ve done quite a lot of work in departments on looking at subject-specific methods for revision, and for the content-rich subjects specifically, such as history or geography, we found low-stakes testing to learn content and retain it to be important.’ Alastair Armstrong, Assistant Headteacher, Fettes College, Edinburgh

The rule of three A final point on retrieval practice: don’t just quiz or test students on the knowledge or skills you have imparted once. In fact, the research advocates that retrieving information at least two, if not three, times will optimise performance. Karpicke and Grimaldi (2012) found that retrieving information two or three times ‘produced a 150% improvement in long-term retention’. So teachers, quiz or test your students on the same topics three times!

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Teaching and learning policy

Having a clear teaching and learning policy and evaluating the quality of provision, either in one particular class or across a whole school, is essential to ensuring that teachers are providing consistent, high-quality teaching. The way in which many schools currently go about creating and enforcing their teaching and learning policy – with learning walks and data analysis 60

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(see Chapter 1, page 4) – may add untold amounts of pressure and excess workload on our teachers. Worse, these processes are conducted with very little rigour or any useful research methodology other than, ‘We’ve ticked that off the list.’ Teaching and learning is one area that every school must get right; it trumps absolutely everything else we do as teachers and school leaders. So what should we be doing differently?

Creating a teaching and learning policy If you’re in a leadership position, it’s important to embed a simple, evidencebased teaching and learning policy within your school, which can reduce teacher workload and maximise student progress. A concise list of straightforward strategies that teachers can implement in every classroom will provide the degree of consistency all our children need. The benefits of this are clear. I have found that schools that prioritise a high-quality teaching and learning policy are the most effective. With this comes clarity for teachers, parents and students. It places everyone on a level playing field in line with school expectations. Teachers are required to work with a degree of rigour, fairness and discipline, but ultimately this allows teachers to teach and students to learn and thrive. In these schools, teachers will often thank each other for their adherence to the policy and will appreciate their leadership team for the clarity and guidance offered. A clear policy also assists with consistent training for all teachers and brings about collective teacher efficacy (see Chapter 9, page 196), empowering teachers to become immersed in their own pedagogy and how it impacts on their students and themselves professionally. However, simply writing a policy on paper will not create magic in the classroom if teachers are not supported. You can have a policy with the best evidence-informed ideas relevant to your context, but if your teachers are not equipped to bring content to life, then it’s worthless. In the most harmonious schools, teaching and learning is a daily conversation for all staff. In staff briefings, teacher training sessions, assemblies and meetings, teaching and learning is on every agenda everyday, indefinitely, developing a culture of collaborative and reflective practice. The headteacher is part of the journey too.

What if not everyone follows the teaching and learning policy? I am yet to work in a school that achieves 100 per cent consistency, and in every school, there will be one or two teachers who take an approach that may be detrimental to whole-school consistency. This sends out mixed messages to students and is an issue for middle and senior school leaders to address as soon as it becomes problematic. Long-term support for these teachers is needed to help bring about change, including finding out why and offering support. If the school’s teaching and learning policy is being undermined in a year team or department, it’s important that the middle leader does something about it in the first instance to prevent it making everyone else’s lives more difficult. Teachers often look to the person in charge of teaching and learning, and it may be helpful 61

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to have their involvement, but the buck should at least start with the team around the teacher. A head of department, for example, could bring about change, with the support of their senior leader. If the weakest link is the middle leader themselves then we clearly have a problem.

Evaluating teaching and learning Over the last decade, I have conducted whole-school learning walks in thousands and thousands of classrooms. This has been a great privilege for me to be able to see so many lessons and countless teachers delivering a wide spectrum of subjects and strategies to a vast range of students. I have observed many of these with other teachers too, including school inspectors, senior leaders, visitors and colleagues working within the same school. I often think to myself what impact this process has had on me, the colleagues taking part, the teacher themselves in the classroom and the students. I also think more deeply about how much impact learning walks actually have on improving the quality of teaching and learning. As a school leader, I used to argue that data in its broadest sense allows a school to determine whether teaching and learning ideas and research are working in our classrooms and whether the students’ needs are being met. But on the other hand, I would question how much value any learning walk experience actually has for a teacher and what impact, if any at all, it has on the individual students. Learning walks can be useful to get a flavour of day-to-day practice to discover pinch points in behaviour or how ideas are being rolled out across the school. However, too often they are used to assess the quality of teaching, and it’s this that makes my spine shiver. There are still many schools that use tick boxes, checklists and numerical targets to evaluate the quality of teaching and learning, tailoring very little to the individual teacher, class and context. Learning walks rarely tell us about the quality of teaching taking place. The data is wholly unreliable, as they rarely consider the before, during and after and are often simply a snapshot in time. It is possible to draw some reliable conclusions, but this is definitely a rare occurrence and is often dependent on time and context. Until we move away from this method of evaluation, we will continue to belittle one another in the profession with mindless exercises that are used to ‘tally’ what is taking place, rather than develop quality teaching and learning. We need to work hard at using better metrics for evaluating the quality of teaching and learning, using structured and semi-structured approaches to explore specific aspects of learning, yet also support the individual teacher when doing so. As a starting point, any observations should be carefully planned with the input of both the observer and the teacher, and these should include regular one-to-one coaching conversations (see Chapter 2, page 40). Another option is a formalised coaching programme rolled out across the school. This is explored further in the next idea.

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Coaching to develop teaching and learning

Coaching is a fantastic method of developing teaching and learning to ensure high-quality practice across a school. In this idea, I share the five key principles of coaching to help you embed it in your school. For many years, I have advocated the use of coaching as an alternative for teachers’ professional development. In my research, I’m pleased to report that more schools across the UK are seriously contemplating, or have started to embed, coaching dialogue for improving the quality of teaching and learning. However, not everyone is there. Teachers who work in Scotland will find coaching to be very much part and parcel of their everyday working lives, but for teachers elsewhere, coaching is still very much hit and miss. The difficulty for all schools is, of course, a lack of funding. If headteachers have sufficient funds available, they can add capacity for teachers to coach one another and learn from one another. However, if we set aside context, funding and school logistics, there is plenty we can all learn from schools who have established coaching as a model for making a difference to all teachers, regardless of the stage they are at in their career or the school in which they work. Let’s look at the key principles.

1. Avoid subjective or emotional decisions In coaching, there are no subjective or emotional decisions made, for example a grade or, dare I say, a simple ‘what went well?’ or ‘even better if’. Even these two simple statements elicit an emotional response. I have had the pleasure of working with the charismatic Chris Moyse, an experienced school leader who advocates a drastic alternative to what schools tend to deploy when it comes to observing teachers: tick lists and observation checklists predominantly feature and teachers dance along to a merry song under the guise of consistency. It was when I was a deputy headteacher, working with over 100 teachers in my school, that Chris first suggested to me to abolish all subjective decisions from any observations. In terms of context, the school at the time had faced significant challenges and had banished lesson gradings after my arrival – including checklists, proformas and graded teachers who wore the judgement like a badge of honour – and we were moving slowly away from three formal observations a year. Within one year, we had abolished the system altogether and had moved to a simple template, but still with subjective statements such as ‘what went well?’ and ‘even better if’. Chris first suggested the idea of coaching and we started to move towards a blank piece of paper, where well-trained and qualified teachers acting as coaches would make

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the implicit explicit by raising a number of probing questions to help steer the teacher towards solutions. In the world of coaching, this is nothing radical, but in schools – particularly busy and challenging schools – the reality of making this work in practice is very difficult but extremely valuable.

2. Develop a coaching culture When it comes to coaching, the key thing is changing dialogue across the school and developing coaching as a culture that permeates all teaching and learning conversations in which teachers have a say. Teachers should be identified to act as coaches to help generate teacher discussions and, from this starting point, the training and coaching work can evolve. The Achilles’ heel here is how to select teachers to act as coaches without further exacerbating bias or cherry-picking competent, keen teachers who want to work with others. The greatest cultural shift will be schools working hard to transform the stereotypes associated with ‘being coached’. Everyone, even you, needs a coach!

3. Plan the logistics At a logistical level, schools need to consider how every teacher could receive coaching. Fundamentally, all teachers should be engaged with the regular teaching and learning dialogue and not leave it to an isolated, one-off event, which would lead to little or no improvement whatsoever. Coaching can happen outside of the classroom, but the challenge is how to facilitate this inside a busy timetable. Therefore, coaching conversations should be a weekly occurrence, with the teacher generating their own focus. Training for coaches is, of course, to be rigorous and qualifications offered because quality control and quality assurance are critical. After I worked with one of the schools in this book, Slough and Eton Church of England Business and Enterprise College (see Chapter 9, page 199), over a period of time to establish coaching, they moved on from a small group of teachers being coached to 99 per cent of their teaching staff now being signed up to receive coaching. While this shift is a huge achievement, 100 per cent is the goal for all of our schools. The difficulty for most schools, of course, is generating an opportunity for coaching to happen on a weekly basis, and also finding sufficient funds to allow a small group of teachers to be qualified coaches and have the time to observe other teachers and meet with them regularly. I believe that coaching dialogue can happen in five to 15 minutes, and can take place weekly inside or outside the classroom.

4. Embed vision, values and a common vernacular Throughout all of this, vision, values and a common vernacular should be agreed and consistently promoted through observation, teacher discussions and in every other way across the school. If this was not a process that sought compliance, consistency would be a natural occurrence.

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5. Ensure coaching exists across all departments and teams One final point: coaching must exist across departments and teams, considering diversity, equality and line management and line manager roles. For example, there is nothing stopping a deputy headteacher being coached by another member of teaching staff who, coincidentally, is a superb listener and an excellent subject practitioner. The teacher may be able to offer the senior leader subject knowledge they do not have, which is particularly important if they have to fill timetable gaps. This is a simple and obvious example of where a less experienced member of staff would be able to provide solid coaching conversations with a more experienced teacher. We can each learn from one another, and we often do when we have time protected for meaningful conversations. The schools that protect this time fiercely are getting it right.

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School case study School name: Fettes College Location: Edinburgh, Scotland ’ve got a good visual image Context: Imagine Harry Potter and you the heart of Edinburgh.

looks like in of what the majestic Fettes College ependent boarding and day school ind nal, atio duc Fettes is a private, co-e ool s in residence on campus. The sch with over two-thirds of its student nal atio duc co-e ame bec and for boys only was originally a boarding school ers ach dte hea ten had The school has in 1983 for seven- to 18-year-olds. d’s school building is one of ‘Scotlan the and 0 187 in since it was founded and n ctio fi of nts poi able udes some not greatest buildings’. The school incl and d Bon es Jam how es Twice describ fame: Ian Fleming’s You Only Live us -life alumni include Tony Blair, Ang real and es, Fett his father attended of ions mill ined erta ent Balfe, who has Deaton, Lola Shoneyin and Lorne man Bat o Leg The and da Kung Fu Pan children by composing music for truly backdrop, but there is something ue uniq its has Movie. Every school magical about Fettes.

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? The emphasis in our school is on harnessing pedagogical research and discussion in order to improve the quality of learning and teaching in the classroom. Sharing ideas, discussing best practice and allowing teachers the freedom to try out new techniques lie at the heart of our learning and teaching ethos. What in theory sounds so simple is, of course, the ‘Holy Grail’ for all schools. Cultivating an environment and culture of practitioner-led enquiry and reflection is easier said than done, and goes well beyond the standard policy document that often rests unread in a folder. We wouldn’t for one moment suggest that we are breaking new ground, but we are moving in the right direction towards a staff body who want to talk about educational research and refine their approach to teaching. What we have been attempting to do is to facilitate the process by which this can happen and try to make sure that what happens in the classroom remains our central focus.

How have you achieved this? Several years ago we made sure that each academic department had ringfenced learning and teaching meetings, separate and distinct from traditional departmental meetings, which tended to be consumed by administrative and bureaucratic matters. This has allowed heads of department an opportunity to 66

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lead on learning and teaching issues that are specific to their needs and those of their subjects. It has also allowed for younger or new members of each department to input ideas, share effective lessons and feel part of the team. A representative from each faculty attends the whole-school learning and teaching committee, which meets on a Wednesday and allows for the flow of ideas across departments. Often, issues raised at the whole-school learning and teaching meetings, such as skillful questioning techniques, methods of assessment or refining our approach to homework, then make their way back to departmental meetings, or go on to form the basis of whole-school observations.

Making learning and teaching a priority, built into the school timetable, ensures that it gets the attention it deserves and puts it at the heart of departmental discussion rather than the last point on an agenda – once all the administration has been sorted out. Crucially, the academic leadership team also works very closely with the pastoral leadership team in order to drive progress. As a boarding school, we see the pastoral provision and full-time care of our students as central to our existence. Over the past five years, we have certainly recognised that academic achievement is closely intertwined with a high-quality pastoral provision. The themed awareness weeks that we have run have emphasised the characteristics required to live a happy and fulfilled life, recognising that a highly pressurised academic treadmill is not conducive to wellbeing. Like it or not, exam results are still seen as the passport to higher education, particularly by ambitious parents who are spending a lot of money to send their children to our school. However, we have come to see very clearly that academic achievement is a by-product from more than just what 67

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happens in the classroom. Our PSHE and tutorial system ensures that our students have a wider support network to facilitate their progress and develop the key characteristics that are required for success and fulfilment in the outside world. Therefore, looking at ways in which we can develop our students beyond the classroom continues to be of central importance. This is of course much easier in a boarding school, where traditionally co-curricular activities have played a major part in education. Sport, drama, the Duke of Edinburgh Award and music have long provided opportunities for students to find their niche and develop specific skills beyond the classroom. Increasingly, service to the outside community is something we have placed a significant emphasis upon, with a recent initiative allowing our lower-sixth students to serve as volunteers on a residential holiday for students with learning and physical disabilities. Happening on site during the summer holidays, the opportunity to develop leadership and resilience skills is obvious but also the chance to up-skill in Makaton training gives an extra dimension to the experience. Makaton is a language programme using signs and symbols to help people to communicate. It is designed to support spoken language and the signs and symbols are used with speech, in spoken word order. Find out more at www.makaton.org/aboutMakaton. Yes, our students generally, although not always, come from a privileged background, but the core of our learning and teaching purpose has to be to develop well-rounded and responsible young men and women, capable of thinking for themselves and doing for others. Again, it sounds easy and probably lies at the heart of most school prospectuses, but unless you are providing the opportunities for it to happen then you are just paying lip-service to the idea. An uncertain and unpredictable world awaits our students and it would appear as if the current educational system will only partly prepare them for the challenges that lie ahead.

How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? Creating a culture in which teachers want to engage in educational research and ideas takes time, and there has to be an acceptance that some teachers do not want anything to do with it. You have to accept that this is always going to be the case, but at the same time try to open the doors of those teachers and see what is happening in their classroom – often they are the best lessons! No one wants a teaching body made up of robots, all armed with the latest fads. Variety is the key to a successful teaching staff and students thrive on the experience of seeing different styles and approaches. As long as everyone buys into the overall standards of good practice in key areas of teaching, learning and assessment, there has to be some latitude for teachers to do it their way. The traditional and the innovative can live side by side, so I would recommend to others: don’t try to implement whole-scale change where it isn’t required. Make change when it really matters and it will make a difference to teachers and students.

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Why does this work? by Dr Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel The recent movement to use research findings from cognitive psychology to inform teaching practice is, in principle, a welcome one, but at the same time, it can create an additional burden on teachers whose workload is already overflowing. However, the good news is that most teachers are already implementing a variety of effective strategies in their classrooms in one form or another. Small tweaks are usually enough to optimise or continuously improve teaching practice. Knowing which small tweaks to make requires some understanding of why certain learning strategies are effective. To put it in terms of cognitive psychology: you may want to gain an understanding of the cognitive processes that make a strategy beneficial. Knowing this facilitates tweaking your implementation of a technique. Let’s look at retrieval practice (see page 58) as an example. Most teachers probably already use quizzing and questioning in their classroom. You may even have students who take quizzes at home. Now, when you ask teachers and students why they use or take quizzes, most will probably say that it is a way to assess knowledge of the material. This allows teachers to gain insight into what students have mastered. While this is a completely valid reason, it overlooks another function of testing memory of the material. Thus, testing not only assesses performance, but more importantly, enhances performance by reinforcing the to-be-learned material. Think about this for a moment and try to find examples from real life where you got better at remembering something because you repeatedly recalled it. The same process applies in your classroom and knowing this can help you optimise implementations of retrieval practice. Among other things, you want to make sure that you give your students enough time to bring information to mind. Thus, after posing a question, wait before you have the answer revealed, so that all students can engage in beneficial recall of the information. Or, when your students use flashcards, make sure they don’t just flip and read the card, but instead retrieve the information from memory first. Lastly, avoid revisiting previous material via re-teaching or presenting old slides, and instead present students with questions that they tackle at the beginning of class. There are many more ways to introduce effective retrieval from memory. It does not matter how small the tweak is that teachers wish to make in their teaching; they will need to be given time to engage with research-informed strategies, extract implementation ideas, prepare worksheets, slides, and activities for delivery in the classroom, and discuss teaching practice with colleagues. Dr Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel is a lecturer at the University of Dundee and an expert in applying findings from cognitive science to education. She is a member of The Learning Scientists and the founder of the Teaching Innovation and Learning Enhancement (TILE) network. Follow her work on Twitter @pimpmymemory. 69

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Chapter 4: Teacher wellbeing

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n 2017, I first met headteacher Jamie Barry at his primary school in Bristol; his ethos and passion for supporting teacher wellbeing were hard to ignore. Jamie believes that teacher wellbeing is an absolute necessity in schools due to the importance of staff recruitment and retention – and the demands teachers face day to day. Schools achieve nothing without the people choosing to work in them, and for Jamie, teacher wellbeing is ‘all about people and developing individuals’. He says, ‘You can’t think that way about children and think your staff are just some different species. They are people as well.’ Although this focus will be the mantra in many schools, it is plain to see from staff recruitment and retention statistics that we, as a profession, are facing a significant challenge when it comes to teacher wellbeing. In this chapter, we will look in more detail at these statistics and how the factors associated with the story they tell are strongly related to wellbeing, whether it’s workload or the pressures of accountability and school inspections.

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Of course, it’s important to remember that the context in which a school is operating may exacerbate these challenges, particularly when considering inspection grading, lack of funding, high staff turnover and student behaviour, but is teacher wellbeing really an impossible ask even under these circumstances? I hope the interventions and approaches offered in this chapter both for individual teachers and school leaders will help to support and promote the wellbeing of staff in all schools.

Why is this an issue? A fascinating piece of research published by the Education Policy Institute (Sibieta, 2018) unpicks the challenges education is now facing in England: 1. Applications to teacher training were down by about five per cent in 2018 when compared with 2017. 2. Teacher training targets have been persistently missed in maths and science. 3. The value of teacher pay scales has declined by about ten per cent in real terms since 2010 as a result of various freezes and caps on public sector pay rises. (Graduate pay varies significantly by subject of study, but teacher pay varies little by subject taught. This seems to be a major cause of why recruitment differs by subject.) 4. Student numbers have risen by ten per cent since 2010 so the teacher to student ratio is now 1:17 compared with 1:15.5. In 2018–19, the Department for Education needed to recruit 32,226 new teachers to the profession (Department for Education, 2018c). That’s the equivalent size of the total personnel working for the British Navy! Due to a predicted rise in the student population, the latest figures indicate that 47,000 additional secondary teachers are needed by 2024 (Hazell, 2018). I’m not sure how the Department for Education are going to achieve this in the current climate. Year upon year, there are reports of a teacher shortage here in the UK and the government’s response to this problem has generally been focused on recruitment. However, are teacher shortages a case of wrong diagnosis and wrong prescription? I believe that the real problem (and solution) lies in teacher retention.

‘One of the reasons I came to this school was because they really nurtured the family feeling and the staff, parents and children, and I wanted to work where people mattered.’ Jamie Barry, Headteacher, Parson Street Primary School, Bristol

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The same piece of research from the Education Policy Institute (Sibieta, 2018) found: 1. Rates of teachers exiting the profession have crept up over time, from eight per cent to nine per cent in primary schools and from nine per cent to ten per cent in secondary schools between 2011 and 2017. 2. Exit rates are particularly high early on in teachers’ careers, with only 60 per cent of teachers working in a state-funded school in England five years after starting their training. From January 2017 to May 2019, over 8,900 academic articles were published on ‘teacher attrition in England’ (based on results on Google Scholar), yet we still haven’t found the solution. There are a number of specific research questions I would pose to the Department for Education regarding teacher retention: 1. Do more teachers leave the profession after a school inspection? 2. Do we know whether the current inspection framework is applied fairly to all schools? 3. Why are so many qualified teachers not in teaching? 4. Why are there not enough headteachers? 5. Why is diversity seriously lacking in the workforce? 6. Why does the fifth largest economy in the world a) have four million children living in poverty and b) not have enough doctors, teachers and police? 7. What can cognitive science and neuroscientific developments tell us about effective teaching approaches? How could these techniques then go on to improve teacher wellbeing? 8. Could a cross-political party be created to protect education policy? If so, how could it operate? We may not yet have all the answers on teacher 54 per cent of retention – far from it – but there are some things teachers and school we do know. We know that the process that causes leaders say teacher a teacher to leave the profession is something that wellbeing is a starts a long time before a teacher actually leaves weakness at their (Lindqvist and Nordänger, 2016), and the reason school, while why teachers leave a school? It is often because of only 26 per its leadership and, in particular, what that means cent say it is for workload and the levels of stress and pressure a strength. among staff, rather than the school itself. Until something significant is done to ease the workload and pressures surrounding the job, more good teachers will continue to leave and this will continue to have a negative effect on our children’s education. Every headteacher – even in the most stable of schools with the most inspiring leadership – will tell you what a challenge this is.

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Are financial incentives a solution for teacher retention? The Education Policy Institute published research in February 2019, analysing whether ‘phased bursaries could solve the teacher retention crisis’, with a focus on English state schools, particularly secondary schools, which are facing a critical shortage of qualified teachers (Zuccollo, 2019). Student numbers are rising and the overall number of teachers is falling. A worrying trend is that retention rates among early career teachers are a central part of the problem. As the Education Policy Institute research says: ‘Each cohort of new teachers seems less likely to stay in the profession.’ With this comes particular challenges for schools in disadvantaged areas and the Education Policy Institute believe that financial incentives are likely to help here. They highlight the work of researcher Dr Sam Sims, who found that for teachers in the US states of Georgia, Florida and North Carolina ‘for every 1 per cent increase in pay for a shortage-subject teacher, there is a 3.1 per cent reduction in the number of teachers quitting the profession.’ However, the Education Policy Institute research does admit that any bursaries in teaching are ‘likely to be most effective for graduates in degree subjects where teachers are paid less than alternative occupations’. It’s clear therefore that financial incentives are worth exploring as a solution to teacher retention, but when I think back over three decades of teaching, I simply don’t believe that bursaries for various subject teachers and ‘golden handshakes’ can do enough to keep significant numbers of teachers in the profession. As executive principal Stephen Tierney (2019) writes, ‘Rather than trying to resuscitate the current system we need a resurrection mentality; our education system needs new life not more of the same.’

Workload Ask any teacher if they are not busy and you are likely to receive a bemused face. In the past two years, I have asked over 15,000 teachers across the UK, ‘What is your number one workload issue?’ I’ve not met one teacher who tells me they have nothing to do. In fact, I’m finding that the job has become so unsustainable that many teachers are working at least one day of their weekend in order to keep up with the workload. Studies into why teachers leave the profession have shown that workload is a key factor and something that has constantly been an issue in education (Struyven and Vanthournout, 2014). As far back as 2003, Smithers and Robinson found that more than half of primary teachers who left the profession ranked workload as the most important factor in leaving. According to England’s Department for Education’s workforce census, in 2017 there were more part-time requests than ever (Department for Education, 2018d), and I suspect this rise has a lot to do with workload. Mary Bousted, Joint General 73

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Secretary of the National Education Union, has spoken about teachers increasingly going part-time to manage their full-time workload. She has said, ‘So what they do is they go point 8 (four days a week), so they spend Friday doing all their work so they can have a free weekend’ (Bousted, in Hazell, 2017). It appears that more teachers are now requesting to work part-time so that they can complete tasks on their day off at home, in order to have their weekends with family.

Why are teachers working so hard? Teachers have always been hard-working professionals, but I believe there are certain reasons why teachers today are struggling so much with workload. Teachers are spending an increasing amount of time on fiddly, unnecessary non-teaching tasks; they feel under a huge amount of pressure to prove their professional worth; and funding cuts for schools are also having a serious impact. Let’s take a closer look at each of these contributing factors.

Non-teaching tasks Teachers are spending an increasing amount of time on non-teaching tasks. Doing essential preparatory work like planning and resourcing lessons is a given, and providing stimulating, exciting lessons takes time. However, analysis in the Department for Education’s ‘Workload Challenge’ report (Gibson et al., 2015) stated that 56 per cent of a teacher’s workload is due to ‘recording, inputting, monitoring and analysing data’ with ‘excessive/depth of marking – detail and frequency’ at 53 per cent (see more about this in Chapter 1, page 4). When you add up all these timeconsuming duties, workload can start to look unmanageable. These additional tasks might include: • constantly having to input assessment data on numerous platforms • reproduction of data in different formats for the use of governors, academy leaders, school heads or inspectors • excessive, unnecessary ‘in-depth’ marking to adhere to the ‘school policy’ • unnecessary administrative tasks or paperwork. Key Stage 2 teacher Solomon Kingsnorth (2018) said he was required to make a judgement every term on 93 objectives for each child in reading, writing and maths, equating to over 8,000 judgements on progress in a school year. As Solomon says, ‘You can’t say you’re reducing workload if teachers are expected to make 8,000 progress judgements a year.’ The situation can be even worse for secondary teachers, who may have between five and ten classes and may be required to submit fine grades (for example a three-part refinement of a grade A). Kingsnorth writes, ‘The importance of those shiny green cells in the spreadsheet cannot be overemphasised, but in many schools they amount to little more than an over-tired teacher madly clicking or highlighting at the end of the half term, based often on a gut feeling or the most recent lesson taught.’

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It’s interesting to note that the situation is different for teachers working in state schools and those working in independent schools. In some fascinating research, Jude Brady (2018), a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, conducted a comparative study of working conditions for these two sectors. The study found that although teachers in both contexts are working in excess of 55 hours per week to keep up with the workload, independent school teachers show higher job satisfaction than state school teachers. An initial reason given for this difference is that state school teachers are asked to complete meaningless tasks more often than their independent school counterparts. Since at least 2012, the English government has started to take a more active role in tackling teacher workload because teachers are spending more time on non-teaching tasks (Department for Education, 2018e), although this isn’t the case in all parts of the UK. In Northern Ireland, for example, teachers tell me there is a lack of national knowledge about what can be done to enhance wellbeing in schools, and the fact that there hasn’t been an operational government in recent years has exacerbated this further. Various advisory groups and EdTech companies are researching and suggesting more effective ways to work, as well as challenging education myths. It is important to identify workload issues in your school and use the tools available to reduce, improve and maximise the role of the teacher. The ‘Workload reduction toolkit’, published by the Department for Education (2018f), is a good place to start (if you ignore the irony of the decision to publish it in the summer holidays).

Proving our worth The Global Teacher Status Index (GTSI; Dolton et al., 2018), published by the Varkey Foundation, reports the in-depth data collected by Populus in 35 countries to explore teachers’ attitudes on a range of issues. In this research, the British teachers surveyed said they were working longer hours per week (50.9) than anywhere else surveyed in the world apart from New Zealand, Singapore and Chile. This may not come as a surprise, but what we may not be aware of is that teachers in the UK think that they are less respected by the British public than they actually are. In other words, teachers are more highly regarded by the public than they think! This may, overall, be a positive finding, but does this perception cloud teachers’ views when it comes to workload? My concern is that our workforce is in a position in which teachers and school leaders believe their professional wisdom is no longer valid. With the influx of business capital influencing government policy and stretching school budgets, exam performance and a desire to show value for money (at least in England) are becoming paramount and our schools are edging towards becoming ‘for-profit’ organisations. Some will be very happy that schools must demonstrate good value for money, particularly where difficult decisions are being made, but what if any of these decisions impacted on your child? Don’t be fooled that these pressures do not exist in independent and international schools as well; the pressure is very real in these institutions because money is handed over directly by the parents, rather than via the government. These schools are very conscious of value for money and all decisions matter. In state schools, we lose the ‘rawness’ of this discussion because we do not deal directly with money from parents, but in both models, it is very much the reality. 75

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The growing climate of competition within education means teachers ‘take responsibility for working harder, faster and better as part of our sense of personal worth and in relation to the worth of others’ (Ball, 2016). While we may not have long working hours directly dictated to us (although I am not denying that it happens), often it is the pressure that we put on ourselves when challenged with attainment targets and parental expectations, alongside performance-related pay and job security. These veiled threats prevent teachers from escaping a heavy workload.

‘One of the biggest challenges is political involvement. As long as education is politicised, which in my view is never going to end as there is so much public money that goes into it, that’s always going to cause a massive wellbeing challenge.’ Jamie Barry, Headteacher, Parson Street Primary School, Bristol

In the book The Best for My Child: Did the schools market deliver?, journalist and parent Fiona Millar (2018) highlights the marketisation of schools and ‘parent choice’: ‘The advent of parent choice brought with it more accountability about school performance and a “quasi-market” in schools. This was designed to encourage parents to vote with their feet using the knowledge they gleaned from new inspection reports and footballstyle “league tables” ranking every school in an area by results.’

Can you imagine parents having a professional view on a doctor’s final decision to remove an infected lung from their child’s chest, or how a pilot will land a plane in a gale-force storm, or whether a criminal should be prosecuted or not, simply because they can choose a doctor, an airline or which solicitor they wish to use for representation? Parents can choose, of course, but they don’t necessarily have much expertise in the relevant sector. If we are to have any hope of reducing workload, those outside the sector must feel confident to trust a teacher’s professional wisdom. Travelling teacher Hywel Roberts shared a Greek word in his keynote at Practical Pedagogies in Cologne in November 2018 that has stuck with me ever since: phronesis. In Chapter 3, page 52, I talked about the internal database that teachers use on their feet daily to calculate thousands and thousands of idiosyncratic decisions that are unobserved but make a huge difference to what happens in the classroom. This is phronesis or professional wisdom. There are thousands of events that a teacher does that cannot be captured on a spreadsheet or under observation, but some schools ignore these decisions or insist that they are recorded, which has a detrimental effect on teacher wellbeing. One example may be where a middle leader is required to provide detailed minutes of all meetings that they conduct to prove that weekly line management meetings are happening. This is something that we choose to do to one another as professionals, without realising that we are demeaning our professional wisdom, exacerbating problems with teacher mental health and steering teachers’ focus away from what matters. 76

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Funding cuts ‘Real-term’ funding cuts are another challenge for schools that is having a massive impact on teacher workload. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that per-student spending in England’s schools fell by eight per cent in real terms between 2009–10 and 2017–18. Furthermore, over two-thirds (69 per cent) of secondary school heads have had to cut teaching staff to save money (Sutton Trust, 2019). With fewer teachers, workload naturally increases for those who are left. The situation is worse in Northern Ireland, where there has been no operational government since 2017. The schools budget has been flat for five years, with no increase to accommodate inflation, and this has led to strike action as teachers haven’t received any increase in their pay, but class sizes are going up, SEN provision is being reduced and there have been redundancies. This is leading to workload and wellbeing concerns being more significant for Northern Irish schools than they have ever been in the past. Over time, and with successive governments, we have ended up today with a system where people are doing things because they ‘think that’s the right thing to do’ and therefore we’ve reached quite muddied waters about what it is we actually should be doing with our budgets: what’s statutory and what’s not? What’s best practice and evidence-based, and what’s not? No one is quite sure how the money should be spent to help students, so teaching staff are now pulled in many directions as educationalists and policymakers try to find that magic silver bullet. Given there are limited resources available, this has meant that parents have now started increasingly to form their own views about what schools should be providing and what teachers should be doing, exacerbating the pressures that schools are facing due to ‘parent choice’ even further. The recent protests about LGBT+ education in Birmingham are one example. The Grim Reaper commissioned research into teacher wellbeing in April 2018 (Scott and Vidakovic, 2018). The word ‘lack’ came up time and again in their findings, as they ‘found that the negative influences on staff well-being cited by respondents were: • lack of support to manage behaviour • lack of time • lack of money/budget/funding • lack of resources • lack of communication • lack of a work/life balance.’ It is certainly not a great leap to link every single one of these ‘lacks’ to the reductions in real-term funding in our schools. A lack of cash certainly makes any job harder and has implications for salary offers, terms and conditions such as pension contributions, and career development, with fewer promotion opportunities available. With teaching being tough by default, a lack of investment is going to make the job unsustainable. 77

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Accountability and school inspections In June 2017, the House of Commons published a briefing paper titled ‘Teacher recruitment and retention in England’ (Foster, 2017). At the top of the long list of reasons for teachers leaving the profession was not only workload but also the pressure associated with the Grim Reaper. Teacher salary and poor student behaviour feature, but they are not the predominant reasons for teachers quitting. ‘Sometimes we have to fight for our staff. The staff really value me fighting the system where it needs to be fought. They know I’ve got their back as much as I can offer and then when certain things do end up getting through to them for whatever reason at least they understand that I’ve not just implemented it on them because I’ve been told to.’ Jamie Barry, Headteacher, Parson Street Primary School, Bristol

In England, the walls are closing in and many are asking, ‘Could it be time to reform the Grim Reaper’s grading of schools?’ Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman was given the perfect opportunity to revise the school inspection handbook for September 2019, but she didn’t take this opportunity to be brave and make such an obvious fix. It appears policymakers’ hands are tied by legislation that is even out of their control. In June 2019, Sam Freedman, a former adviser to Michael Gove, said he ‘very much’ regretted Grim Reaper policy he helped to introduce to keep ‘Outstanding’ schools exempt from inspection. He even said it was a ‘dumb policy’ (Lough, 2019)! By the time this book is in print, I suspect we’ll still be languishing in a familiar framework with one of the most obvious solution to teacher retention staring right at us.

What does school inspection look like across the UK? In Scotland, Education Scotland is the agency responsible for quality and improvement, operating ‘independently and impartially’ and accountable to the Scottish government. There are 32 regions with all educational settings judged on a six-point scale using quality indicators, and the General Teaching Council for Scotland maintaining the teaching register of qualified teachers. Having gone through a very rigorous teacher registration process, one thing I do admire about Scotland is their resolve to maintain a qualified profession. In Wales, Estyn is the organisation responsible for quality and standards in education, inspecting all settings every seven years with three weeks’ notice to schools and eight weeks’ notice for initial teacher education (ITE) providers. As part of their common inspection framework, there are four key judgements made using five key areas. In 2018, Professor Graham Donaldson was commissioned by Estyn to consider the future of inspections and he proposed 78

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32 recommendations for the Welsh system. He said, ‘a system that’s based on pressure, putting pressure on schools in order to get better only takes you so far’ (BBC News, 2018a). Overall, his key recommendation was to pause the inspection system for a year until they figure out what best to do. In light of Professor Donaldson’s report, Estyn are proposing implementing changes to inspections in three phases over several years, consulting schools and piloting different options, such as a greater emphasis on self-evaluation (Rowlands, 2019). In Northern Ireland, ETNI (the Education and Training Inspectorate) manage the inspection and self-evaluation framework for all phases, which makes a judgement on the overall quality of education, outcomes for learners, quality of provision, leadership and management, governance, care and welfare, and safeguarding. There are six performance levels and additional terms are used such as ‘strengths’ and ‘areas for improvement’. However, union action over teacher pay in the past couple of years has made it very difficult for ETNI to inspect schools. We must also think about the impact school inspections may have on the retention of headteachers. Although there has been little research into whether increasing numbers of headteachers are leaving their jobs, research by the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER; Lynch et al., 2017) suggests that headteacher retention is significantly lower in schools rated ‘Inadequate’ as opposed to ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’. The research states: ‘Some headteachers are initially attracted to working in challenging circumstances, as they see it as an opportunity to have a positive impact. However, if their school is low performing, which is more common if they have more disadvantaged students, then the resultant pressure to raise standards in response to accountability and inspection can contribute to some headteachers leaving headship.’ This is especially concerning because students from low-income backgrounds are already less likely to have well-qualified teachers. As Clotfelter et al. (2007) say, ‘more advantaged students are often deemed easier and more rewarding to teach than those from disadvantaged backgrounds’, incentivising highly qualified teachers and school leaders ‘to move away from schools with large proportions of disadvantaged students’. A school inspection system that lacks intelligent accountability only exacerbates this situation even further by deterring highly qualified professionals from wanting to work in these settings through the high levels of pressure to raise standards put upon them by poor inspection results. This is particularly damaging when it is clearly the students in these schools who need high-quality teaching the most. Studies published by the American Psychological Association (2017) tackle the invisible chains of poverty, saying, ‘Socio economic status (SES) encompasses not just income but also educational attainment, financial security, and subjective perceptions of social status and social class.’ Literacy gaps and skills of reading acquisition, phonological awareness, vocabulary and oral language exist before formal schooling begins. A comprehensive report published by Child Poverty Action Group (Srblin, 2018) provides an in-depth analysis of education, schools and life chances: 79

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‘Poverty can have a noticeable impact on a child’s development at as early as 22 months old. A good education alone will not iron out the differences between children who live in poverty and those who do not. However, a good education is important, and intervention by schools and other partners can improve the lives of low income families and their children.’ We need accountability, and competition (to a degree) can improve working conditions, productivity and experiences, but there must be a better way of doing things. We must move quickly to a more sophisticated model that still holds schools to account and ensures high-quality provision without preventing professionals from wanting to teach in challenging settings. For now, this is unfortunately out of the hands of individual teachers and school leaders, but nevertheless there are things we can all do to ensure we are delivering the best outcomes for young people while still making teaching a more sustainable career option for ourselves and our colleagues. In the following section, I share ideas for how teachers can manage their own wellbeing, take control of their workload and learn to say no to additional tasks, as well as strategies for improved policies and practices to improve wellbeing at a whole-school level.

How can we tackle it? ea 1

Id

Make a promise to yourself

Take charge of your own wellbeing by making a commitment to do small things each day that will protect your time and your mental and physical health.

Although it may feel as though workload is sent down from on high and wellbeing policies are dictated by senior leaders, there are small things that individual teachers can do to take charge. Make a wellbeing commitment to yourself to ensure you are as productive as possible and to keep yourself healthy – both mentally and physically. Here are some ideas to get you started: 1. I will not sit idle in staff meetings. I promise to politely and constructively challenge any extra workload that does not seem to be beneficial to students. 2. I will tackle problems with solutions, endeavouring to be a solution-driven person, adding further to workplace productivity and saving time in the process. 3. I will consider myself first. I will ensure that I am fit and well enough both mentally and physically to support the students in my care effectively. 4. I will seek support when my work–life balance is not right and is resulting in work-related stress or similar. I will get support or make a change before the issue becomes serious.

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5. I will remember that children are children and inject elements of fun into the curriculum (albeit controlled fun!). 6. I will understand that some parents do not always have the skills to support their children emotionally or with basic life skills. I will offer help where appropriate, but I will also remember that many of these areas fall outside my remit, and keep safeguarding tantamount to everything else I do in school. 7. I will challenge my 24/7 availability by text and email outside of working hours by having work-communication-free times and not responding quickly or at all to things that can wait until the morning. 8. I will remember that lessons that take longer to plan than to teach are generally not worth the effort (see Chapter 2, page 30, on detailed lesson planning). 9. I will take on board constructive feedback and dismiss feedback that has poor delivery or is not useful to my development as a professional. 10. I will continue to take the time to do things I enjoy and plan weekends away, spa trips and nights in the pub without feeling guilty. 11. I will look after my colleagues, check for signs of stress or burnout and support those who need it.

ea 2

Id

Let’s talk about mental health

We must all take responsibility for our own mental health and wellbeing if we are to thrive in the teaching profession in the long term. This idea will provide some suggestions to help you prioritise your own mental health and wellbeing, and to speak with someone in confidence if you are seriously struggling. Mental health difficulties can affect any of us at any point in our career. I have had three or four serious moments in my career, and I’ve also lived with some personal trauma for much of my life that I have only recently found the courage to be able to talk about. Men are more reluctant to talk about their mental health and there’s still a significant stigma associated with speaking openly about it or gathering men together to discuss our struggles – whether in the teaching sector or not. We are working in a time when we are expected to do more, to take on more and to be available around the clock. Workload is often associated with teacher mental ill health, and the things that school leaders ask their teachers to do on a weekly basis, in some cases, may be fuelling teacher mental health problems. An NUT survey of 3,000 young teachers suggests 45 per cent plan to leave the profession in the next five years with half pointing to concerns for their mental health as the reason (Pells, 2017). A phenomenal 76 per cent of teachers reported mental health issues such as anxiety or depression when surveyed by the Education Support Partnership (2018).

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Prioritise your mental health As Robert Sutton (2017) says in his book, The Asshole Survival Guide, ‘Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.’ This is a great piece of advice for everyone. Sometimes it’s the circumstances around us at work that drive our poor mental health. Sutton shares a list of ‘bullying hallmarks’, which aims to help individuals recognise when someone is being an ‘asshole’. I have designed my own list based on Sutton’s ideas to support those working in schools where things may not be as pleasant as they could be. How many poor attributes do you recognise from the following? 1. Shouting or interrupting. 2. Passive aggressive behaviour, e.g. treating people as if they are invisible and ignoring requests. 3. Choosing the same people, i.e. having favourites. 4. Asking, ‘Are you done with this yet?’ 5. Holding mandatory meetings just for the sake of it (sometimes during lunch!). 6. Being taunted for working ‘too hard’. 7. Name calling or constant teasing. 8. Glaring or wearing a ‘morning’ face. 9. Treating everything as an emergency or making a mountain out of a molehill. 10. Loud object-banging, breathing like Darth Vader or using the ‘F-word’ in every sentence. If you spot any of the above signals in your day-to-day work, then you may be working with an asshole. It’s either time to call them out or time to find a new job! But if it’s not the behaviour of others that’s causing the problem, then it’s time to start prioritising your own mental health and wellbeing. Here are some tips that you can use throughout the school year: • Do only the tasks that make a difference: When we feel overwhelmed, it is easy to lose sight of what tasks are important as we perceive that they are all as pressing as each other. Make sure you prioritise and do only the tasks that will make a difference to student progress. • Make fewer choices: The more choices we have, the happier we believe we are, but sometimes the opposite is true: the greater the choice, the higher our expectations. The problem with too many choices is that we may feel we make the wrong choice. As psychology professor Barry Schwartz (2005) says, minimise your choices because the more options you juggle with in your mind, the more dissatisfied you will be. This can apply to teaching strategies or possible resources for use in the classroom, as well as your personal life.

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• Plan a weekly routine (and stick to it!): Sometimes you need to walk away from work and put time into yourself and family. You are 100 per cent entitled to do this and your place of work should never make you feel guilty about it. Plan a week that gives you more of a balance and build into it activities and tasks that matter to your personal life and will broaden your perspectives, for example getting involved in charity work or attending a conference. • Log out: As for social media, learn to log out. Getting involved in long debates, reading critical comments about something you have said or simply watching people succeed when you feel stuck all impact on our mood and our ability to cope. Learn that everyone has an opinion and that you will never keep up with the amount of content shared online. • Reach out: If you do find yourself struggling, it’s important to remember that you are not alone. If you are experiencing it, then there will be at least one other teacher who is too. Seek advice on social networks or with charities. It’s essential to talk to someone; this can be to a friend, spiritual leader or professional therapist. • Take time to reflect: When my school was placed into special measures and taken over by a multi-academy trust parachuted in to save the day, I largely attributed the school’s final judgement to my work, rather than external forces and poor proxies that were predominantly out of my control. According to Adams et al. (1976), it’s normal when going through a very difficult time in your life to go very quickly from a period of wellbeing to one of despair, followed by potential reconstruction and recovery. After the initial shock and adjustment, we have to battle with our inner contradictions, for example uncertainty, loss of confidence, confusion and depression, reaching a potential crisis point where we sink or swim. We might choose to quit, let go or accept the situation to reconstruct and recover or explore and develop a new sense of confidence. Of course, it’s easy to put this on paper and reflect on it when times are not tough, but the difficulty for us all is, when we are faced with stress and mental health issues, how do we have the strength to step out of a difficult situation and be aware of what is really going on? It takes real, deep awareness and strength of character to be able to make rational decisions in these circumstances. On the next page is an excellent diagram (based on Lofthouse et al., 2010) to help teachers to reflect on their practice. Designed for use in coaching conversations, it’s a useful graphic for self-reflection and critical evaluation of your work. When you’re in a difficult situation, I’d advocate using the following questions to help you think about what is happening calmly and rationally: 1. What do I know? 2. What do I not know? 3. What do I know I don’t know?

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Unknown Visibles

I don’t know I know...

I know I know...

I don’t know I don’t know...

I know I don’t know...

Known Visibles

Making learning visible in coaching observations. Based on Lofthouse et al. (2010)

How do you tell your line manager you feel mentally unwell? Mental health issues have now overtaken back problems as the main reason for doctors to write a sick note, so managing mental health is something all employers have to take notice of. Worryingly, 64 per cent of education professionals say they ‘wouldn’t feel confident’ disclosing that they were suffering from mental health problems or unmanageable stress to their employer, which is significantly higher than the UK workforce as a whole at 44 per cent (Education Support Partnership, 2017). This must mean that many teachers and school leaders are suffering in silence and also suggests to me that presenteeism is rife in UK schools. Presenteeism is the name scientists have given to the condition of being at work when you really should be at home because of illness. Being at work when suffering from a mental health issue can compound the problem and cause longer-term issues that may have a bigger impact than any original absence from work would have. Sadly you don’t have to look very far to find the reasons why teachers prefer to stoically soldier on: stories of schools hounding teachers to complete school tasks from their sick bed or describing the huge guilt teachers feel when away from the classroom are all too easy to find. But this is not right. The 2010 Equality Act protects anyone suffering disability due to a mental health issue and states very clearly what employers must do to accommodate anyone disclosing this fact. They have a statutory obligation to listen and take action. 84

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If your mental health problems are impacting on your work, it’s really important to talk to your line manager about it. I know that’s not easy for some, as we don’t all work in supportive schools, but, if you can, let them know how you are feeling. If you don’t feel confident about having this conversation with your manager, here are six steps to help.

1. Check Check whether your specific mental health issues can be classed as a disability. You’re disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities (UK Government). The criteria are quite broad so you might be surprised that your situation is included, even if you don’t think of it as disabling. If you find you are classed as disabled due to your mental health issues you do not have to inform anyone in your workplace but, if you choose to, you have disability rights. See www.gov. uk/rights-disabled-person for more information.

2. Secure a medical opinion If your mental health issues do not classify you as having a disability, but you are still experiencing difficulties managing day-to-day life, then getting a doctor’s opinion might help your employer understand your situation more clearly. Remember, one in three people have experienced mental health issues at work so you will certainly not be the first, and the NHS report that, at any one time, one in six of us is experiencing mental health issues.

3. Make it one-to-one If you decide to inform your line manager, ask for a one-to-one private meeting and be honest about what you feel you can and cannot do at the current time. The meeting should be an exchange of ideas as to how to help you manage your situation in the workplace, not where you apologise for being another drain on the school’s resources. You should be treated professionally and with empathy.

4. Reasonable adjustments A school has a number of options available to support a colleague with mental health issues and their first action should be to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to help accommodate you so that you can continue to work, if you feel you can. Examples of this could be: making working hours more flexible by job sharing, having additional support in the classroom, having more PPA time or having access to specific counselling or supervision from either external sources or an internal mentoring scheme. No two people experience mental health issues in the same way so ask for what you think will help. You are the expert on your own condition and what you require.

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5. Seek union advice If you find your line manager or any senior leader dismissive or unsupportive then your union may also have some excellent resources concerning your rights at work. Don’t be afraid to speak up. Your mental health is a crucially important part of your ability to perform as a teacher and should be attended to as a matter of priority. As a wider demonstration of support, schools should ensure that mental health issues are taken seriously and discussed via specific INSET and CPD. The school community is the sum of all its staff so mental health and wellness should be seen as a priority. When did your school last talk about teacher mental health?

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A whole-school wellbeing policy

If a school wants to take staff wellbeing seriously, a robust whole-school wellbeing policy is an absolute necessity. In this idea, I share two excellent examples of policies that are working well in the UK and offer some reflective questions to help you develop your own.

David Lowbridge-Ellis is a deputy headteacher in a mixed secondary school in Walsall. Having pushed himself to his limits earlier in his career, he understands better than anyone the importance of teacher wellbeing. David says, ‘I thought I had to do everything for my students and my teaching staff, even to the detriment of my own wellbeing and my family.’ One night, he even stayed up until two o’clock in the morning on a ‘planning binge’, which resulted in the grand total of one 60-minute lesson. He vowed, ‘Never again.’ This experience taught him that giving so much to your job outside the classroom ‘leaves nothing for you to give when you’re inside the classroom’. Now, as a school leader, David takes the wellbeing of his staff seriously, so seriously in fact that their staff wellbeing policy is written down in plain English on their school website: www.barrbeaconschool.co.uk/47-things-we-do-staff-well-being. David admits, ‘I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression: our staff work exceptionally hard’, but at the heart of the policy is making sure that teachers are only doing the things that will make a real difference to students and they are doing these things ‘in the leanest, most efficient ways possible’. Ten highlights from the policy are: 1. No need to write lesson plans of any kind. 2. No pressure to put on a show in lessons. A culture of typicality is reinforced by no lesson gradings. 3. No cover duty for more than one lesson every half term (in reality, it’s exceedingly rare for anyone to cover more than three times a year). 86

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4. No expectation to answer emails outside school hours (in fact, this is actively discouraged). 5. No written reports to parents or carers. 6. Marking is for one audience and one audience only: students. Never tick and flick or do anything else for observers, parents or carers. 7. No data is to be entered more than once. 8. CPD is delivered as twilight sessions that never finish after 4.15pm, with days off in lieu. 9. The school offers annual CPD on managing stress with the clear message that keeping things to yourself is not a sign of strength. 10. Open-door senior leadership – no concern is ever too small, and senior leaders are very visible at all times. Similarly, The Education Alliance (2019), a multi-academy trust with six schools in Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire, has published a ‘workload charter’, offering a promise to all the staff they employ based on trust, teacher autonomy and evidence-informed practice. They pledge: 1. There is a culture of trust, driven by moral purpose. 2. Teachers are allowed to use their 1,265 working hours however they choose over the course of the year. 3. Staff are not expected to submit daily or weekly lesson plans. 4. There is no central, trust-wide approach and no ‘acknowledgement’ marking. 5. Meetings never take place just because they’re on the calendar. 6. Additional data is collected by non-teaching teams. 7. There is no expectation for staff to respond to emails outside working hours. 8. There are no mock inspections. 9. All new initiatives are based on evidence. I suspect dialogue around workload and wellbeing takes place in many schools, but it’s not prevalent everywhere. If you don’t already have a wellbeing policy in your school, I hope the two examples above will help inspire you. If you’re a classroom teacher looking to make a difference from the ground up, take some ideas to your senior leadership team and see whether you could take a lead on staff wellbeing. If you already have a wellbeing policy, take another look at it in light of the two examples above and also consider the following questions to see whether there is room for improvement. • Can you reassure me that your wellbeing policy is more than a piece of paper? • How do your support staff feel when operating day to day with your colleagues? • Can teachers walk confidently out of the school gates at 3.30pm? 87

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• When staff leave your school, are they gushing with genuine emotion in their leaving speeches? • What if your site manager closed the school at 4pm on a Friday night? • Do middle leaders hold each other to account when they set deadlines for one another or for colleagues across the school? • Are all teacher deadlines monitored by one person? • When did your team or school last cancel a meeting? • What motivates your staff to work in your school? And you cannot respond with ‘It’s our kids’ or ‘It’s our community.’ Dig deeper for an answer. • And that cynical teacher, every school has one, when did they last contribute to whole-staff workload strategies or have a genuine smile on their face about wellbeing initiatives in your school? How can we change this?

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Taking control of teacher workload

I hope this idea will encourage school leaders to rethink their policies in two key areas that have the most impact on teachers’ workload: marking and meetings. If you’re not at a leadership level yet, please do use this idea to start a discussion with your manager. You never know what trees may grow from planting these initial seeds.

Most teachers are martyrs. I know this because I have been one and have worked with hundreds of others for many years. Teachers already work exceptionally hard to plan and deliver high-quality lessons that will really make a difference to students’ learning and progress, so why do some still insist that they spend hours on the non-essentials too, with lengthy, overly complex school policies on marking and data collection, and meetings that always run over? This surely makes a teacher’s job harder, not easier, and most of these tasks certainly don’t need inspiring, degree-educated professionals to do them. To get the best out of our teachers, we must strip teaching back down to its basics and allow our staff to focus on the areas of their job that really make a difference. In this idea, we’ll seek to understand in more detail two specific tasks that tend to take up the vast majority of non-teaching time: marking and meetings, and how they can be streamlined. For more on improving policies and practices around data collection, see Chapter 1, page 4.

Feedback for FREE! As we discovered in Chapter 1, page 6, marking is the number one burden on teacher workload. If we are to take teacher wellbeing seriously, getting our feedback policy right must be a priority. I thought I had completed a good job in one school 88

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when our 100+ teaching team created a ‘Mark. Plan. Teach.’ methodology. Over the last two years, visiting schools across the UK, in other parts of Europe and in the Middle East, one of the best feedback policies I have discovered belongs to primary headteacher Suzanne Best and her colleagues at Great Kingshill CE Combined School in High Wycombe. Their policy advocates that all adults working with students across the school will provide feedback to students on their work, but here is the punchline: ‘Teachers are free to determine how feedback looks within their individual classes.’ On my journey across the country, I’ve asked thousands of teachers about what they are most frustrated about and what they believe would make them more effective. Their response? Teachers simply want to be trusted to get on with the job and be given the time to do it. Full stop. We must give teachers the trust to be able to do their jobs well, and this key sentence in the marking policy at Great Kingshill is an excellent starting point. Furthermore, the policy aims to put ‘the relationship between students and teachers at the heart of’ feedback and to enable teachers to be professionals and students to make progress. In more detail, the policy aims to: • ‘Provide accurate, useful feedback to our pupils that makes a difference to their outcomes both academically and personally, emotionally and socially.’ • ‘Allow pupils to access feedback that supports them in making progress.’ • ‘Allow the professionals (teachers and learning support assistants) to determine the most effective way to provide feedback to their pupils, thus protecting teacher workload and ensuring that the policy is applied consistently.’ Class teachers have a responsibility to communicate the methods of feedback to their students and ensure that all students understand how they will be provided with feedback. All adults working with students across the school will provide feedback to students on their personal, social and emotional needs; they will support students with their emotional development by ensuring time is made for this within the classroom environment. There is no expectation that verbal feedback will be recorded. All staff are responsible for the effective implementation of the policy. Note that this does not stipulate school leaders! The policy will be monitored through conversations with students and class teachers, and students’ work, not just books, will form an important part of the monitoring process. However, this will always be carried out alongside the students to allow them to provide vital input into the feedback process. There is an expectation that students will be able to explain how they get feedback from their class teacher and that feedback will have a direct impact on students’ outcomes. As a classroom teacher, this would be a school I would like to work in.

Top tips for rethinking marking in your school I hope the Great Kingshill ‘feedback policy’ has inspired you to give assessment a rethink in your own school. If so, here are my top tips for getting started: 1. Review marking policies and get rid of ‘unnecessary’ marking processes. 2. Remove the numerical features of all teaching and learning policies and focus on impact: 89

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a. Can a teacher manage the workload? (Start with the teacher who teaches the most children and work the policy backwards.) b. Does a teacher’s feedback motivate and mean something to the student? c. Does it leave the student with more work to do? 3. Another simple fix is to banish the word ‘marking’ and replace the term with ‘feedback’. This can connote several things: written, verbal and non-verbal feedback, which places quality over quantity – always. 4. Think about what your teachers are there to do and minimise or abandon the amount of administrative work they do. After you’ve thought about it, actually commit to doing something about it. 5. Take something away from the teachers’ workload tomorrow and they will thank you for it! Remember that teachers are humans and a lighter workload will make for happier teachers. A shift in this workload would allow teachers to have more time to focus on what they are there to do – teach and stimulate the minds of the future. 6. Use authentic and genuine recognition to feed positive professional identities. Praise from school leaders can keep you motivated and make the workload feel lighter. Research suggests that ‘teachers who had quit and those who were considering it in the next two years said that the thing that would most encourage them to stay is receiving praise and recognition’ (Lindqvist and Nordänger, 2016). 7. And whatever you choose to do, share your processes with your parents, especially the research behind them, and challenge their perceptions about what effective feedback looks like. Provide them with exemplar material of what impact ‘feedback’ can have compared to traditional marking, which is often limited in time response and detail.

Meetings Meetings are a necessity in every school but they are also a huge drain on teachers’ time and I think we could all use them more effectively. Think about it for a moment. Imagine that one timetabled period is worth approximately £2,000 of an experienced teacher’s salary per academic year. Now consider how much it’s costing you to run that weekly meeting in comparison. How much impact versus actual value do your staff meetings have? This is how you should decide whether your meeting is a good use of everyone’s time. Here are some simple solutions explaining how we can tackle the meeting culture in our schools by changing our policies to reduce workload and make meetings more meaningful: • A stand-up meeting will go much more quickly than a sit-down meeting, particularly if it involves a difficult conversation. • Turn meetings into professional development sessions. Instead of ‘information receiving’, ask those attending to ‘bring and brag’ a range of ideas by information sharing. Better still, use the time to actually do the things you are talking about.

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• Try walk-about meetings if only a couple or a handful of people are involved. They are good for your physical and mental health, and can drive fresh thinking. • Change the venue or rotate who chairs the meeting. They say a change is as good as a rest and if you are working in a healthy environment, your manager or headteacher will be keen to develop the role of chair in others. If not, at least move to a new venue each week (bearing in mind confidentiality and safeguarding). Imagine walking down the school corridor to find the leadership team in a classroom after school having a meeting, laughing and perhaps taking part in their own professional development session. Wouldn’t that be a sight for sore eyes? • Plan a one-hour meeting but bring people together for 30 minutes only, then give them 30 minutes to go away and actually do the things you agreed and discussed. This allows them to complete the jobs set during directed time.

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Wellbeing and professional development

Take a research-informed approach to develop relevant and effective professional development opportunities around staff wellbeing.

When I asked Jamie Barry what advice he would provide to other school leaders if he could ‘bottle wellbeing culture’, he said the following: ‘The first thing is to listen. You have to talk to people who work for you because their context, their experiences, their background, the school’s journey all impact on the stresses and the factors that affect wellbeing. The second step is to do it together. I know you’ll have ideas but you have to do it together. Step three is to formalise. Don’t leave it to chance, e.g. I’m sure they’ll sort something out for a staff social. Formalise ideas and build them into your professional development because if you have stressed and exhausted teachers, then what’s the point of sitting them in a staff meeting to discuss teacher wellbeing?’ Jamie Barry, Headteacher, Parson Street Primary School, Bristol

I agree with Jamie that if we really want to make a difference to our teachers’ working lives, we need to devise a formal approach to establishing and embedding staff wellbeing in our schools. I believe that if we want to develop a wellbeing culture, we must approach this in the same way we approach theory and practice. Engagement with research should be a part of teachers’ professional identity and practice, and we can use this to take a research-informed approach to developing staff wellbeing at a whole-school level. 91

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The Researching Practitioner Development Framework (RPDF) developed by The Open University (Lindsay et al., 2018) offers a useful approach for practitioners who are new to research. I believe that all schools and teachers interested in developing their research-informed practice can learn from it. There are three stages in the framework, each with clear steps that can be taken: 1. Working as a researcher: • building supportive relationships • developing research and study skills • blending theory and practice. 2. Developing ways of thinking: • reflecting on theory and practice • developing your identity • building your resilience. 3. Moving on with research: • engaging with new opportunities • making a difference • disseminating research. Schools can use this framework to define and nurture any professional development opportunities that aim to establish a wellbeing culture. Firstly, it’s important to work as a researcher: find out what’s going on in your school currently and which areas need improvement; discover approaches and techniques that work for other schools; and build supportive relationships in order to achieve this. You can then reflect on what you have found out and develop your own way of thinking and strategies that work for you and your school. Finally, you can put all this into practice in order to make a difference in your school before disseminating what you have discovered to other schools that may benefit from this approach too. Of course, finding the time where all staff members are able to attend training sessions is key to this strategy working successfully. Depending on the size of your school, you will need to consider how to get the message out to all staff about upcoming training and events. It may be as simple as giving out a message during a meeting, a quick email or finding a large number of people to help promote the event over a sustained period of time. You could also try the CPD menu idea in Chapter 10, page 210. It’s important that the purpose of your professional development aligns with your school’s vision – both academic and pastoral – and that all staff can feel empowered and valued. When this is achieved, they are likely to be happier and, as your wellbeing agenda strengthens, school staff will find it increasingly difficult to leave the school. Now, that’s a good problem to have!

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School case study School School name: Parson Street Primary Location: Bristol, England ntry primary school situated in Context: Parson Street is a two-form-e . With Roman origins

th Bristol area the district of Bedminster in the Sou of the River Avon, Parson Street tch stre ong ile-l surrounding the 75-m World was heavily bombed in the Second serves a diverse community that 500 to e clos has ool nursery, the sch War. Accommodating a 52-place area a mixed community but serves an has ool sch students when full. The il pup for ible elig n dre centage of chil of high social deprivation; the per et ve the national average. Parson Stre abo ly ent sist con premium funding is ber num , as well as supporting a growing is proud of its inclusive nature and tol Bris in ool sch rst fi the is plex needs, of children with additional or com to k wor its for rd awa tice te Gold Prac to achieve the Educate and Celebra rsity. promote equality and celebrate dive reased ools, the number of staff has dec Due to funding cuts, as with all sch 60 ely the school employs approximat over the past few years. However, to ts teachers and teaching assistan staff in various roles, ranging from 2, round, site and pastoral staff. In 201 administrative, lunchtime, wrap-a in and ome a stand-alone academy the school took the decision to bec rning (Academies). September 2016 joined Trust in Lea n rn’ – to develop children so they lear Parson Street’s vision is ‘Live & Lea and ls skil life; to teach students the the skills they need to succeed in rse society where all are equal and dive a attributes they need to live in r the at the school is to make each yea valued. The mission of everybody #BestSchoolYearEver.

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? We have always taken the wellbeing of our staff very seriously. Why wouldn’t anyone do that? The staff are our greatest resource and make all the difference to how well our children do and how successful our organisation is. At Parson Street, we try to make the wellbeing of staff part of our culture. We do not want it to be seen as a bolt-on to the work we do but integral to the operation of our school. If it is really going to be successful then it has to be owned by everybody and given a high priority. Over the past few years, we have approached the development of wellbeing in different ways. Some of these have worked and some haven’t. However, it is a strength at our school because of our consistency in 93

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developing this and our commitment to continue to think about it. We are realistic that we cannot take away all the stress and worries in the job, but we have been delighted when we receive positive feedback from staff who feel we take their wellbeing seriously.

How have you achieved this? The key to developing wellbeing as a strength is embedding it within the culture of the school, ensuring that everyone takes shared responsibility for it. If it is managed by just one person, or is simply demonstrated in one-off or ad hoc events, then it will not have any impact in a sustainable way. Staff may feel happier or less stressed (or in fact the opposite) for a duration of time, but this will not last or make the desired change. As part of our longer-term strategy, we have made use of audit tools and resources (including Investors in People, see page Chapter 10, page 216, and NourishEd) to review our strategy. This has helped us consider the areas that would benefit from development as well as areas highlighted as strengths. This information has been valuable in generating conversations with staff, including governors, so that they can understand wellbeing as a serious matter. We have also worked to create a voice for the whole staff (not just teachers) so that they are given the opportunity to share their views about workload and wellbeing issues. We have been very careful in considering how we construct this so it is not simply a forum for letting off steam, but is a proactive way of promoting wellbeing, for example organising events and leading the wellbeing strategy. Part of the work we have undertaken has included exploring ways of reducing workload, for example reducing marking and feedback, removing formal observations and trying to cut down on paperwork. Over time, we have purchased curriculum materials, interactive sites and access to resources that have saved teachers’ time. It is worth pointing out, however, that we don’t always get this right. There are times where our endeavours can generate workload, so it is important that there are opportunities for different voices to reflect and evaluate.

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In addition to the workload strategy, we consider the staff as ‘people’ and look at why and how they would like to improve wellbeing. This has included allocating some professional development time for wellbeing, social events and activities and negotiating deals for staff, for example reduced-rate gym memberships and so forth. We also try to say ‘thank you’ as often as possible, including with termly Golden Staff nominations (everybody nominated receives a treat and the winner has a day of paid leave of their choosing), Staff Appreciation Week and weekly shout-outs and birthday celebrations.

How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? In my experience, it is important for schools to develop a wellbeing approach that is right for their context. Schools need to give their staff a voice and talk to them about what they need and want. What will make a difference to their wellbeing? Of course, there will be certain activities that we do at Parson Street that will be successful elsewhere, but it is about personalising your journey. I would encourage other schools to look at wellbeing as an ongoing strategy that requires commitment. Some of this comes in the form of people, for example we have two wellbeing leads in the school to help coordinate this work; some of the work requires finance, which we have managed to include into our budget this year, and some of the work requires time alongside your professional development. All schools must think about their organisation carefully and ensure that all the staff are considered within a formal wellbeing strategy. Within our team, we have cleaners, lunchtime supervisors, administrative staff, a site team and cooks – as well as teachers and teaching assistants. The wellbeing of all these staff members matters and has to be considered carefully (as they each have different stresses). After initially taking the lead of wellbeing myself, I have moved the ownership to staff (with involvement from senior leaders) to help ensure shared accountability. This isn’t a situation where senior staff ‘fix’ any issues with workload and wellbeing – the workforce drives the agenda. It is important that everyone is realistic about wellbeing. If there is a sense in your school that a number of events or even a longer-term strategy will remove all stresses and anxiety, then you will be mistaken. In the real world, teachers work in a stressful environment; we have our own trials and tribulations in life, but we must continue to reflect and adapt our strategy, adjusting to the needs of our staff and the demands at the time. Above all else, school leaders must be kind and build a team where people care for one another. My experiences have shown me that you get a much better deal from staff when they know you care and that they are appreciated. Simple things that take no effort (such as saying thank you) can make a world of difference.

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Why does this work? by Adrian Bethune I have always believed that schools don’t necessarily need a lot of money to improve teacher wellbeing. Lots of the ideas in this chapter prove this. Cutting down on unnecessary meetings costs nothing. Giving staff ownership of how they give feedback and treating them as trusted professionals costs nothing. Saying thank you to a member of staff for their hard work costs nothing. But the payback can be huge. Numerous studies show that happier employees are more productive, more creative, have less time off sick and are more loyal to their employer (Oswald et al., 2015). We also know that teacher mental health impacts on student mental health, so happier teachers could mean happier students (Bajorek et al., 2014). So, genuinely working at improving teacher wellbeing is a no-brainer to me. The ideas in this chapter work because they support many of the fundamentals that contribute to human happiness and wellbeing – namely increasing the time spent on enjoyable and meaningful activities, belonging to a team, and having a sense of control over important aspects of one’s life. So, for example, when a school gives its teachers autonomy over how they give feedback in class, they immediately increase their sense of agency and control, which is hugely important for wellbeing. Those teachers can then choose to spend less time on the meaningless aspects of marking and assessment, and more time on the feedback methods they know are useful and effective, which increases their sense of doing meaningful work. Also, if schools take staff wellbeing seriously and actively engage all staff in the review, design and implementation of policies, then working collectively as a staff body fosters strong personal relationships, which is another cornerstone of a happier workforce. There are lots of quick wins here for teachers and senior leaders, and at the very least, people may simply reflect on how much they bear the hallmarks of an ‘asshole’ and commit to changing their ways! Ross is right to point out that, ultimately, teachers have a big responsibility to look after and prioritise their own personal wellbeing and mental health. I have taught in schools that were happy and supportive places to work but some staff went on long-term sick leave because they ran themselves into the ground in the service of others. Our students need teachers who are good role models for wellbeing – those who show they care about themselves as much as they care about their class. When teachers look after themselves well, and when schools look after their staff, everyone does better. There are no downsides to having happier teachers in schools. Adrian Bethune is a primary school teacher in Hertfordshire and Education Policy Co-Lead at the Mindfulness Initiative. He is the author of Wellbeing in the Primary Classroom (2018) and founder of www.teachappy.co.uk.

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e learned in Chapter 4 how important it is to support our teachers’ mental health and wellbeing, but what about our students? Increasingly, students are struggling with their mental health in schools across the UK. Teachers are not mental health practitioners and it’s clear to me that we need significant funding from the government in order to support students’ needs at a sophisticated level. This seems unlikely at a time when specialist support is unaffordable, teacher salaries are frozen and an increasing number of qualified teachers are leaving the profession. Nevertheless, I believe that we, as educators, can still play a role in facilitating open dialogue around mental health, recognising the signs a student might be struggling and helping them to access the support they need. This chapter will offer some practical ways forward for teachers and school leaders so our young people do not have to suffer in silence. 97

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Why is this an issue? A huge number of students enjoy school, but GL Assessment (2018) research highlights that significant numbers are struggling. GL Assessment analysed data from over 850,000 UK students between the ages of seven and 14 relating to their ‘attitudes to self and school’. Almost one-fifth of the students exhibited ‘low or moderately low attitudes’ to perceived learning capability, self-regard and feelings about school. More than one in 20 of the students were assessed as having ‘extremely poor attitudes to their learning, and negative feelings about school and very low self-regard, which makes them especially vulnerable’. Statistics from the NHS (2018b) are equally concerning. 12.8 per cent of five- to 19-year-olds had at least one mental health disorder in 2017 and the prevalence of mental disorder among five- to 15-year-olds has risen from 9.7 per cent in 1999 to 11.2 per cent in 2017. It is emotional disorders in particular driving this increase, ‘going from 4.3% in 1999 and 3.9% in 2004 to 5.8% in 2017’. Other types of disorder, including behavioural and hyperactivity disorders, have remained roughly the same. According to GL Assessment (2018), both educators and policymakers have become increasingly aware of the importance of children’s mental health and wellbeing. The OECD, for example, now measure student wellbeing, in part because they realised that students’ levels of satisfaction have an impact on academic performance. Governments have also taken a greater interest in young people’s mental health because ‘happy children stand more of a chance of becoming content and productive citizens than unhappy ones’. It’s clear therefore that we live and work in a period where children’s mental health difficulties are reaching record levels, and if we want not only to provide them with a good education but also to ensure they become happy and successful adults, we need to tackle this issue head-on.

Why are our young people struggling? Some of us have been quick to assume that children from single-parent families are worse off when it comes to mental health and wellbeing. However, a report published by the University of Sheffield (Rabindrakumar, 2018) has helped to reshape the narrative, as it ‘debunks the myths about single parent households and significantly, it shows that children are not negatively impacted if raised by a lone parent’. The study explores the experiences of more than 27,800 households. It found that one in three families with children will have been a single-parent family at some point over a six-year period, but there is no evidence of a negative impact of living in a single-parent household on children’s wellbeing in terms of satisfaction, quality of peer relationships or positivity about family life. It’s time for policymakers and researchers to do more to challenge popular stereotypes and I wonder whether this is something that we, as teachers, could learn from too. So what is fuelling mental health difficulties among our young people today? While this is an extremely complex question to answer, with a number of different factors to consider, I would suggest there are two issues that may at least be fanning the flames: over-testing and social media. 98

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Over-testing In the summer of 2018, I recall speaking to one headteacher about her son who was sitting 33 GCSE examinations. Yes, 33! Social research I conducted (McGill, 2018) suggested that six per cent of families have children who sat 30 exams or more that same year! So do schools test children too much? This is a debate that regularly hits the headlines and even the politicians have become involved. At the NEU conference in April 2019, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn declared in a cheap publicity stunt that he would ‘scrap primary SATs if elected’ (Richardson, 2019). Meanwhile, Nick Gibb (2019) says, ‘abolishing SATs would be a terrible retrograde step’. As teachers, we know that testing has its place. Testing knowledge is good. If you ask any teacher whether they think assessment is useful, they will say yes. The real issue is the amount of pressure we put on tests, particularly in terms of accountability measures for schools. Making these assessments such high stakes for teachers and schools may lead to the pressures being placed upon our young people. I know it’s not as simple as that, and there will be a wealth of external factors outside schools that will take a lifetime for us to analyse to determine why our young people are facing increasing mental health problems, but it must have an impact. As we know, children’s cognitive development is very much like a sponge, absorbing the environment around them. Our young people do not have the critical thinking they need to apply nuance and context to what they are seeing, hearing or doing. Of course they are developing this and our teachers are supporting them in the classroom, but let’s consider the impact high-stakes testing may have by looking at the 11-plus test, used in areas of England to determine admission to schools. In a paper published by think tank LKMco (2016), which later went on to shape dialogue at the House of Commons at an Education Select Committee in March 2017, some startling statistics about the 11-plus test were shared: • 78 per cent of headteachers in selective areas think 11 years old is the wrong age to judge a child’s ability. • 96 per cent of these headteachers believe that tutoring impacts on pass rates. • 92 per cent believe that failing the 11-plus test may have a negative impact on children’s self-esteem. • 83 per cent believe non-selective schools working in selective areas face additional pressures due to higher proportions of students with special educational needs and who do not speak English as a first language. • 51 per cent believe that testing has a negative impact on social mobility. • 69 per cent say academic selection should not be increased. There is some evidence to suggest that selection is good, particularly at an older age (Sutton Trust, 2011), and going to a grammar school can also be a ticket to the future for some children from disadvantaged backgrounds, helping to bring more families out of poverty. I agree with these sentiments, but how do we manage this without disadvantaging others in the process and impacting on children’s mental health? Here lies a deeper issue for education as a whole across the UK. Grammar schools face the same mental health issues as all other schools, and our case 99

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study school in this chapter, Queen Mary’s Grammar School, has received national recognition for their work in student mental health. It’s essential for all teachers, regardless of the type of school in which they work, to be aware of the signs that a child may be struggling during exam season. Dr Sarah Vohra’s (2018) book, Mental Health in Children and Young People, offers specialist advice for effective ways for parents, teachers and schools to spot the symptoms of mental health problems and take action for children between six and 16 years old. Her guidance is based on her background in clinical practice, as well as her experience of working with children in schools, prisons and other settings. The next time your students sit an exam, check for the following signs and symptoms of possible anxiety: • tension headaches or feeling dizzy • difficulties concentrating • physically unwell • irritability • problems sleeping • a dry mouth or a lump in the throat • muscle aches, trembling or hyperventilating

84 per cent of teachers and school leaders find supporting student mental health a challenge in their own contexts.

• sweaty palms or diarrhoea • restlessness or pacing. In a climate where teachers are asked to do more during the working day, it’s important to take these issues back to basics. Have a face-to-face conversation. Be attentive and listen to what the child is saying. Report any safeguarding concerns and help signpost your student to any support you or the school can offer. Remember as well that even if these symptoms occur during exam season, there might be another underlying reason for a student experiencing mental health problems. In ‘Mental health and behaviour in schools’, published by the Department for Education (2018g), the guidance reminds us that ‘Mental health problems can, in some cases, be an indicator that a child has suffered or is at risk of suffering abuse, neglect or exploitation.’ The paper goes on to say, ‘it is normal for children to feel nervous or under stress around exam times’, but other factors can make mental health problems for some children become longer-term difficulties. In June 2019, outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May asked that every new teacher in England be ‘trained in how to spot early warning signs of mental illness’ (Coughlan, 2019). Although I warmly welcome this news, with the challenges of reduced funding and increased pressures, teachers’ capabilities to support students are becoming increasingly stretched. And we all know, when resources are stretched, you cannot do your job well. What we need to do is challenge the government and policymakers to invest as much as they can into our services, and ensure our teachers continue to recognise and deal with these issues in our classrooms and feed forward recommendations to qualified mental health professionals. 100

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Social media With the rise of social media and the desire for the perfect pout or an exciting experience to share, there is an increasing perception that ‘everyone seems to be having a better time than me’. The wise among us will know this is unfounded but we will all teach students who succumb to the social media allure of ‘a life of perfection’. With thousands of apps to access anytime, day or night, it is incredibly easy for people to have their story heard – or at least to share the same story in multiple locations with ‘status updates’ of what we are doing, the places we have been and the people we meet. As an observer, we form an opinion of someone else’s life – forming a perception of success and perhaps a comparison with our own existence. In reality, we are largely all doing the same things, meeting like-minded people and each sharing thoughts and events, but we all have a subconscious aim to share that ‘perfect moment’ – redefined today by a high volume of retweets, likes and comments – even though we know that the photograph will be at least the fifth or even twelfth version and will have been edited pre-publication. Research into the impact of social media is still very much in its early stages because it is only in the past ten years that social networking has become an integral part of modern life. Among some of the more recent research is a report by the Education Policy Institute (EPI), published in 2017, which considers the relationship between social media and young people’s mental health and emotional wellbeing (Frith, 2017). The EPI report says that some studies show social media can have a very positive impact on young people: it can keep them connected with friends, help with their homework, and develop their interests, creativity and identity. Young people with mental health concerns can also use social media to seek out support, advice and counselling. However, the EPI notes that existing research has also uncovered several risks for young people using social media, including spending an excessive amount of time online, sharing too much information, cyberbullying, the impact on body image and harmful content, such as the promotion of self-harm. ‘We’ve had instances of bullying on WhatsApp – things intended to be banter but not taken as such. A boy had been bullied by members of another school who were logging into a game and they were being racist towards him. We’ve had students disseminating unsavoury memes, spending five hours a night on YouTube and getting into trouble for not handing in homework.’ Sophie McPhee, PSHE Coordinator, Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall

Research by ASCL (2018) supports the fact that social media is not without its risks. In January 2018, ASCL surveyed 460 secondary school headteachers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. These school leaders were asked about the impact of social media use on students over the past 12 months. The survey found that 95 per cent of headteachers feel that social media use is damaging the mental 101

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health and wellbeing of young people – and 93 per cent would like new laws and regulations to keep children safe online. 77 per cent believe the government and social media companies should provide more information for parents. Other findings from ASCL include: • All but one respondent said students had experienced bullying via social media. 40 per cent said this happened on a daily or weekly basis. • All but three respondents said students had experienced upsetting content on social media, including sexual content, bullying, hate speech and content relating to self-harm. 27 per cent said this happened on a daily or weekly basis. • 89 per cent said students had been approached by strangers on social media. • 93 per cent said students had experienced low self-esteem due to idealised images or experiences on social media. 22 per cent said this happened on a daily or weekly basis. • 96 per cent said students had lost sleep due to their use of social media. 32 per cent said this happened on a daily or weekly basis. Interestingly, on this last point, Seattle School District thinks it may have found a solution. Their schools now start 55 minutes later to allow students to get more sleep. They found that ‘Exam scores and other grades in the science classes increased year to year by a small margin.’ (World Economic Forum, 2018) Countering the negativity around social media, a study led by the University of Oxford (Orben et al., 2019) found that social media effects on the life satisfaction of adolescents are ‘nuanced’ and ‘small at best’, with other factors such as family, friends and school life having a more significant impact on wellbeing. However, the researchers do admit that the ‘unknowns of social media effects still substantially [outnumber] the unknowns’, so more studies are required in this complex area. Despite the potential risks, it’s clear that social media is here to stay. The EPI report (Frith, 2017) shares some statistics that show just how prevalent the use of social media is among young people in the UK: • 37 per cent of 15-year-olds use the internet for more than six hours on a typical weekend day. They are classed as ‘extreme internet users’ by the OECD. The UK has the second highest level of extreme internet use among all OECD countries (after Chile). • 27 per cent of 15-year-olds first used the internet when they were six years old or younger. • 95 per cent of 15-year-olds use social media before or after school. • 11 per cent of ten- to 15-year-old girls and five per cent of boys in the same age range spend over three hours on social media on a typical school day. • 56 per cent of nine- to 16-year-olds use a smartphone on a daily basis.

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• It is also important to realise that given the speed at which technology evolves, the way young people use social media is constantly changing. The recent development of live-streaming is one example and another is the rise of instant messaging services, such as WhatsApp, which mean that conversations are being held increasingly in private groups instead of on public profiles. Social media does clearly have its risks when it comes to young people’s mental health and wellbeing but it forms such a significant part of young people’s lives that the solution will never be to restrict access at home, but what about in our schools? It’s essential that young people develop the digital skills and resilience needed to thrive in the online world, so we need to find a way to help young people to use social media safely and constructively, and we need to manage its potential impact on young lives in the classroom if our students are to learn successfully. As Geoff Barton, the General Secretary of ASCL, says, ‘Social media can be a force for good […] but it also has a dark side […] More must be done to protect young people so that they can enjoy social media safely and responsibly.’ (ASCL, 2018)

Funding In terms of mental health, if schools are to continue to offer the support they do, and even increase their offer, they need to be supported by a strategic national approach towards mental health support and have access to the funding needed to ensure that they are able to adequately train and resource staff. The fact that the Department for Education (2017b) commissioned the research ‘Supporting mental health in schools and colleges’ is important, as it shows an awareness that it is an issue within schools, and the report acknowledges that funding is a serious concern: ‘More than nine in ten (93%) providing counselling services and a similar proportion (91%) of those providing other support used their own budget to fund this provision […] Schools and colleges also received free or low cost support from practitioners […] However […] there was uncertainty whether the school could sustain the funding for the intervention in the future.’ This same research found that 71 per cent of schools and colleges feel lack of funding is a ‘major barrier to setting up mental health provision’. With the severe funding cuts many schools and colleges are facing, how many will have to prioritise other areas over mental health support? Teaching and support staff need to have access to resources both for supporting low-level concerns and to buy in additional support, such as school counselling, from partners. In 2019, there are too many stories of long waiting lists at CAMHS and students being discharged too soon or simply declined to be seen. We know that there are whole families in crisis who are not accessing the support they need due to cuts in services. As educators, we all have a duty to challenge bias and support students and families with mental health difficulties, but what can we realistically do in these challenging circumstances with a lack of funding and support from external services? I hope the ideas in this chapter will help provide you with some guidance. 103

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Mental Health Charter

Adopt the Mental Health Charter in your school to ensure the language your teachers and students are using reduces the stigma attached to mental illness. Writer and social critic Natasha Devon MBE set up the Mental Health Charter in 2017 to support the media in reporting about mental health responsibly to the public. The Charter acknowledges the power of language and imagery in shaping social attitudes and aims to educate and reduce the stigma associated with mental illness. Devon visits schools and colleges throughout the UK delivering classes and conducting research with teenagers, teachers and parents on mental health, body image and social equality. Her Charter sets out seven ideas, which I would recommend all schools adopt when working with their students.

1. Phraseology Never use the phrases ‘commit suicide’ or ‘successful suicide’. The term ‘commit’ suggests criminality and blame. We now understand that suicide happens when the pain we experience exceeds our resources for coping with pain. Suicide is not a criminal act in the UK and has not been since 1961. ‘Successful suicide’ contravenes what we now understand about the act – most people who take their own life are ambivalent, in that part of them wants to live. Better alternatives include ‘attempted suicide’, ‘completed suicide’, ‘ended their own life’, ‘took their own life’ or even ‘killed themselves’.

2. Imagery Never show ‘before’ images in eating disorder stories or pictures that could be triggering to people who self-harm. For people who are in a healthy mindset, seeing ‘before’ pictures of people in the grips of anorexia or who have self-harmed can act as a deterrent. However, for people who are either experiencing or in recovery from eating disorders or self-harm, we now understand that these pictures can become something to ‘aspire to’.

3. Terminology Never use the term ‘anorexics’, ‘bulimics’, ‘depressives’ or ‘schizophrenics’. It is important to understand that a person is distinct from their illness. To label someone ‘an anorexic’, for example, suggests that they are defined by their eating disorder. This is not only unhelpful in terms of the way in which they are perceived by others but it might also hinder their recovery process. 104

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A better alternative is saying ‘people experiencing anorexia/bulimia/depression/ psychosis’.

4. Less is more Avoid giving too much detail on suicide, self-harm or eating disorder methodology. We now understand that giving a lot of detail about how people have harmed themselves can inspire imitational behaviour. Try to avoid going into too much detail and focus on ‘whys’ not ‘hows’.

5. Generalisations Avoid using generic terms like ‘mental health issues’ when describing terrorists and other violent criminals. 99 per cent of people with mental illnesses are more likely to harm themselves than others. In establishing a link between generic poor mental health and terrorism or violent crime, stigma and fear are increased. Instead be specific – what mental health ‘issue’ did the perpetrator have? Was it in fact a personality disorder? Being a psychopath or a sociopath is not technically a ‘mental illness’. If you find yourself discussing this, add a disclaimer along the lines of: ‘Note most people with mental health “issues” or personality disorders would not commit a crime of this nature. These crimes occur as a result of a rare combination of circumstances.’

6. Know the difference Understand the difference between mental health and mental ill health. Everyone with a brain has a mental health, just as everyone with a body has a physical health. By using the term ‘mental health’ to describe mental illness, an important discussion that impacts 100 per cent of the population is effectively confined to one quarter of it. Instead of ‘battles with mental health’, it is therefore much more helpful to say ‘has issues with mental ill health’, so that we can understand the distinction.

7. Reliable sources When discussing mental health, offer links to good-quality sources of support. The best charities and support organisations ensure their web forums are monitored for triggering content (for example, users sharing self-harm or suicide techniques). They do not promote one form of therapy for financial gain but instead describe various treatment methods. They base their content on reliable evidence and have good links with research institutions.

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Understanding Generation Z

With the evolution of technology and social media, our current generation of students, Generation Z, are growing up with a very specific set of potential threats to their happiness and wellbeing. In this idea, we’ll explore what we can do to mitigate these threats and help students embrace the benefits that technology brings instead. It appears that year on year, the mental health needs of children in schools increase, but in terms of general happiness, is every generation more discontent than the last or are they in fact happier? It’s a tough question to answer but, for me, each generation faces challenges specific to the context in which they grow up. Technology has had an impact on the last three generations in the UK: the xennials, the millennials and Generation X. Let’s take a look at each generation in turn to see what this means for our young people growing up today.

The xennials Growing up, the xennials had limited technology and modems that made strange noises. It took longer to load a webpage than it did to ‘cook’ a pot noodle. Then suddenly, they were in possession of smartphones, with the whole world at their fingertips, and they were still at an age where they were young enough to understand how to use them and evolve with the technology. It is no wonder (yet not acceptable) that xennials, many of whom will be the parents of our current generation of students, spend so much time on their devices and less time interacting with their children. To top that off, xennials constantly compare themselves by viewing their friends’ polished social media lives. They portray their own lives carefully, enhancing the good bits and hiding the dirty laundry behind those staged smiles. The savvy among us know the score: it is not all as it seems, but dissatisfaction with their place in the world can be an issue for some of this generation. What impact might this be having on the children of xennials and how are the younger generations supposed to navigate through this social media minefield?

The millennials Next, the millennials, another generation who are likely to be the parents of the students currently in the school system. They have many of the same traits as the xennials but to a greater degree. They have always had the world at their fingertips on their phones. This generation have grown up with their teenage years displayed for all to see on social media. They are the cohorts where university was seemingly for everyone and failure was not an option. Some in this generation may have had high expectations in terms of lifestyle and income but have not been able to live up to them. Everything is available and it will arrive the next day in the post, possibly paid for on credit – my parents’ generation saved for things; mine and subsequent generations can buy first, pay later. 106

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Generation Z and beyond Generation Z are the current generation; they are the children of the xennials and millennials. Their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ post-war hardship is nothing more than hearsay. Some primary school children have smartphones as young as Year 3. They have access to games and even content suitable for adults. They are victims or perpetrators of cyberbullying in their own bedrooms. Even access to porn creates unrealistic expectations of the opposite sex and relationships. Something they own breaks; it gets replaced. Stuff is cheap and accessible and many of these children have plenty of it. Experiences and amazing holidays are happening at a younger and younger age for those who can afford it. Aspirations are sky high, with parents and schools touting mantras such as ‘be what you want to be’ and ‘anything is possible if you work for it’. Unrealistic expectations of themselves and what their lives ‘should’ look like are rife, putting increasing pressure on children throughout their schooling and leading some to breaking point. Overstretched teaching staff are struggling to deal with the increasing social and emotional needs of the children in their classes as effectively as they’d like (but they are all doing their best). The warning signs are there in many primary-aged children and continue throughout secondary school.

Protecting Generation Z So what can we do to protect Generation Z’s mental health in this challenging context? Richard Langton and Sophie McPhee at Queen Mary’s Grammar School start tackling issues around social media in the younger year groups with PSHE lessons that talk not only about eSafety and online behaviour but also about finding balance in your life. They do not demonise online gaming or social media but make students aware of the risks and help them to ensure that these things are not taking up a detrimental amount of time. As teachers, we must remember that young people are our future, and just like countless generations before them, they will learn best when they are valued and listened to. Take time to have meaningful, face-to-face conversations with your students to teach them the importance of real-life interaction, while also allowing them to embrace the digital world. In April 2019, the ‘Online harms white paper’ set out the UK government’s plans for a world-leading package of measures to keep UK users safe online. The paper states that ‘the government will establish a new statutory duty of care to make companies take more responsibility for the safety of their users and tackle harm caused by content or activity on their services’. My hope for 2020 and beyond is that we do not have another policy paper but actually something concrete that stems from policy recommendations so that more of our young people can safely enjoy the benefits that online services offer. I would like to see it become statutory that schools and local communities teach the use of social media, including safety, fake news, accountability and digital advertising versus authenticity. In the meantime, I hope schools can integrate this into their PSHE lessons in the same way as Richard and Sophie at Queen Mary’s Grammar School. 107

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A whole-school approach to mental health

To ensure students receive consistent support, it’s essential that a school takes a whole-school approach to mental health and wellbeing. This idea will give you some guidance to help you set this up in your school or improve on your current offering. In February 2018, Jeremy Hunt MP, former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, announced a £5 million programme to train primary school staff in mental health first aid. Designed to help teachers spot the early signs of mental illness in young children, this follows a similar scheme introduced in secondary schools in the summer of 2017. However, with at least 850,000 children living with diagnosed mental health conditions in the UK (Department of Health and Department for Education, 2017) and the stigma of mental health stopping people seeking help from mental health services, teachers on the front line are still crying out for support to help our most vulnerable students. It can be demoralising for teachers to work with students with poor mental health every day and not see them get any consistent or specialised support. To counter this, there needs to be a coherent, systematic whole-school approach to mental health. Current research consistently shows that using a whole-school approach is the most effective intervention and that it’s particularly effective at improving outcomes for those most at risk (Department for Education, 2018g). The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2018) and Public Health England (2015) recommend that schools use this approach. A whole-school approach means your school needs to: • identify the mental health needs within the school • have leadership in place for mental health and wellbeing • deliver high-quality teaching around mental health and wellbeing • have a culture and an environment that promotes mental health and wellbeing • make sure students and staff are aware of and able to access a range of mental health services • support staff wellbeing • be committed to student and parent participation. This might sound daunting at first, but here are four initial steps you can take to start making this a reality in your school.

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1. Listen to your students To identify how you could improve your provision for student mental health and wellbeing in your school, start by running a survey for all students to voice their perceptions of their own mental health and how well they currently feel supported by the school. This will pinpoint areas in your provision that you need to focus on, either because students are struggling with specific needs you may not previously have been aware of, or because there are certain aspects of your approach to mental health that need improving. For example, I recently met Shaun Dellenty, a former school leader and advocate for LGBT+ inclusion, who surveyed his students to discover 75 per cent of them had experienced homophobic language. There are more details in his book, Celebrating Difference (2019). Once you’ve analysed the results of your survey, you can also hold student voice meetings to discuss specific aspects of your provision in more detail. Our case study school, Queen Mary’s Grammar, have, for example, used student voice sessions to build a more accurate picture of their students’ self-assessment of their own mental health.

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2. Appoint a mental health lead It’s important to appoint a staff member as your school’s mental health lead. Their role can include leading targeted interventions, working with primary mental health specialists, training teachers and support staff in various mental health conditions and how to support them, making CAMHS referrals and being a go-to for supporting staff and students with their mental health needs.

3. Establish a staff working party for mental health Set up a staff working party for mental health and encourage all staff to get involved. It’s best to have a rolling action plan over the course of the school year, asking for suggestions from members to help set the agenda. Members will often come up with suggestions about schools to visit, conferences to attend, and books or research to help inform your provision. Make sure you get a balance between theory and practice. When Queen Mary’s Grammar School started their working group, several suggestions came out of these meetings around staff appointments, curriculum change and using student voice to find out about pressure points and mechanisms that might work for them. The working party can be run by the mental health lead.

4. Training for all staff in mental health first aid Training needs to be cascaded down for all staff so that they are better equipped to deal with students’ mental health needs. As Sophie McPhee at Queen Mary’s Grammar School says: ‘It needs to be clear that everyone is talking about mental health and it is not just the job of the pastoral staff – any member of staff could receive a disclosure from a student. We always encourage students to go to an adult that they trust. That could be a teacher of a subject that has no obvious connection to mental health.’ Sophie McPhee, PSHE Coordinator, Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall

Schools should ensure that mental health issues are taken seriously and discussed via specific INSET and CPD. The school community is the sum of all its staff so mental health and wellness should be seen as a priority. All staff, whether or not they want to be actively involved in a particular mental health initiative or project, must at least know what to do if they have a disclosure made to them and how to signpost students to the support available.

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Mental health across the curriculum

As important as it is for adults to understand and be well equipped to deal with student mental health, it is also equally important for our young people to have their own knowledge about mental health conditions and where to go for support if they are worried about themselves or someone else. Before you embark on teaching young people about mental health, you need to be open with your parents and say what you are doing. You could be teaching students from families or backgrounds where mental ill health is stigmatised or just not considered a possibility. It’s important to tell parents what you are doing and why.

PSHE As a starting point, you should make sure there is sufficient time in the curriculum for PSHE. For secondary students, there are excellent teaching resources for teaching mental health available from Jigsaw (www.jigsawpshe.com) and STRIDE (www.bristol.gov.uk/en_US/web/bristol-healthy-schools/topics/stride-lessons), which you can use to shape PSHE lessons. For primary, try Anna Freud’s Schools in Mind (www.annafreud.org/what-we-do/schools-in-mind) and the Cyber Ready Toolkit by Ecclesiastical (www.ecclesiastical.com/risk-management/cyber-ready). While resources provided by mental health organisations are useful, it’s also essential that PSHE leaders are using lessons and resources based on rigorous research and the latest news articles. In her PSHE lessons, Sophie McPhee at Queen Mary’s Grammar School uses a combination of resources from trustworthy organisations (preferably those accredited by the PSHE Association), self-made resources based on CPD training, news articles and wider professional reading. Mental health can also be taught outside PSHE by teachers confident in this area so think about how you could bring it into other subject areas or parts of school life, such as tutor time, assemblies or enrichment days, too.

Mental health awareness week A fantastic way to encourage open discussions about mental health among students is to run a mental health awareness week in your school. Be careful that this does not become a box-ticking exercise but is part and parcel of your wider mental health curriculum and provision. It’s best to choose a theme to help you structure your week and come up with a coherent programme

‘I’ve tried to break the stigma and to get people talking and sharing and supporting each other. When we first launched our mental health awareness week, I didn’t want this to be a box-ticking exercise; it has to be sustainable.’ Richard Langton, Headmaster, Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall

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of activities. Queen Mary’s Grammar School ran multiple mental health events over a fortnight in 2019, including, amongst other things, workshops by Karma Nirvana, a visit from Fiona Thomas, author of Depression in a Digital Age, and drama sessions with Time to Change (see page 114). Before you embark on planning your awareness week, take the time to ensure all your staff are on-board – use your student survey data or student voice feedback (see page 109) to help staff realise that it’s an issue and something you all need to work on, as a school. You can get parents involved too by inviting them to an evening talk and discussion during your awareness week.

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A radical solution

Mental health is an important aspect of education – and teaching. Politicians are starting to wake up to this but we need them to make radical changes to school funding if teachers are to have any hope of providing the support our young people need. With decreasing funding in our schools, the pressure placed upon our teaching is increasing. There has been mixed reaction to Theresa May’s plans for every new teacher in England to be trained in how to spot early warning signs of mental health (see page 100). Teachers are best placed to spot early signals, and doing so in class or in tutor time can make all the difference. However, due to expertise and time constraints, teachers are limited in terms of what they can do to help young people. Teachers are time poor and, by default, marking, planning and teaching take precedence over mental health conversations with our young people. So how do we challenge our government agencies to give schools more funding than what has been the norm? If we fund schools, teachers, doctors, hospitals and emergency services better, surely we can reduce many of the issues we face across the British Isles? Isn’t prevention better than cure? Allow me to offer a radical solution. 1. Fund all schools so that they can hire more teachers and staff can do their jobs better. Reduce teacher contact time from 90 per cent to 80 per cent, and make this statutory across all sectors and UK jurisdictions. Until this changes, education will always be delivered on a shoestring. 2. With the additional funding and reduced contact time, insist that all teachers work with every student to understand how their school can best meet their individual needs. (See the Kunskapsskolan model in Chapter 8, page 172.) 3. Extend tutor or form time so that teachers have more opportunities to discuss social issues with their students and offer relevant support. There is research to suggest school break and lunch times have been reduced, which is a sure sign that wellbeing opportunities in our schools are being hindered in return for more curriculum coverage. 4. Insist that all schools have a dedicated school counsellor and clinical psychologist attached to the organisation, rather than via local education authority services. 112

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School case study ar School School name: Queen Mary’s Gramm Location: Walsall, West Midlands ool (QMGS) is a selective boys’ Context: Queen Mary’s Grammar Sch and has 1,090 students

the sixth form school, which is co-educational in in the country, founded in 1554 in ools sch est old on roll. It is one of the GS s north of Birmingham. In 2018, QM Walsall, an industrial town eight mile g with Mercian multi-academy trust alon became a founder member of the 1. 201 in ion vers con y dem g single aca four other Walsall schools, followin in ic in Purpose’, ‘International The four pillars of QMGS are ‘Academ at the and ‘Enterprising in Spirit’, and life Outlook’, ‘Generous in Approach’ the to equally, along with adherence school reflects these characteristics ded gra e per cent of all GCSE entries wer QMGS Pastoral Charter. In 2018, 67 with B, to 70 per cent of grades were A* at A or A* or 7 to 9, and at A-level, t of higher education. The school is par most of the sixth form going on to n bee has in Excellence Programme and the Institute of Education’s Mandar the by UK ndary schools for cricket in the named as one of the top 100 seco in sroom, the school has a field centre Cricketer magazine. Outside the clas USA the et Force, trips as far afield as Wales (Farchynys), a Combined Cad clubs ce programme, and a multitude of and Borneo, the Horizon near spa es driv k s in regular fundraising, food ban and societies. The school engage The es. ns, such as schools and care hom and visits to other local organisatio t you s semper habebis opes’: ‘It is wha school motto is ‘Quas dederis sola riches.’ give that you will keep as eternal

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? Although the number of initiatives at QMGS demonstrates commitment from members of staff across the school, the status of mental health as a whole-school priority has been due to the passion and drive of Richard Langton, the headteacher. His determination to improve the wellbeing of students and staff alike has permeated the running of the school at every level, not for personal gain, but from a true desire to see all in the school community thrive. Under his leadership, staff and students have been encouraged to push ahead with their own mental health projects, and he and the senior leadership team continue to listen to staff concerns regarding workload, stress and student mental health, and always act accordingly. Our success can be seen on an individual level; one example is a new Year 7 boy finally finding his feet at secondary school through the care of our Nurture Group. It can also be seen by the number of parents attending an information evening held by 113

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the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust last year, and by the increasing number of Walsall primary schools signing up for a visit from our Change Your Mind team (see page 114). We have gained both local and national recognition for our efforts.

How have you achieved this? In 2016, a working party was set up by the headteacher and all staff were encouraged to take part. Visits to other schools were encouraged and supported, training events attended and wider reading completed. This research was then shared with the group. In the same year, all students across the school completed a survey to ascertain where there was a perceived deficit in our approach to mental health and how these gaps could best be filled. It was at this point that the number of projects and initiatives took off. Students of all ages were trained with the Diana Award (www.antibullyingpro.com) to become anti-bullying ambassadors. Our sixth-form students were trained as mental health ambassadors by Time to Change (www.time-to-change.org.uk) and all of our pastoral staff are now mental health first aid trained with MHFA England (https://mhfaengland.org). One twilight training session for staff was devoted to wellbeing with a local mindfulness teacher, and currently, a number of teaching staff are studying for a Level 2 Certificate in Children and Young People’s Mental Health with Hereford College. In 2016–17, a student-led initiative was launched: Change Your Mind. This project involved sixth-formers planning and delivering mental health workshops to Year 6 classes. In its first year, the team visited six schools and in its second year, this number doubled to 14 schools. In the 2018–19 academic year, 23 primary schools were visited and workshops were delivered to over 1,000 Year 6 pupils. In 2019–20, the programme will continue to expand, with a wider suite of workshops mapped to the new health and relationships education guidelines for Key Stage 2 and offered to primary and secondary schools outside of Walsall. Secondary teachers will be able to receive a day’s training if they wish to set up Change Your Mind in their own schools. You can follow the Change Your Mind initiative on Twitter @QMGS_CYM. In addition, funding was granted for two mental health awareness weeks in February 2017 and 2018, which included visits from CAMHS, Diversity Role Models (www.diversityrolemodels.org), NHS staff – and, indeed, Ross Morrison McGill! Despite the incredible financial pressure on schools, our headteacher Mr Langton has delivered on his promise to make wellbeing a priority, not only in terms of the funding being made available, but also with the employment of five extra members of pastoral staff to relieve workload on the existing team. 114

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How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? Fear not – there is a great deal schools can do that is completely free of charge. Firstly, ascertain whether or not any staff or students already know someone who can help out voluntarily with any initiatives. For example, the neighbour of one member of staff at QMGS is a business manager for a GP surgery and offered to act in an advisory capacity as our sixth-formers prepared a debate on NHS mental health funding as part of our 2018 awareness week. Secondly, you may be able to set up partnerships within your area that are of mutual benefit. Sophie McPhee has established a Wellbeing Group (@QMGS_PSHE and @QMGSWBG) – which in itself costs nothing – with one of these projects in a partnership with a care home. Once a month, students visit and chat to the residents, thereby building intergenerational relationships and improving wellbeing on both sides. Thirdly, there are many organisations that offer training and resources free of charge. The Time to Change mental health ambassador training is free, as is the Dementia Champion training for anyone interested in learning how to deliver the Dementia Friends information sessions. Our Year 7 students all have a Dementia Friends session during our PSHE lessons. CAMHS will also come in for free to talk to students about the five steps to wellbeing and deliver information on mental health disorders. Perhaps the most effective way of educating students on mental health is through the school curriculum – this is also completely free. Make sure PSHE is given the time and the staffing expertise it deserves so that mental health is taught explicitly as a topic. Make references to mental health in other PSHE topics too, such as those on gambling and debt, nutrition and relationships. Ensure that your relationships and sex education (RSE) programme is LGBT inclusive and that all students understand LGBTQIA+ terms (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual; the + represents other sexualities and gender identities). At QMGS, we have also set up Rainbow Soc, a school LGBT group. The Barnado’ s ‘Real Love Rocks’ (www.barnardosrealloverocks.org.uk) has great resources for this, which enable students in this group to feel both understood and an important part of the wider school community. Heads of department should be encouraged to explore the theme of mental health through their subjects too, so do protect staff meeting or training time as opportunities to do this. Finally, yet crucially the most important aspect of all, the senior leadership team should use its influence to ensure a culture is built whereby all feel comfortable talking about their own mental health and feel supported in setting up initiatives for the benefit of others. Mental health awareness is not a one-off assembly, theatre performance or presentation. It is a fundamental part of developing a thriving 21st-century school community.

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Why does this work? by Dr Sarah Vohra As a frontline consultant child psychiatrist, I assess and treat children and young people presenting with a broad range of mental health conditions from depression and anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD), eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, self-harm and suicidal ideation to name but a few. I consider not only the difficulties the child reports but also the system around the child (home, school and friendship circles) that maintains and in some cases can worsen the child’s difficulties over time; certainly social media, bullying and the pressures young people have to endure academically present as common themes in contributing to poor mental health. I think it is crucial that children and young people are taught at a young age the importance of maintaining good mental health and how to spot signs they may be struggling. I am pleased to hear of the waves that schools such as Queen Mary’s Grammar are making in this area in ensuring that mental health education is embedded within the DNA of the school and runs through PSHE lessons as a common thread. To reduce mental health education to simply one session, a tick-box exercise, is not enough. It does not reflect the gravity and the scale of the issue. Improving in-house communication is only part of the solution. As much as government initiatives have identified child mental health as a priority and encouraged more open, honest communication, there still remains a degree of stigma and shame attached to mental health; certainly, Natasha Devon’s work with the Mental Health Charter has helped support the media in using non-stigmatising language and promoting more responsible reporting. Stigma and shame can mean that there is a delay in young people coming forward to access support and quite often it is not until they have reached a crisis point that their difficulties become known to others. I encourage schools to adopt a traffic light approach to communication – equipping students with red, yellow and green flashcards, bracelets or tokens upon enrolment at the school. Staff and students agree what each colour stands for and the action expected as a result; this is likely to be individual for each student. For instance, a student sliding a red card to the front of their desk may indicate to their teacher that a panic attack is imminent and they require some time out in the pastoral office to de-escalate. This empowers the students to communicate their difficulties to staff and fellow peers, and also gives those around them the know-how of what they can do to support them. Dr Sarah Vohra is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist, bestselling author and columnist. Sarah set up The Mind Medic (Instagram @themindmedic) in 2016 in order to debunk the myths and common misconceptions around mental health and share practical tips in an accessible and easily digestible way. 116

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s Dr Ted Cole (2015) says, ‘school exclusion, in its various forms, often has devastating effects on the lives of the young people involved and long-term costs for society. Schools clearly have a duty to reduce such exclusion to an absolute minimum.’ So, let’s start this chapter with some facts about exclusion in England:

• From 2006 to 2013, overall exclusions decreased, but they began rising again in 2013. Since then, they have increased every year, and there was a 40 per cent rise between 2013 and 2017 (Gill et al., 2017). • The main reason for exclusion, in general, is persistent disruptive behaviour (Gill et al., 2017). 117

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• From 2016 to 2017, students who had SEN, were classified as ‘in need’ or were eligible for free school meals accounted for 78 per cent of all permanent exclusions. That’s a significant majority of vulnerable students (Department for Education, 2019e). • In special schools, the most common reason for exclusion between 2016 and 2017 was a physical assault against an adult (Department for Education, 2018h). • In 2015–16, only seven per cent of Key Stage 4 students who were permanently excluded and 18 per cent of those who received multiple fixed exclusions went on to achieve good passes in English and maths GCSEs (Department for Education, 2019e). • Although the exclusion rate remains low – the latest government figures show the exclusion rate for 2016 to 2017 was 0.1 per cent of all student enrolments – this still means that around 40 children are being excluded per day (Department for Education, 2019e). As educators, if we are interested in all students, not just some, these statistics should concern us greatly. Tragically, even young people themselves are painfully aware of the pathway that exclusion can take them down. On GCSE results day in 2018, a group of students from South London made a powerful statement by hacking the London Underground, mocking up Tube maps showing a direct line from ‘sent out of class’ to ‘prison’, via detention, isolation, exclusion, a pupil referral unit (PRU) and a young offender’s institution (Parker, 2018). In this chapter, we will look in more detail at the impact of exclusion and what each of us can do at a practical level to support our most vulnerable students.

Why is this an issue? A variety of people in the education world have offered different thoughts as to what might have caused the recent increase in exclusions. The reality is that many factors have contributed to the situation, but the following three in particular have been key: • Progress 8 (in England) • austerity and funding cuts • off-rolling. Let’s unpick each of these contributing factors.

Progress 8

Almost a quarter of teachers and school leaders (23 per cent) feel they lack confidence when it comes to managing behaviour and exclusions.

In England, the introduction of Progress 8 has demanded a more academic-rich curriculum for schools in general. Progress 8 was designed to be a measure of a secondary school’s effectiveness and it monitors student progress based on their Key Stage 4 qualifications in four different areas: 118

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1. English 2. maths 3. any three of the EBacc subjects: science, computer science, geography, history and languages 4. any other three qualifications, either from the remaining EBacc subjects listed above or any other approved qualifications. The grades received in English and maths are double weighted. Essentially, Progress 8 has narrowed the field of GCSEs that can count towards whole-school data and, in turn, schools have reduced their GCSE options to ensure their data counts towards Progress 8. It has led some schools to place a greater emphasis on languages over the arts, for example (Turner, 2017). Previously, more students would have taken vocational subjects alongside their five GCSEs, but this alternative provision has also been reduced. Often vocational subjects are used to support the most hard-to-reach students who are most at risk of exclusion. A report commissioned by the Department for Education (Mills and Thomson, 2018) quotes the headteacher of a secondary school in the north-east of England who says that vocational subjects increase the ‘chance of good behaviour in school’ for those who ‘are not very confident academically’. In the same report, an executive headteacher of a PRU in the south-east of England states: ‘By offering [vocational] qualifications we are hoping to show students the importance of achieving and succeeding going forward. This is also to build their confidence.’ There is also research evidence supporting this approach. One study led by the UCL Institute of Education, for example, examined the effectiveness of alternative provision (AP) in a London local authority (Cajic-Seigneur and Hodgson, 2016). The researchers interviewed 14- to 19-year-olds in AP and found that ‘the majority’ of these young people stated that the main reason they had become ‘disaffected’ with education in mainstream school was the ‘type of subjects on offer’. ‘Most’ of the young people in AP found the academic subjects they had studied in school ‘boring and having no direct relevance to the world of work’; in contrast ‘they reasoned that vocational subjects that were more practical and offered hands-on experience in different vocational areas were beneficial for their future choice of careers and getting jobs’.

Austerity and funding cuts Over recent years, there has been a significant reduction in support services such as behaviour support teams, specialist tutors and organisations like Connexions, which provide a subtle but highly valued level of support for hard-to-reach students. Increasing numbers of children live in temporary housing, meaning home support is more difficult to arrange even if a school can afford it. Plus, reduced funding is another reason that vocational and specialist courses have had to be cut in many schools. All of this has a serious impact on whether a school is able to keep students in their setting if they need this level of support (McInerney, 2018). 119

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Off-rolling Off-rolling is a term currently blighting English schools. It is a practice that has been going on for years but has only recently come to light and become a public issue. It refers to the removal, by one means or another, of students from their school’s roll. When a child is permanently excluded from a school, their exam results go to their new school, which in most cases is a PRU or AP. Schools can therefore significantly improve their GCSE results data by off-rolling low-attaining students. Well over half of all permanent exclusions (57 per cent) happen in Years 10 and 11 (Department for Education, 2018h). In many instances, exclusions are the right choice for everyone involved. However, it is true and sad to say that more and more children are being sidelined to benefit school results. This simply has to be rethought.

The effects of exclusion Regardless of the reasons for it, permanent exclusion has huge implications – the biggest of which are for the child. Being excluded can make young people become disaffected and lose their love of learning. We need to ask ourselves: when our students are excluded, where do they go and what happens to them? Many excluded children feel angry about their exclusion and let down by their school and teachers. They may also feel very nervous about going to a PRU or AP if they have heard negative stories about them. The PRU or AP may be in an unfamiliar town and up to an hour from home. We also can’t ignore the reality that children in PRUs are at a greater risk of being groomed into gangs (Rawlinson, 2018). As Anne Longfield (2018), the Children’s Commissioner, reminds us, ‘It’s easier for gangs to be able to access vulnerable children if they are all in one place.’ The ‘Who’s Left?’ research by Education Datalab also suggests outcomes for students who leave a school’s roll are very poor, with ‘only around 1% of children who leave to state alternative provision or a special school […] achieving five good GCSEs’ (Nye, 2017). It is worth noting that as the exclusion rate increases, this figure is only likely to get worse, because overcrowding will mean that PRUs and APs will find it harder to support their students and help them to achieve good qualifications. Another issue is that exclusion can negatively impact a child’s behaviour and mental health. Professor Tamsin Ford, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Exeter’s medical school, has warned that exclusion can exacerbate a range of mental disorders as well as behavioural disturbance. Professor Ford says the impact of excluding a child from school on their education and progress is often long term, and they may develop new mental disorders as a result (Ford et al., 2018). This is even more concerning as behaviour leading to an exclusion is often already a cry for help. As one parent says on The School Exclusion Project website, ‘Sadly, most schools tend to ignore our children’s cries for help manifesting in their behaviour; and compound the disruption of our children’s education. It’s about time we all do our bit to support these children and help turn their lives around.’ That said, as with all schools, students’ experiences at a PRU or AP can vary greatly and there are many settings across the country sharing success stories. Being at a PRU or AP does help many students achieve more in the end, as they are taught 120

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in smaller classes and their attendance improves. I agree with Tina Owen-Moore, author of The Alliance Way (2019) and co-founder and former lead teacher of the ‘bully-free’ Alliance School in Milwaukee, when she says, ‘When people know each other well, there is less opportunity for harm.’ Moving to a PRU can also be less stressful than is often imagined. When I visited our case study school for this chapter, CP Riverside School in Nottingham (see page 134), an alternative provision free school, I found parents and students were hugely grateful for the support they were receiving, and they reported that the students had achieved so much more as a result. ‘We support and nurture students through the remainder of their pre-16 education and then their transition into post-16 education or training. Our rates of NEET (not in education, employment or training) students leaving our school are low when compared to others in the locality. Our careers strategy, guidance and individual career mapping for students starts from Year 8, or when they are referred. We immediately begin to identify and discuss areas of interest and aspiration to re-engage students in education and are then able to direct them to a variety of internships, apprenticeships and further education.’ Mark Eyre, Vice Principal, CP Riverside School, Nottingham

Whenever we talk about exclusions, it’s also important that we mention those who benefit from certain children being removed from the school: the other 29 or so children in the class whose lessons can be significantly less disrupted and whose learning can be much better without the distractions. Clearly exclusions are sometimes necessary to protect or help a child, the other children they learn with and the teachers who teach them, but we also know that it may have a huge and potentially very negative impact on the child who has been excluded. Exclusion should only be a last resort when all other options have been exhausted, and we must therefore do all we can to minimise the number of exclusions in our schools, whilst also improving the conditions within our schools for those students to thrive.

‘There are two reasons where we would consider issuing a fixed-term exclusion or returning a student to their commissioning school or authority: when a student has put themselves or somebody else significantly at risk and when a student has persistently refused to engage in reflection or restoration of multiple events. We believe everything else can be significantly improved or resolved using a restorative approach.’ Mark Eyre, Vice Principal, CP Riverside School, Nottingham

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How do we reduce the number of exclusions? In 2018, it was reported that Gloucestershire was considering fining schools up to £5,000 if they permanently excluded a child (Henshaw, 2018). Gloucestershire is not alone in thinking about this, and it is evidence that the local authorities are starting to recognise the issue. But is this really a solution? An approach that goes more to the root of the problem, particularly with regard to off-rolling, is to shift education back to being focused on the needs of a child, rather than the needs of a school, so school performance data no longer holds enough power to influence permanent exclusions. Of course, this requires a wider shift in thinking from the government and society as a whole, so it’s not a short-term or easy answer. Another change that could make an impact here is if schools were held accountable for children after they had been excluded. This would create a shift in mentality around the practice of off-rolling, although again it would require government intervention. At a more practical level, classroom teachers can often have the greatest effect on reducing exclusions, as they are the adults who work with the children every day. We noted at the start of this chapter that persistent disruptive behaviour is the most common reason for a child to be excluded. By better managing such behaviour, we can help to prevent exclusions. In the ideas that follow, we will discuss this as well as other strategies for working with some of the most vulnerable young people in our society.

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Tips for helping those with ADHD

ADHD stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and it is a common disorder that can impact upon focus, impulse control and emotional regulation.

UKAP, the UK ADHD Partnership, identifies some alarming statistics linking ADHD to exclusions. Firstly, children with ADHD are 100 times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than other children. Secondly, 39 per cent of children with ADHD have had fixed-term exclusions (UKAP, 2013). Exclusion must be an absolute last resort for any child, particularly those with SEND, and it is therefore important that we understand how to support students with ADHD in our classrooms. ADHD is not a condition that children will simply outgrow; many of those who have an ADHD diagnosis have symptoms that will persist into adulthood, alongside other conditions that they may have. ADHD is not all about hyperactivity and fidgeting; children with ADHD may often appear in their own world.

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Children with ADHD typically struggle with: • following directions • working memory (keeping things in mind) • regulating emotion • all aspects of organisation • changing focus • thinking before saying or doing things • time management • starting tasks. It’s worth noting, however, that research published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (Whitely et al., 2018) suggests that students who are the youngest in their class are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than their older classmates. This research reviewed 17 studies covering more than 14 million children and suggests that ADHD can be misdiagnosed, so it’s important not to make assumptions based on a child’s behaviour. Remember that ADHD is a spectrum condition that needs medical diagnosis as it is classed as a disability. Schools should make reasonable adjustments for a child’s needs.

Supporting students with ADHD Supporting a student with ADHD in your classroom is demanding of your time, energy and expertise. With regular interruptions, the need for repeated instructions and close supervision, managing such students can be demanding. However, you must remember that these students often cannot help their behaviour. Children with ADHD have the best chance of success with teachers who: • are flexible • follow clear routines • are consistent • provide a range of activities • recognise and support individuality • maintain a positive teaching environment • present information and tasks in steps • set firm limits on student behaviour. So, with this in mind, here are ten top tips for working with children with ADHD.

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1. Set clear rules and expectations: Children with ADHD need to be reminded regularly of the classroom rules, so make sure you set clear targets and expectations for behaviour. It’s best to do this when you first start working with the student or students and continue to remind them of the rules throughout your time together. 2. Give strategic praise: Helping a child with ADHD to recognise when they are making the right choices will serve as a regular reminder of behaviour expectations. Positive attention is powerful, so always acknowledge when you ‘catch them’ being good. 3. Use immediate or short-term rewards and consequences: Children with ADHD benefit from immediate positive feedback for desired behaviour, as well as clear and proportionate consequences that are given straight away for undesired behaviour. This might include time out, removal of privileges or removing the child from a situation. None of these will have the desired effect if delayed. 4. Be persistent and consistent: You may want immediate results but that’s not likely; it can take months to see significant progress. A child with ADHD may be used to adult frustration and rejection. However, when the boundaries are consistently applied, the child will learn that you are in it for the long run and your relationship will form. 5. Establish routines: Children with ADHD get bored with routines but need them desperately. Try providing them with a visual timetable on their desk and always give them prior warning when the daily routine is going to alter. 6. Create clear plans and checklists for lessons and unstructured activities: Place these on the students’ desks. Children with ADHD will benefit from seeing the activities ticked off and will feel a sense of accomplishment, which also builds resilience in the learning environment. 7. Use timers: Timers are great for setting the length of activities and movement breaks. They also limit teacher talk, which a child with ADHD may not be able to focus on for very long. 8. Reward going above and beyond: Ensure that children with ADHD have a personalised reward for completing their work or helping others in the classroom. This may be in the form of praise, a positive phone call home or a postcard, but the important thing is that the student chooses it themselves. 9. Plan your learning environment: Students with ADHD benefit from the learning environment having minimal distractions, although this often needs to be a balancing act as other children may benefit from the stimuli. Student and parent input will help to establish the ideal environment for a child with ADHD to access the learning. 124

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10. Empower students: Allowing a child with ADHD to feel empowered in their classroom is a helpful step. Ask them where and how they think they will learn best. This may include being sat near the teacher, with another child who will act as a positive role model, at the back of the room to minimise turning around, or simply away from doors and windows. The promotion of self-regulation should be encouraged too. This could be achieved through a time-out card and identifying a safe-space for when the classroom becomes overstimulating or when the child feels dysregulated. Finally, if you require further support in the classroom, ensure that you work with your school’s SENCO and relevant agencies that support the child.

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Creating better home–school links through praise

We all like a bit of praise. It’s nice to share it far and wide, and this can bridge the gap between parents, students and schools, which, in turn, can improve behaviour and reduce the risk of exclusion. But what does the research say is the most effective way to offer praise? Mueller and Dweck (1998) conducted six separate studies looking into how different types of praise affect students. In each study, students aged nine to 12 years old played a problem-solving game. Once they had completed the game, the students were told they had got 80 per cent of the questions right and were praised for either their natural intelligence or how hard they’d worked on the task. The researchers found that the students who were praised for their effort were more likely to choose future tasks that helped them learn new things, were more likely to say they enjoyed the tasks, were more likely to persist on tasks, and performed better in future tasks. Thus, praise that is clear about what the student has done to receive the praise is more effective. Reassuring a student that they are ‘good at’ something won’t make them think they are capable and won’t help them to learn more; it’s more likely simply to make them think that being good at this thing matters. Hattie and Timperley (2007) also note that ‘Praise usually contains little taskrelated information and is rarely converted into more engagement, commitment to learning goals, enhanced self-efficacy, or understanding about the task.’ This highlights the need for feedback and praise to be specific to the task and the work that has been completed. It’s also important that the feedback is honest. Sympathy, support and encouragement in response to a poor piece of work are not effective in bringing about improvement. In fact, frustration is more effective, as is suggesting the student must do better and attributing their failure to a lack of effort or a poor strategy.

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Five ways to praise students With these research findings in mind, below are some tips and ideas for praising students that will help you to celebrate their specific achievements with their parents or carers at home. All these ideas are ways in which you can pinpoint particular examples of work that has been done well and what exactly made it praiseworthy. Using these effective forms of praise with the student, and sharing them with parents or carers, will encourage children in and beyond the classroom, improving their self-belief, their attitudes to work, their behaviour and their relationship with their teacher and the school, all of which contribute to reducing any risk of exclusion.

1. Postcards The classic praise postcard is always a lovely idea. It can be a bit of hard work but once you get into the swing of things it becomes easier. Grab some plain postcards, or even ones that fit in with the theme of your subject, add your written praise and send them home. You could do this once a half term or even once a week for hard-working students. It’s a buzz for both parent and student to have something in writing that they can post up on the kitchen fridge for months to come.

2. Sticker alternatives Students usually love stickers but sometimes can’t remember what the sticker was for. One alternative is to use paper wristbands, similar to the ones worn at music festivals. These are cheap to buy and can be personalised for your students. They can go on the wrist or around the handle of a bag to remind students of the praise given.

3. Technology There are many ways of sending praise and rewards home via technology. One example is ClassDojo (www.classdojo.com), which allows you to send messages home in real time and keep parents informed. You could also start a class blog to share your students’ excellent work. Padlet (https://en-gb.padlet.com) is another easy way to share images and examples of work. Just let parents have a QR code and they can keep up to date with what your students are doing.

4. Work selfies Work selfies are a fab way of getting students to decide for themselves which work they want to share with their parents. If they feel a piece of work is worth sending home, then get them to add a clip or sticker to it. You then just have to check the work is up to standard and take a photo of it to send home. You can use a personalised postcard app, such as TouchNote (www.touchnote.com), to make this quick and easy.

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5. The Friday call Do not underestimate the classic phone call home. This is easily one of the most effective ways of communicating but is often forgotten about when it comes to sharing praise. How about picking three students in the week to call home about and praise on a Friday? It’s not only going to make their weekend (and that of their parents), but it may also make yours too!

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Creating better links between schools and employers

As we established on page 119, providing disaffected students with more opportunities for vocational education can transform their attitudes to learning, which is key to improving behaviour and preventing exclusion. It’s important for schools to raise the profile of and invest in teaching vocational courses, but there is also more work we can do to improve careers advice and access to apprenticeships too. In some of the schools I have visited and worked with, careers advice and apprenticeship opportunities are part of their day-to-day existence rather than a one-off event. However, over the last three decades working in challenging schools in England, I have also seen the provision of careers advice and help become a little hit and miss as various policies have changed the requirements for careers guidance, and increasing funding pressures have led many schools to take a decision to limit their offering in this area. ‘We want our curriculum offer to be of benefit and relevance not only in relation to post-16 transition but also when students are completing application forms in later life.’ Mark Eyre, Vice Principal, CP Riverside School, Nottingham

In England, there has also been a significant fall in the number of people taking up apprenticeships. There was a 27 per cent drop in the last quarter of 2017 alone, increasing the pressure on the government to have a ‘radical rethink’ about apprenticeships at a national level. Critics say institutions are being deterred from creating posts because of increasing costs and complexities. As a result, the English government risks ‘failing to meet its target of 3 million people starting apprenticeships in 2020’ (Butler, 2018). There are also the usual gender stereotypes associated with apprenticeships in catering, engineering and hairdressing, to name a few, and these need to be challenged by everyone at all levels of education.

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While apprenticeships are beneficial in many ways, both for employers and employees, in terms of reducing skill shortages and customising knowledge to specific job roles, the main advantage for schools is that they give students an opportunity to increase their skills in paid employment.

Guidance for schools across the UK There is guidance relating to apprenticeships, work placements and partnerships available for schools across the UK. A good place to start is the UCAS website, which offers a vast database of careers information at www.ucas.com. In Scotland, the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board (SAAB) develops and supports apprenticeship policy for young people, making recommendations on the guiding principles, operational policy, systems and structures supporting apprenticeships in Scotland. The Scottish Government also provides practical guidance to help schools partner with employers to improve access to work placements, mentoring or developing application and interview skills. Visit www.gov.scot/policies/young-people-trainingemployment/school-college-employer-partnerships for more. In Wales, the government aim is to deliver a minimum of 100,000 apprenticeship places up to 2021, addressing skill shortages, equality and equity, and also offering training in the Welsh language. All schools can access apprenticeship funding regardless of whether they are a levy payer or not. More information, along with four ‘key steps for schools to consider’, is available here: https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2019-01/ guidance-for-schools-on-apprenticeships-in-wales.pdf. Finally, Northern Ireland, as in the rest of the UK, has an increasing range of apprenticeships available for those aged 16 years or over. To find out more, visit www.ucas.com/apprenticeships-in-northern-ireland.

What can schools do to improve their offering? If your school is struggling to provide careers advice or access to apprenticeships and vocational education, consider trying some of the ideas below.

National Careers Week National Careers Week is the largest careers event in the UK providing advice and guidance for young people. The event offers half a million students meaningful interactions and professional and inspiring interventions. Ambassador teams are available to help schools and colleges link to employers and access great free resources. See https://nationalcareersweek.com for more.

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Partnerships Schools can expose students to a wide range of career opportunities through partnerships with employers, businesses and charitable organisations. Real-life experiences provide young people with the opportunity to discover what type of work they would be most interested in when they leave school. You could also try partnering with a further education college. There is so much we can learn from 16–18 institutions, including the challenges and success of teachers working in these settings, dealing with the challenges of our young people who may not fit the traditional curriculum model, and how to provide effective vocational education.

Engagement programmes There are a number of programmes across the UK that help young people find out about possible career paths. Try the Junior Engineering Engagement Programme (J.E.E.P.), for example, which aims to engage young people across the country with careers in facilities management and engineering. Find more information at http://jeep-abm.org.

Inform students about apprenticeships The official apprenticeships website, www.apprenticeships.gov.uk, offers a wide range of information and resources to help all young people find a career. What if all teachers knew about this website and made apprenticeships a part of regular dialogue with their students? There is a whole host of ideas (101 to be exact) to engage students in understanding the benefits of apprenticeships and the opportunities available at https://amazingapprenticeships.com/app/ uploads/2018/07/101-Apprenticeship-Ideas-for-Schools.pdf.

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Getting the most out of managed moves

Although, as educators, we should be doing everything we can to keep a student in our school, managed moves are sometimes a necessity, and can work wonders for a child if we go about them in the right way. ‘Managed moves’ have been around for many years but in recent times they seem to have become increasingly popular. They are essentially an agreement made voluntarily by all involved parties for a student to move to a new educational setting. This includes the schools, parents or carers and the student themselves. Managed moves are not formally logged on the student’s record and are therefore often presented as an alternative to permanent exclusion. The 2012 Department for Education document ‘Exclusion from schools and pupil referral units in England’ discussed how they can be used as a ‘fresh start’ for students at risk of a permanent exclusion. 129

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The concept of a fresh start is, at heart, very positive, because it acknowledges the need for young people to get another chance within mainstream education. There may be various external factors linked to a particular school that have led to a young person presenting with challenging behaviour, which could be helped by leaving that school. Bullying is one example; another is that sometimes the young person may just simply be unhappy where they are. We have all left a job because it wasn’t the right environment, so that could be the same for some young people too. A managed move to have a fresh start away from such issues seems sensible. However, what about a managed move when the young person has issues that are internal, not external? If moving schools simply means carrying the same concerns with you, it is unlikely to be of help unless the move allows you to access the support that you need. But sometimes this support is then put in place. For example, there are often successful managed moves from a school either to a PRU or to another school, where the PRU has seen the potential in a young person and put the necessary support in place. It’s great to see a young person thrive in this way; never seeing them again can be a great feeling, as it means the move was successful. ‘We have received students who have been excluded fairly early on in their secondary life and have supported them to achieve four or five good-quality outcomes to successfully move on to the next step of their education.’ Mark Eyre, Vice Principal, CP Riverside School, Nottingham

The trouble is that this is often not the case. Increasingly, I am meeting young people who have been on multiple managed moves before ultimately being permanently excluded. Some young people have attended four or five different schools and this has served to delay them getting the support they have always needed. When we think about their internal needs, how does this help?

Imagine this scenario… You are 13 and are on a managed move to a new school. You have SEMH needs, you struggle to sustain peer relationships and you find it hard to relate to people. You have low self-esteem, are fearful of failure and struggle to take even small risks. Added to this, you have moderate learning difficulties where you feel constantly baffled by the curriculum and have felt ashamed that you have had to have so much support. You haven’t had any referrals to outside agencies. You know that your behaviour hasn’t been great but you don’t really see that it is a problem as no one at home is worried about it.

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Your current school is near your primary so you moved up into Key Stage 3 with the same peer group you had known for years, but the new school is a few miles away and you don’t know anyone there. At your admission meeting, your new school made it clear that you were on your last chance; permanent exclusion is hanging over your head like a large neon sign. Just imagine you are that student. You haven’t had the social skills to cope with peer relationships that were familiar, so how will you form new ones? You lack the emotional maturity to cope with this by yourself, yet you are being expected to walk in midway through the year and simply fit in. The SEMH needs you carry inside will simply move to that new school with you, and without support to address them, they will probably become issues again.

So, what can schools do? Managed moves are sometimes unavoidable, but there are ways in which we can arrange them so they benefit the young person, address their needs and help prevent them from being permanently excluded further down the line.

Be honest and open Firstly, it’s important to be honest and open about the young person’s needs. Many managed moves fail because the receiving school is poorly informed about the young person they are taking in. Make sure you send the student’s new school all the paperwork, including any support plans that show what has and hasn’t worked for the student.

Time it right It’s essential to give the new school time to prepare for the student, so they have the right support in place, or have at least investigated what support there is, ahead of time. If possible, make sure you arrange moves around the school year. Moving a student in the middle of a half term, when they are midway through a topic, can be detrimental to their learning.

Communicate clearly with parents Make sure the student’s parents or carers are informed about expectations and statutory guidelines around managed moves. Those leading meetings with parents should be practised and prepared, so they can communicate clearly and confidently, and answer any questions that may arise.

Make a follow-up call Finally, make sure you, or a member of staff who knows the student well, calls the new school to ask how they are getting along. Not only is this an opportunity for you to share with the school your knowledge about what has and hasn’t worked for the student in the past, but it also shows the student that you care about them and their education.

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Reducing the risk of exclusion

We all know that students at risk of exclusion can be the most challenging to teach and their behaviour is often a symptom of something that is out of our control as teachers. However, there are a number of small but effective ways all teachers can help these students.

Exclusion should only ever be considered as a last resort. In this idea, I would like to share with you eight things that every teacher can do in their day-to-day work, which together can have a real impact on whether a student ends up facing exclusion or not.

1. Be welcoming Smile and welcome your students, especially the ones who are most challenging. Make them feel noticed and valued. ‘Our teachers are driven to ensure that all of our students feel like they are wanted and needed in their classroom. Classrooms at CP Riverside are a safe space for students to be vulnerable and take risks, particularly regarding perceived weaknesses they have, which often include skills such as extended or creative writing and reading aloud. Students recognise that they are fundamental to the learning process.’ Mark Eyre, Vice Principal, CP Riverside School, Nottingham

2. Be kind Don’t humiliate or ridicule your students. Well-placed banter can be well received but this is a really difficult balance to strike. Learn from the past and adapt your repertoire to suit future interactions.

3. Be there Listen to their point of view, show understanding and make them feel like they belong. Offer students a follow-up time to talk or non-verbal cues to show that you are listening and that you care.

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4. Be fair Consistency is something all students appreciate and none more so than students with behavioural difficulties. Be sure to set your boundaries – aligned with the whole-school behaviour policy – and stick to them. Communicate clearly what the choices are and the consequences. At all times, show that you care. This is critical for students who are at risk of exclusion.

5. Be positive We all know positive encouragement goes a long way. Often, at-risk students enter into a negative downward spiral and offering them some positivity can be a very powerful thing. Maybe think of something you know they will be successful at and create opportunities for them to feel good about themselves.

6. Be brave One strategy that you might find works very well is to make the most difficult students your ‘favourites’, start to treat them like that and remind them frequently. Children like to feel that they belong and that their opinions matter. Get the least likely students involved in things and you could tap into potential that would otherwise go unnoticed.

7. Be structured Structure is something that gives children a safety net; they like to know what’s coming next and what to expect. Surprises can unsettle a student, especially if they have complex and difficult lives. In secondary schools, this is really important in the role of the form tutor too, as schools rely heavily on them to give out messages to students. If you’re a form tutor, allow time in your morning to tell students about anything unexpected coming up.

8. Be practical Hands-on learning works best for many students who are at risk of exclusion. It allows variety and develops interest, but more importantly, it can bring learning to life and give context. When you are planning a lesson, add in practical activities to break up the learning; this gives time and space for children’s concentration, as well as giving the opportunity for teaching social skills. Small groups work best, as it’s less exposing and allows at-risk students to flourish. They really don’t like being made to feel stupid or being made to look like a boffin.

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School case study School name: CP Riverside School shire Location: Nottingham, Nottingham provision free school located in Context: CP Riverside is an alternative cation for 56 students from Year

tive edu Nottingham that provides alterna ons n unsuccessful for a variety of reas bee e 8 to Year 11. These students hav are or ns, visio ies or alternative pro within mainstream schools, academ founded in 2015 under the former was ool without a school place. The sch name ‘Channelling Positivity’.

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? From the outset, CP Riverside has been committed to improving the behaviour and engagement of all its students. Our restorative practice and solution-focused approach benefits our students and school more than any of the sanctions-based systems that most of our students have previously endured. We hold our staff and students to consistently high standards, and our frequent mentoring and coaching conversations with staff and students are vital in ensuring that long-term, sustainable improvements occur and are a reminder of our progress made to date. Key to our success is our commitment and ability to build and maintain positive relationships with some of the most disengaged students in the locality. Our aspirational, non-judgemental, non-confrontational environment with knowledgeable and supportive staff creates the ideal atmosphere for students to feel safe and trust those around them. This offers the freedom for taking risks, adopting a positive mindset and making change. Our continued investment in retaining a high staff-to-student ratio enables us to support the individual needs of all our students. As a result, we can be proactive and respond to each student in a manner that brings about the most favourable outcomes for all. Using positive discipline, positive language and unpicking conversations, we ensure students have the best opportunity to succeed during the final years of their secondary education.

How have you achieved this? Over time, we have developed and embedded procedures, routines, actions and forums that have had a positive impact on staff, students and our school. These are explained on the next page.

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1. We had to understand behaviour before we could change it One significant step towards achieving a positive behaviour culture at CP Riverside was designing and implementing our ‘Understanding Behaviour Policy’. It has been fundamental in communicating our expectations, approach and commitment to positive change to all stakeholders. Staff and students were an integral part of the consultation, ensuring the final policy and procedures were fit for purpose. This policy goes far beyond how to manage negative behaviour in classrooms. It incorporates our beliefs about our students and their potential, examples of positive language and discipline, and the responsibilities of students, staff and parents in contributing towards a positive behaviour culture.

2. Our ‘meet and greet’ shows we care Our daily ‘meet and greet’ is our first opportunity to show students that we are pleased to see them. The student engagement team are able to effectively judge students’ wellbeing and willingness to learn before they even enter the school building. As a result, we can ensure students receive the appropriate support and intervention before they start their day. We believe that taking 15 to 20 minutes at the beginning of the day ensures students can start the day in a positive frame of mind, significantly improving the quality of learning that will take place throughout the day.

3. We have created opportunities for conversation, reflection and restoration Our school day is designed to maximise learning time for all students without negative behaviour impacting significantly on the learning that is taking place. After each lesson, there is a 15-minute break to allow restorative conversations to take place if necessary and create opportunities for relationships to be repaired before the next lesson. We recognise that wherever swift, meaningful restoration of relations can occur, staff and student wellbeing will improve, leading to an improvement in our performance as individuals and as a school.

4. We have created mentoring opportunities for all All students who attend CP Riverside School participate in an individual mentoring programme that focuses on driving their academic performance and personal development. During these sessions, personal and academic targets are set for the following week, and students will update their attendance and behaviour profile and make progress towards identifying or achieving a meaningful and suitable post-16 destination. Our student engagement team delivers weekly individual and group interventions, ensuring all our students have the skills and qualities required to self-manage and regulate their emotions, and to establish positive relationships with staff and peers, to help fulfill their academic and personal potential.

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How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? We have created a school that works for our students, one that provides every opportunity for them to thrive and flourish. We have implemented initiatives and programmes that have not worked and we have been prepared to go back to the drawing board numerous times to get to this position. Our advice to teachers and school leaders looking to create a positive behaviour culture is easily communicated in three key stages.

1. Invest in inclusion instead of isolation Completion of a reflection sheet or continuing with classwork in a booth is often an ineffective method of securing a long-term positive behaviour change, whereas a conversation in a safe space that repairs a damaged relationship and promotes growth and development is more likely to have a long-lasting positive impact. Removing students from circulation immediately solves a visible problem, but doesn’t often deal with the hidden struggle. Using a therapeutic or restorative approach and moving away from the safety and security of sanctions and consequences to manage behaviour is a risk. It requires all staff to develop an individual, professional relationship with each student, which often means teachers investing more in their students to reap the rewards. However, a student who works for you or themselves is likely to be more productive than one who only fears sanctions or consequences.

2. Make conversations and relationships the currency of your school Many of our students (and possibly some of yours) are hard to reach because we may have failed to reach out a hand. Whether in the classroom, dining hall or corridor, be sure to acknowledge and communicate with all students. If all staff can build relationships with those who are labelled hard to reach, small conversations and a listening ear can reap dividends.

3. Create opportunities for staff to share successful strategies Our team meets on a weekly basis to discuss students who have not made the required progress and students who have engaged consistently in learning. These meetings are structured to ensure the dialogue remains focused on strategies that have worked in at least one subject area and could be adopted elsewhere, or indeed whether any students require additional support. 136

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Why does this work? by Jules Daulby I’m glad to see this chapter tackling behaviour and exclusions head-on. Special schools often don’t do GCSEs. It is worth contemplating this when we look at Progress 8 in England. Mainstream school structures for the higher attainers in these schools will be similar to the lower attainers in a mainstream school. The Department for Education has, however, created a comprehensive school system that ignores the needs and alternative potential of children who are struggling or who have SEND. While never perfect, previously students could be included and qualifications found for all to reach success (like special schools do now), yet assessments based only on terminal exams (and memory) and a loss of access to further education colleges have left some learners with no opportunity for success, only experiencing a relentless, unfavourable measurement against national standards. They are never good enough. Schools need a strengths-based approach where all children can achieve and feel proud of who they are, and where ‘every learner matters and matters equally’ (UNESCO, 2017). Austerity has made a difference to schools and so too has the system to include children who have additional needs. Headteacher Vic Goddard calls the nominal figure of £6,000, which must be spent on a child with SEND before more support is funded externally, a tax on schools. Ethical heads are including children with SEND because they believe it is the right thing to do, not because they are funded adequately or rewarded for being inclusive. A perverse situation has arisen where children are excluded so they can access services that are otherwise closed to schools. Of course, teachers matter and an inclusive approach in the classroom is key to keeping these children in schools. Ross gives some fundamental strategies on this and focuses on one of the most at-risk groups for exclusions: children with ADHD. The tips are useful and practical; it is often ‘just great teaching’ that can make the biggest difference. One excluded student told headteachers, ‘Say hello before you tell me off.’ This statement exemplifies how a focus on relationships should be the first pedagogical approach rather than behaviour management. Schools must be rewarded for inclusion, not exam results. These children should not be seen as a burden but a bonus in schools. If we are going to reverse the trend of exclusions, a focus on including all children is required, and as Ross writes, it is a value worth fighting for. Jules Daulby is a literacy and inclusion specialist who campaigns against exclusionary practice in schools. She has worked in education for more than 20 years, having garnered a particular interest in inclusive practice in mainstream schools. Jules believes that all children can flourish if access to learning is prioritised. Committed to comprehensive education, Jules believes that less segregation is an urgent social justice issue. 137

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ne of the greatest challenges all schools must face is meeting the needs of every individual child. Supporting students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is our greatest responsibility within education, and also one of the most difficult in my experience. Understanding how the support structures within a school work best is complex and this includes how the special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) can deploy what limited resources they have across an institution to support teaching and learning, as well as meet the needs of each individual child. Throughout my career, I have worked with many vulnerable children. I’m sure you have too, and there will be many heartbreaking stories of triumph and tribulation. Schools must provide a safe place for children to learn, thrive and develop into young adults, but we have all encountered those students who clearly have complex needs and require additional support, yet the system has let them down.

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I remember several students I have worked with vividly, including one who had severe ADHD and another who was born with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, a condition that affected his legs, and who moved around school – and three flights of stairs – with calipers on his legs. There was also a girl in one of my classes who was visually impaired and another with severe cerebral palsy. These are just four students from an education system in England that sees eight million children pass through its 32,000 schools every academic year. Of these schools, roughly 1,250 are special schools (BESA, 2017). With an estimated 354,000 children and young people with education, health and care plans as of January 2019 (Department for Education, 2019d; see page 140), how can our school system support them all? There are also, of course, those with ‘hidden SEND’: those students who appear to be struggling, yet do not have what most of us would traditionally consider a special need or disability, whether this be due to bias, protocols and procedures, or a lack of scientific endeavours to support diagnosis. All of these young people still require additional support to progress in our classrooms, and many argue we should be raising the profile of these ‘hidden SEND’ and improving equality for those experiencing them. For example, acknowledging mental health and depression, or undiagnosed conditions where there is a lack of research or awareness, may translate into the required provision being offered in our schools. So how aware are you of what SEND really covers? The number of difficulties, disabilities and conditions that come under the SEND banner are probably broader than most realise. According to the SEND Code of Practice, a child has SEND if they have ‘a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of others of the same age’ or have ‘a disability which prevents or hinders [them] from making use of facilities of a kind generally provided for others of the same age in mainstream schools’ (Department for Education and Department of Health and Social Care, 2014). SEND therefore incorporates learning difficulties such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia; speech, language and communication needs; conditions such as autism and ADHD; social, emotional and mental health difficulties (otherwise known as SEMH) and physical impairments such as hearing or vision loss. This broad definition of SEND means there may be a higher proportion of students with SEND in any classroom or school than you first think; these are students who are likely to find learning difficult, who may display challenging behaviour, and who would definitely benefit from tailored strategies and extra support. Of course, in mainstream schools at least, the challenge is providing this support in a busy classroom environment, with 30 students vying for your attention.

Why is this an issue? Supporting students with SEND has always been a priority for teachers and schools, but it’s now more important than ever for all teachers and school leaders to have a secure understanding of how they can best help children with SEND in their classrooms. With assessments for SEND at an all-time high and external agencies stretched to breaking point, teachers, schools and local councils are struggling to meet demand due to a lack of training, and reduced funding and resources. Let’s unpick these challenging circumstances in a bit more detail. 139

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More students are receiving assessments

‘I want every student to feel they are unique, they are important and that what they do is valued.’

Sally Lees, Headteacher, Homewood Education, health and care needs School, Tenterden assessments determine whether a child or young person requires specific support for a special educational need or a disability. Their parent or a member of school staff (in practice, this is usually the SENCO) can request an assessment from the local authority. The local authority will decide whether to proceed with the request for assessment based on the information provided. If the assessment goes ahead, its outcomes will determine whether the child or young person will be provided with an education, health and care plan (EHCP). If an EHCP is issued, it will identify the support the child or young person will receive in terms of their education, health and care needs. EHCPs are drawn up by the local authority in consultation with other agencies that may be working with the child, such as those specialising in educational psychology, speech and language or social care, the child’s school, parents and ideally the child themselves. According to the Department for Education (2019d), the number of children and young people with EHCPs (or their pre-2014 equivalents, known as ‘statements’) in England increased each year between 2010 and 2019. In 2019, this equated to roughly 354,000 EHCPs, compared with approximately 225,000 ‘statements’ in 2010. That’s a huge increase. Of course, it’s unlikely that the number of learning difficulties, conditions and physical disabilities has actually increased; rather, it is assessments that have become more common, due in part to greater understanding, awareness and openness about SEND. Having more students with EHCPs enables everyone working with these children to have more information about the tailored support and frequency of support they need to make progress. Teachers, particularly SENCOs, should do what they can to access the right assessments and specialist services for children, and when the support in school is not enough, they should pursue a needs assessment. However, this does mean that increasing numbers of students require specific support in the classroom and teachers need to know how to make sure their needs are met. ‘Quality-first teaching’ in the classroom is viewed as the answer, but there is sparse evidence to show how these strategies are designed to support the needs of students with SEND, and SEND training is virtually non-existent during initial teacher training courses. Obviously not all students with SEND will have an EHCP and schools still have a responsibility to provide SEN support for these students. It’s essential that schools put in place the support these students require to make sure they progress and achieve the specified outcomes. All in all, whether a student has an EHCP or not, there is a huge amount of work to be done by teachers to ensure they are fully supported and able to progress and achieve in school. Additional teacher training is an obvious solution, but what might this look like in practice and what else can be done? 140

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A note about teachers with SEND I recall working with one colleague who gave the impression that she really struggled with her teaching. For years when I observed her teach, I would notice her struggle when a student pointed out a spelling mistake on the board or when another asked her a question. I would observe her either ignore the question or try to decode the information and respond. As we all know, this can be quite a difficult thing to do in a busy classroom, particularly when being observed, but this teacher clearly found it a real challenge. During one of our teacher training days, we decided to discuss the importance of our own literacy as teachers. We shared ideas about cognitive overload and decoding, as well as the possibility that some teachers in the room may have particular learning needs, such as dyslexia. After this training day, the colleague I mentioned above came into my office to discuss her own dyslexia. One thing led to another, and thankfully, I was able to use school funds to start a dyslexia assessment to support her in the classroom. It wasn’t an extortionate amount of money and the British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of London were two organisations that were very helpful. The teacher went off for an appointment, and after various assessments, a person from the organisation visited her in her school environment, observed her teach and undertake various activities, such as marking and assessment, and then made a list of recommendations to the school. Again, at a very small cost, I was able to purchase a voice recorder, a filter for the computer screen and a few other small resources that would assist her in her work. It was also highlighted that she should receive some additional adult support in the classroom, as well as when marking students’ work. Looking back, although I do not know this for sure, I would assume this was quite a significant moment in this teacher’s career. She was in her 50s, working in a very challenging school, and I suspect she had considered leaving the profession. It was my responsibility to drive up teaching standards across the school and equip all of my teaching staff to do the best they could. I’m pleased to hear that she is still working in the same school now and I hope that by supporting her individual needs, I helped make a difference and enabled this one teacher to not only remain in the classroom but thrive. To any school leaders reading this book: you have the necessary means to support all teachers working in your school, and we should ensure that we do all that we can to support our colleagues. When it appears that they may be struggling or not meeting the desired standard, there may be an underlying reason. It is equally important to remember that schools have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for staff under the Equality Act 2010. With a little bit of digging and targeted teacher training, you literally can change a teacher’s life. And to any classroom teacher with SEND: speak up and make sure you get the support you need. You don’t have to struggle on in silence. 141

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Limited funding and resources In order to sustain a high level of support and ensure each student not only achieves academically, but also succeeds and contributes to life in and out of school alongside their peers, schools must be well resourced and funded. Decreased capital spend on schools and smaller local services being cut, at a time when demand is increasing, have led to services that are stretched and the needs of vulnerable students not being met. Students with complex needs, quite rightly, require additional support from another adult, but in many schools across Britain committed teaching assistants are the first to be culled when school funding is reduced. This puts much more pressure on the classroom teacher to find solutions to support the child in class alongside their peers and exacerbates workload for those on the frontline two-fold. Some of the SENCOs I have been speaking with also believe they are being squeezed out of their roles because resources and funding have been reduced, with many asked to think ‘creatively’ and design ‘outside-of-the-box’ strategies. SENCOs are struggling to allocate statutory provision in schools, let alone run interventions and provide more generalised support. For as long as I can remember, the role of SENCO has been a challenging job, but with real-term funding cuts I can only imagine what difficult decisions are now having to be made for our vulnerable students. In December 2018, the Department for Education in England announced that they would give councils an extra £350 million in funding to support students with special educational needs and disabilities. The government says: ‘Families will also benefit from more choice for their child’s education through an extra £100 million investment to create more specialist places in mainstream schools, colleges and special schools, giving more children and young people access to a good school or college place that meets their individual needs.’ (Department for Education, 2018i). But is this enough? Both the NAHT and council leaders say no. They believe this injection of cash won’t solve the crisis schools and local councils are currently facing in relation to SEND funding. Drawing on data from the Local Government Association, they argue that there is a £536 million high-needs funding gap this year alone, plus councils are likely to have lost 60 per cent of their funding between 2010 and 2019 (Staufenberg, 2018). So, it doesn’t look like SEND funding is a problem that’s going to go away any time soon.

85 per cent of teachers and school leaders believe that supporting students with SEND is a challenging area of their day-to-day practice.

There are of course some things that are not in our power. We cannot magically generate extra funding, for one. However, there are things we can do, even as stretched teachers in a mainstream school. In the ideas that follow, we will consider some practical approaches and methods for adapting classroom teaching to improve outcomes for children with SEND. The case study in this chapter will then look at what can be done at a whole-school level, focusing on how designing and implementing a broader curriculum can make a difference. I hope the ideas in this chapter will help support you with some of these complex issues. 142

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Supporting students with SEMH difficulties

Regardless of age, students will always require help to be able to deal with the complex nature of learning in any school environment. However, for students with SEMH difficulties, the challenges of being at school can seem insurmountable.

What are SEMH difficulties? Social, emotional and mental health difficulties are a type of special educational need. Children who have SEMH difficulties often find it challenging to manage their emotions and their behaviour due to an underlying mental health issue, such as anxiety or depression, or a condition such as ADHD. They often have difficulties in building relationships with both adults and peers, and may isolate themselves, appearing withdrawn, or present with disruptive, uncooperative or even harmful behaviours.

What can we do to help? There are many things that teachers can do to support students with SEMH difficulties. The following are the strategies that I have found to be most effective.

Offer a tailored timetable A bespoke timetable can help students with SEMH difficulties if it takes into account their specific needs. This may involve withdrawing them from certain activities, such as assemblies or specific non-core lessons. It may also allow them to move between lessons at a different time to avoid the crowded corridors. Unstructured times can also be a pressure point for students with SEMH difficulties, so activities for breaks and lunchtimes can be included in the timetable.

Give advance warning of changes Even a seemingly insignificant difference in a child’s day-to-day routine, such as a new jumper, can cause a dramatic reaction if they have SEMH difficulties. A larger change, such as a new member of staff or a new routine, can be severely upsetting and disruptive to their learning. It’s important to give these children clear advance warning of any changes or anything that’s likely to be out of the norm to help them understand and cope with these potentially tricky situations.

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Train colleagues to be aware of the child’s triggers First, make sure you have a clear understanding of a child’s triggers. If they are acting out of character, try to identify the reason why and take note of any causes that recur. Once you understand the student fully, make sure any colleagues who are also working with the child are aware of anything that’s likely to cause the child to act out of character. ‘We’ve got a policy that we never permanently exclude students – we will find a way to make sure they engage. We have an on-site facility called The LIFE Centre – Learning Is For Everyone, so in other words, we are not going to give up on them but will work with them through one of the programmes we offer through the LIFE Centre. The idea is we reintegrate wherever we possibly can. It’s an environment where their needs can be met. For each individual person there is a route.’ Sally Lees, Headteacher, Homewood School, Tenterden

Draw up a positive plan for when things go wrong Having a simple checklist of coping strategies a child with SEMH difficulties can turn to when things get tough can work wonders. Make sure the child has had the opportunity to discuss with you what has worked in a particular situation, so the checklist has their input too. Remember not to ignore the checklist when things are going well – it doesn’t mean the checklist isn’t needed; it just means it’s working at the moment. It’s also important to have a safe space where a child knows they can go to calm down. This space should be available for the student to reflect quietly and talk to an adult in private.

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Supporting students with dyspraxia

How can we help students with dyspraxia? With up to one in 20 children affected by dyspraxia, it’s highly likely you’ll have at least one child with dyspraxia in your class at some point in your career. Interestingly, boys are four times as likely as girls to be identified as having dyspraxia.

What is dyspraxia? Unknown to some, at its simplest level, dyspraxia is a specific learning difficulty affecting coordination and motor planning and movement. Dyspraxia is not linked to intelligence but it can lead to difficulties with: • speech and language (verbal dyspraxia may be diagnosed by a speech and language therapist) • learning to read and write • following instructions • organisational skills. There is no cure for dyspraxia and it isn’t a condition that children grow out of, so children with dyspraxia become adults with dyspraxia. The Dyspraxia Foundation (2014) provides a valuable definition: ‘Dyspraxia, a form of developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a common disorder affecting fine and/or gross motor coordination in children and adults. […] DCD is distinct from other motor disorders such as cerebral palsy and stroke, and occurs across the range of intellectual abilities.’ Children with dyspraxia frequently find the demands of school life hard to cope with. For example: • They may have problems making and keeping friends. • Awkward movements may be misconstrued as aggression. • Their inability to follow instructions or carry out a task may be misinterpreted as idleness or naughtiness. • Academic failure and embarrassment in physical activities, including in the playground, may lead to low self-esteem. A child with dyspraxia can easily become the victim of bullying, ridicule and social isolation.

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Recognising dyspraxia Although dyspraxia cannot be ‘treated’, teachers can help children cope with the effects. A child with dyspraxia might: • have poor communication and be unable to speak clearly • have trouble finding the right word or words to use • speak in short sentences • have difficulty with grammar • have difficulty reading • read in a monotonous tone • have difficulty following or remembering instructions • have a short attention span • have trouble with maths • hold a pen or pencil awkwardly • write slowly and laboriously • have poor scissor skills and difficulty cutting and sticking • fidget and be unable to sit still • appear uncoordinated outside of classroom situations: for example, they might drop items when eating lunch in the school canteen; they may have difficulty eating; or they may bump into school furniture when walking along corridors or accidentally bump into the wall. A child with dyspraxia will find PE and physical activities very challenging and will avoid them because they may: • lose their belongings • be very slow when getting undressed and dressing • put footwear on the ‘wrong’ feet • be unable to carry out instructions. Dyspraxia is complex and some children only have some of the characteristics and problems listed above whereas others have all of them. Some children may have a few of the features described but not be dyspraxic. Dyspraxia is on a spectrum, so some students will be more severely affected than others and individuals will tend to have a ‘cocktail’ of symptoms rather than a whole gamut of attributes.

What can we do to help? Each student with dyspraxia is unique and effective strategies will vary between individuals, but as teachers we can do a lot to support basic skills and minimise the impact of problems associated with dyspraxia. 146

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One thing at a time Rather than give children a string of instructions, focus on giving just one instruction at a time. Two or more instructions can cause a child with dyspraxia to get in a muddle.

Repeat All children benefit from having instructions and messages repeated – children with dyspraxia in particular. Constantly check that children have understood what has been said and what they need to do.

Tick off Help children with ways to remember information by using lists and diaries so they can tick off things they do as they go. Try ‘backward-chaining’ (or ‘backward reasoning’), an inference method, where you teach the child the last step first and work backwards from the goal.

Avoid comparisons Never allow a child with dyspraxia to be compared to a child without dyspraxia, as this is disastrous. Don’t compare, full stop! Raise awareness of dyspraxia in your school, as it is a condition that is sometimes low on the radar.

Strategic placement Children with dyspraxia shouldn’t be placed in the thick of the action but away from distractions where they can easily focus on their teacher.

Materials A sloping desk or angle board will help as will pencil grips or equipment specifically designed for learners with dyspraxia. Take a look at what’s available at www.fantasticdyspraxic.co.uk/shop.

Praise Applaud every effort and every accomplishment, however small. Children with dyspraxia will be used to repeated doses of failure, so take every opportunity to boost their self-esteem and celebrate all successes.

Chunk Children with dyspraxia will find it hard to absorb and interpret information, so allow them plenty of time, teach in small bursts and chunk up your time.

One to one When possible, try to teach children with dyspraxia on a personal, one-to-one level and never remove them from a class for support as this will only stigmatise them. Remember that they will need extra help and supervision in practical subjects, so encourage teamwork. 147

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Supporting students with dyscalculia

It is estimated that around three to six per cent of the UK population are affected by dyscalculia, but this is likely to be much higher because of the lack of research into this specific learning difficulty. The British Dyslexia Association (2019a) says that mathematical learning difficulties are particularly widespread and could affect as much as one quarter of the population.

What is dyscalculia? The word dyscalculia comes from Greek and Latin, meaning ‘counting badly’, but it goes much deeper than that and includes difficulties stretching from spatial awareness to understanding shapes. Research has shown that dyscalculia is a specific learning disability or condition that affects a person’s ability to acquire arithmetical skills, make sense of maths concepts and perform accurate and fluent calculations. Even when dyscalculic students use a correct method or produce a correct answer, they may do so mechanistically without understanding or confidence. For many students, dyscalculia makes maths a foggy and fuzzy experience riddled with anxieties, and it could lead to a phobia of maths. Dyscalculia has varying levels of severity and often co-occurs alongside other specific learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD/ADD, and with several genetic disorders, including fragile X syndrome, Gerstmann’s syndrome and Turner’s syndrome.

What are the signs? Dyscalculia represents a spectrum of difficulties. These include: • learning to count • poor working memory • counting backwards and reversing a sequence • understanding place value • recognising number symbols • mental arithmetic • connecting a number to a real-life situation, for example knowing that ‘5’ can apply to any group that has five things in it – five sweets, five teddies and so on • remembering numbers and number sequences

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• recognising patterns and sorting items by size, shape or colour • writing numbers clearly or placing them in the correct order or appropriate column • understanding maths vocabulary, such as ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ • learning and recalling number facts • using rules and procedures; for example they may know that 9 + 3 = 12 but not realise that 3 + 9 = 12 • connecting numbers and symbols, for example seeing that the words ten, hundred and thousand equate to 10, 100 and 1,000 • understanding measures such as telling the time, handling money and reading scales, temperature, mass and speed • telling left from right and having a poor sense of direction • identifying symbols such as +, -, x, ÷ and using them correctly • grasping information shown on graphs and charts.

How is it diagnosed? There are many reasons why a child may be finding maths difficult that don’t point to dyscalculia, but the above basic areas may indicate a dyscalculic tendency. There is no prescribed diagnostic test explicitly for dyscalculia but screening tests that focus on arithmetic, number processing, working memory, spatial skills, abstract reasoning and speed of visual processing will provide clues to support a diagnosis. One book you may find useful is Jane Emerson and Patricia Babtie’s (2013) resource, The Dyscalculia Assessment.

What can we do to help? Dyscalculia is not something that can be ‘cured’ and shouldn’t be approached as an illness and treated with medication. Dyscalculia is a need, and without early intervention, it can soon become a special need. As maths is a developmental subject, any anxieties or difficulties can easily hinder progress and act as barriers to learning. Unlike dyslexia, very little research exists about how to help students with dyscalculia, but there are some common strategies that teachers can use to help support children in their day-to-day encounters with maths: • Use concrete examples that connect maths to real life, for example hands-on sorting activities. • Use plenty of visual aids and manipulatives when solving problems. • Use apps that focus on basic skills and adapt to learning needs, for example DoodleMaths (www.doodlemaths.com).

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• Break lessons into chunks and assign manageable amounts of work. • Review a recently learned skill before moving on to a new one. • Talk through the problem-solving process. • Do maths problems on graph paper to keep the numbers in line. • Allow extra time to complete work. • List the steps for multi-step problems. For some very practical, simple and straightforward ideas, take a look at Patricia Babtie’s new books, 100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Numeracy Difficulties and Dyscalculia (2017) and 100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Supporting Students with Numeracy Difficulties (2019).

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Supporting students with dyslexia

According to the British Dyslexia Association (2019b), ten per cent of the population in the UK have dyslexia. It is therefore highly likely that you will come across several students with this learning difficulty during your time as a teacher, but are you aware of how best to meet their needs in your classroom?

What is dyslexia? Among other challenges, people with dyslexia can find reading, spelling and verbal processing difficult. This does not reflect on the person’s cognitive abilities nor their performance in other areas of learning. The NHS (2018c) identifies several symptoms of dyslexia in children aged five to 12, including: • ‘problems learning the names and sounds of letters • spelling that’s unpredictable and inconsistent • putting letters and figures the wrong way round (such as writing “6” instead of “9”, or “b” instead of “d”) • confusing the order of letters in words • reading slowly or making errors when reading aloud • visual disturbances when reading (for example, a child may describe letters and words as seeming to move around or appearing blurred) • answering questions well orally, but having difficulty writing the answer down • difficulty carrying out a sequence of directions • struggling to learn sequences, such as the days of the week or the alphabet

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• slow writing speed • poor handwriting • problems copying written language and taking longer than normal to complete written work • poor phonological awareness and word attack skills.’ Dyslexia will not necessarily have been diagnosed by the time a child reaches secondary school, so it’s important that secondary-level teachers are also aware of the possible additional symptoms of dyslexia in teenagers, which, according to the NHS (2018c), include: • ‘poorly organised written work that lacks expression (for example, even though they may be very knowledgeable about a certain subject, they may have problems expressing that knowledge in writing) • difficulty planning and writing essays […] • difficulties revising for examinations • trying to avoid reading and writing whenever possible • difficulty taking notes or copying • struggling to meet deadlines.’

What can we do to help? There are a large number of well-developed strategies that can be used for supporting students with dyslexia. I’ve included a few below but make sure you find out what works best for your students.

Developing reading skills It’s important to get students interested in reading, even if it’s something they struggle with. As a starting point, try reading to them regularly. If they enjoy listening to stories, it will encourage them to think more positively about reading, rather than seeing it as a laborious task. You might be surprised that this works for secondary students as well as primary-age children. Try getting your tutor group hooked on books by reading to them regularly. Be sure to leave the story on a cliffhanger – they might even pick up a library copy because they can’t wait to find out what happens next. And if you’re feeling brave enough, dress up and act out the story, and encourage students to take part! At primary level, it’s helpful to try reading texts with the child, tackling difficult words together, before asking them to attempt it independently. It’s a good idea to provide a guided reading text in advance for the children to look at with their families at home. At secondary level, provide any class reading materials to the student with dyslexia in advance of the lesson, so they can take a look at it beforehand in their own time.

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If teachers can teach phonics rigorously when children arrive at school, we can support children to develop deeper understanding and comprehension by exposing them to a wide variety of texts, thus creating a love for writing, reading and storytelling, including workshops. Actively encouraging handwriting and a deeper understanding of grammar comes all in good time, but little by little, developing cognitive approaches for building a wide range of vocabulary is vital for cultivating a love of words and reading in every child. This is even more critical for students with dyslexia.

Preparing reading materials Using a dark font on a light (not white) background is advised, as this is visually preferable to people with dyslexia. Wherever possible, make sure your handouts, worksheets and presentations follow this rule. It is also worth considering where students sit in your classroom. Research conducted by Epson (2019) with over 300 teachers across different settings has shown that 40 per cent perceive a correlation between children being unable to clearly see a screen and lower test scores. I can only imagine these results may be worse for students with dyslexia who are allocated ‘cheap seats’ in the classroom.

Developing independence Giving any student the autonomy to help themselves when they need it most is a great way to empower them. Feeling understood and supported matters for all children, but even more so for children with additional needs. Here are four steps to help a student with dyslexia towards independence: 1. Have a one-on-one conversation with the student, explaining that you understand how dyslexia can make it trickier for them to access some of the teaching and learning and you want to help them overcome some of the difficulties. 2. Make notes with the child and list the type of challenges they face during lessons, for example not knowing the spellings or meanings of words or what information they find hard to understand or retain. 3. Set up a school device for the child. Meet again with them, showing them how to use the apps to support their learning. For example: a. ‘If you don’t know the meaning of a word, you can type it into the dictionary app.’ b. ‘Take photos of the slides I show, so you can refer back to them.’ c. ‘To check a spelling, use the spell checker app to help you.’ d. ‘You can check a calculation using the calculator app.’ e. ‘Use this app to signal for help.’ (This is a great strategy for non-verbal communication if the student believes they will be made to feel embarrassed by their peers.) 4. During lessons, remind the student to utilise the device for independence. Follow the research: use technology as and when required, not all of the time (Coe et al., 2014). 152

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Playing to their strengths Students with dyslexia can be highly creative. They may be able to come up with innovative ideas and solutions, as they can focus on the ‘big picture’, rather than getting bogged down in the details. Find a way to play to your students’ strengths and their confidence and motivation will soar! ‘Some students might find English, maths and science quite challenging, and they have to do it, as that is part of their core curriculum, but if we can offer them the opportunity to do catering, construction, beauty and therapy, or health and social care, then we can give them a curriculum they can find real success in. It’s about finding something they can do brilliantly.’ Sally Lees, Headteacher, Homewood School, Tenterden

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Supporting students with autism

According to the National Autistic Society (2018a), 63 per cent of children on the autistic spectrum are not in the kind of school their parents believe would best support them. There is so much more that teachers can be doing to make sure children with this hidden disability are supported and included in both primary and secondary schools.

What is autism? The National Autistic Society (2018b) defines autism as ‘a lifelong, developmental disability that affects how a person communicates with and relates to other people, and how they experience the world around them’. Autism is a spectrum condition and will affect people in different ways. Students with autism may have severe learning difficulties or they may be very intelligent. They may be non-verbal or they may talk a lot. They may be very sociable or may prefer to avoid social interaction. There are also differences in the ways in which girls and boys with autism present. It’s therefore essential to understand the individual and how they can best be supported. Many students with autism will have individual EHCPs in place but some, especially girls, won’t have had autism diagnosed. In fact, 31.1 per cent of boys with a statement or EHCP had this type of need in 2017, compared with only 15.7 per cent of girls (Department for Education, 2017a). Girls can be overlooked or diagnosed late because ‘they don’t fit the stereotypes or their symptoms are misinterpreted 153

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as something else’ (Arky, 2017). ‘Due to early assumptions about autism mostly affecting men, studies have often recruited male-only cohort’, meaning, as Professor Francesca Happé puts it, ‘what we think we know about autism from research is actually just what we know about male autism’ (Devlin, 2018).

What can we do to help? One of the most important things teachers can do to support students with autism is to make sure the classroom offers them an environment that meets their needs. It must account for the fact that those on the autistic spectrum are often hypersensitive to their surroundings and can struggle to communicate how they are feeling. Here are some tips to ensure that students with autism feel comfortable and welcome in your learning environment.

Keep it calm Students with autism may struggle in surroundings that are too noisy or too cluttered. Try to make your classroom as simple and as free of distractions as possible. You should also make sure there’s a quiet space available for your students with autism, so they can retreat for a moment of calm if the hustle and bustle of the other students gets too much. More than anything else, establish a clear routine and framework for that student, particularly in a secondary school where you may only be with them for one hour a week.

Be clear and literal People with autism can struggle to understand sarcasm, metaphors and idioms. Be crystal clear in your instructions and avoid any non-literal language, even when your meaning will be obvious to most students in your class. You can also try using visual aids, such as visual cues, symbols or realistic pictures, for any instructions that will be repeated over the course of the year. (See dual coding, page 56.) Make sure you have the student’s attention before you begin issuing your instructions and give them enough time to process the information. When I studied semiotics for my master’s degree over 15 years ago, researching work by Roland Barthes, Ferdinand de Saussure, John Locke and Umberto Eco to name a few leading thinkers in the field of social science, I discovered a fascinating world about symbols and implied signs before developing a classroom resource to support all students through the use of verbal and non-verbal communication. Find out more at: bit.ly/SemioticsByTeacherToolkit.

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Be consistent Make sure your students with autism are clear about what behaviour you consider acceptable. Your classroom rules should be communicated explicitly. Any consequences for breaking them must be consistent – and must apply equally to both students and staff. That said, remember that every student should be treated equally but also as an individual. Whatever your school policy and behaviour rules stipulate, you must adapt policy and apply it individually to each student as and when required, particularly with those who have additional needs or are vulnerable. For example, ‘time-outs’ are not an effective behavioural strategy for students with autism. The ability to remove themselves from a situation is an important coping mechanism for people with autism, as it enables them to recover from a stressful experience, so it’s important that ‘time-out’ is used in this way, rather than as a punishment or a reward. On return to class, have a conversation with the student, reminding them of their choices and what the consequences are in line with school policy as well as your own expectations and hopes. This will ensure that you are not only managing their learning needs, but also continually reinforcing the boundaries when difficulties arise and communicating how you would best like to support them.

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School case study and Sixth Form Centre

School name: Homewood School Location: Tenterden, Kent e academy school for 11- to Context: Homewood School is a stat r 2,000 students and over 250

has ove 18-year-olds in Tenterden, Kent. It Kent. ool within the selective county of sch ility staff members. It is a wide-ab wing gro the s rate hment area that incorpo It takes students from a wide catc ges villa l rura y Tenterden and the man town of Ashford, the local town of ents of all abilities and has a strong stud es in the area. The school welcom ports roach to teaching and learning sup commitment to inclusion. Its app s. d to benefit all student this inclusive ethos but is designe ced, Plus stream, which offers a fast-pa The school has its own Grammar nce erie exp ht mig s ent to what stud challenging curriculum equivalent . This highly academic provision is ools sch ar mm at one of the Kent gra ents s full and broad curriculum, so stud combined with access to the school’ ool. re breadth than at a grammar sch have an experience that offers mo in dar Man y stud to the opportunity Students in this stream also have cation’s e linked with the Institute of Edu mm gra pro through an accelerated ve vati inno the to e hom school is also Mandarin Excellence Project. The nt nde epe ind with s hod al teaching met I-College, which blends tradition take who s ner lear ted tiva ome self-mo learning, enabling students to bec have success. Students in the I-College and ss gre pro ir responsibility for the ir time Year 11 are managing much of the a more flexible timetable and by . ded nee n expertise whe independently, accessing teacher ipped within the arts and has a fully equ Homewood has a strong tradition the ects is also a working farm, which refl professional theatre on site. There ef-th new 3G pitch, which offers state-o rural location of the school, and a t par is od wider community. Homewo art sports facilities to the school and l loca g lvin small multi-academy trust invo of the Tenterden Schools Trust – a ool. primary schools and a nursery sch

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? The strength of our teaching and learning is underpinned by a very strong curriculum, offering a wide range of courses and pathways tailored to individual student interests and aptitudes. We ensure that, as far as possible, students are active partners with their teachers in their learning. We encourage a variety of approaches to learning and we are not afraid to be innovative. Teachers are given the freedom to take risks and try out their ideas, while still working within the agreed departmental curriculum plan and school policies on assessment, feedback and behaviour management. 156

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Feedback from a range of external visitors has made us acutely aware that our curriculum has greater breadth and is more innovative than in many schools, but we are not complacent. Our approaches to teaching and learning across the school engage students particularly well and our I-College is a striking example of the way we personalise pathways for our students. By providing an environment in which students can learn independently and manage their own timetable and workload, the I-College has gained national recognition from the Pearson Teaching Awards, who presented a Silver Award in ‘Outstanding Use of Technology’ to the Head of I-College, Mrs Kate Farrell.

How have you achieved this? In 2014, we restructured the way the school was organised to ensure that learning was at the heart of our organisation. Students now each belong to a college, which is led by a senior member of the teaching staff who is focused on developing high-quality and effective teaching and learning within the college and maximising outcomes for their students. They are supported by a team of non-teaching staff who can attend to the welfare needs of the students. The head of college also acts as faculty lead for the subjects within the college. When students choose their options in Year 9, they are usually allocated to the college that most closely matches the interests they have expressed in their subject choices. If they have included more than one arts subject, they join the Arts College. If students want to study more than one business-related course, they join the Enterprise College. Those students who select more than one English Baccalaureate subject? They will join the World College. This means that the students’ tutors within each college share their subject interests and can engage in learning-focused conversations with their students. Students also have the option of joining I-College in Year 9, which they will do if they want greater autonomy and agency over their own learning. Most students in Years 7 and 8 are in the Discovery College, where the curriculum is designed to allow them to develop all the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in their learning throughout the school and beyond. Our Discovery College students with SEND are catered for within our key skills groups, which are focused on the development of core skills through a nurture-group approach. The college structure is a very significant element in our success in building a positive learning culture throughout the school. Establishing a strong, broad and personalised curriculum has been another vital ingredient. Alongside the full range of core and EBacc subjects, we give opportunities for students to follow their interests, while maintaining a broad and balanced curriculum overall. Arts, Applied Learning and the Rural Dimension are our three particular specialisms, and the courses we offer reflect these areas: a wide range of different arts subjects, both performing arts (dance, drama, media and music) and visual arts (ceramics, textiles, graphic design, fine art and photography): vocational courses including beauty, construction and catering; and courses such as animal care, which reflect the rural nature of our school and are supported by our on-site farm. This personalised approach is particularly important in meeting the needs of our SEND students. It also underpins our approach to inclusion, which is reflected in our low fixed-term exclusion rate with zero permanent exclusions. 157

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Staff development is a key ingredient in ensuring our teaching and learning is informed by evidence and focuses on what makes a difference in the classroom. We take a quality-first approach aimed at understanding the needs of all learners, including our SEND students. Leadership and management development is also built into the training we offer to our staff, once again with a focus on how to engender the best learning experiences in the context of the teams they lead. We provide dedicated time every week (up to two hours) for departments and college teams to work together on planning for learning and developing their practice.

How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? We would recommend that schools allow leaders and teachers the freedom to innovate and take risks within a clear structure and agreed expectations. This means establishing a very clear vision and ethos that everyone understands, contributes to and is committed to working towards. This also means ensuring a no-blame culture, where mistakes are okay and where teachers can access opportunities to develop inside and beyond the school gates. Ensuring teachers have access to the latest research is also vital. At Homewood, we employ a teacher-researcher for two days a week who brings to our attention current research and supports research projects within and beyond Homewood. Providing supportive and coherent systems that are efficient and mindful of teacher workload (including those for managing student behaviour and parental communications) enables teachers to focus on the planning and delivery of lessons, as well as providing feedback to students without unnecessary distractions. Giving staff the time to plan and discuss teaching and learning together is not easy to achieve, but it needs to be built into all systems within the school if an ethos where learning is at the centre of everything is to be nurtured. In our case, we changed the timings of the school day to allow an early finish one day a week, so that we could dedicate quality time to this work, and to date this has been very successful. We also ensure that other training times during the year – one hour a week after school and the five INSET days – are largely made available to departments and colleges to use flexibly to address their training and development priorities. Whole-school issues are also addressed during this time, but we try to keep this to an absolute minimum. Curriculum diversity is easier for us to achieve as a very large secondary school, but providing sufficient breadth to ensure that students feel they have some ownership of their learning pathway is really important, including for students with SEND. Schools need to be extremely creative in the current financial climate to make this possible, but flexible timetabling and student grouping can open up possibilities here. At Homewood, the use of large learning spaces, for example in our business studies area, has enabled us to offer a range of subjects within the same space at the same time, efficiently staffed by our colleagues. The introduction of innovative approaches such as the I-College also allows flexible timetabling and staffing, which can be managed very efficiently. Practice and provision evolve on a daily basis. 158

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Chapter 7: SEND

Why does this work? by Angela Browne In many ways, the challenges that we have with regard to special educational needs funding force us to be much more creative, sensitive and industrious about how we work with children with SEND in schools. Leaders need to grapple with ensuring that the expertise of teaching assistants, for example, adequately reaches the numbers of children needing support and this can make for new approaches to timetabling and groupings. Likewise, teachers find themselves needing to approach differentiation with agility, sensitivity and creativity. I’ve been lucky to work in specialist settings where we had access to resourcing and staffing levels that made it much easier to do everything possible to ensure fantastic education for our children. However, I’ve also worked in secondary school settings in which this hasn’t been the case and in which lower funding levels have made the job of managing provision for children with SEND a very difficult task indeed. Regardless, as this chapter has highlighted, there is much that we can do in our classrooms and in our schools to enhance the experience for learners with SEND. One of the critical issues raised is the need for structure and routine for all children. The absence of structure and routine can lead to heightened anxiety and consequently to a range of behavioural issues. These can be particularly significant for children who have SEND. In my experience of working specifically with children who had SEMH difficulties, within the context of special schools, PRUs and mainstream settings, routine and structure have been the all-important foundation of everything that we did. For schools to get good at ensuring structure and routine for children, they need to be populated by staff who are able to structure and routine their own work. This means adequate preparation of learning materials and sequencing of learning materials for children as well as clear and reliable classroom routines. It also means that leaders must be mindful of the disruptive factors that can undermine effective learning and wellbeing for children with SEND. Forethought about temporary teachers or changes to permanent teaching staff needs to be borne in mind. Unnecessary room changes and movement about the school need to be carefully planned and arrangements for unusual curriculum days – sports days, drop-down days and so forth – need looking at through the lens of the child with SEND. If what can be done within the confines of the funding available is done, we can at least ensure a culture and ambition for inclusivity. Angela Browne has been working in education for the last 17 years, most recently as the deputy CEO of a multi-academy trust in Bristol. She has been the headteacher of a mainstream secondary school, a pupil referral service and a Steiner Academy. Angela is the founder of the NourishEd Collective and tweets @nourishedschool. 159

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f we want a simple definition of what schools must do, it starts with curriculum. This underpins everything else that we do as teachers and school leaders. After all, get the curriculum wrong and your students are likely to be disengaged, misbehave and possibly achieve weaker outcomes, and I mean this in the broadest sense: attendance, participation in class and examination performance. There is evidence that there was some sort of school ‘curriculum’ in England as early as the Roman occupation, from 43 to 410 AD. Roman Britain had a literate culture and it is thought that the ‘curriculum’ as such might have included ‘elementary learning (reading, writing, and arithmetic), grammar (correct composition and the study of literary texts), and rhetoric (the theory and practice of oratory)’ (Nicholas Orme in Gillard, 2018).

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Fast-forward nearly 2,000 years to the 1980s and we have the introduction of the first prescribed curriculum as a result of the 1988 Education Reform Act. This National Curriculum (for England and initially Wales) was introduced to make sure all students had access to the essential knowledge they needed to become educated citizens. A slimmer version was proposed by Gillian Shephard in 1994 and there was another overhaul by David Blunkett in 1999. Further changes were introduced by Ed Balls in 2008 and then again by Michael Gove in 2014. As I write in 2019, it is now the focus of England’s current pedagogical debate.

Why is this an issue? Arguably, the purpose of a National Curriculum is to make sure that there is consistency in the knowledge and skills being taught in schools, so that every student is given the education they need regardless of which school they attend. But what should this education look like? Should it help students to get a job? To become active and useful members of society? To acquire the skills needed to successfully navigate the world? Or to learn the knowledge that acts as a precursor to further study in a particular subject? And how ‘academic’ should it be? How important is it that a curriculum allows for easy assessment?

92 per cent of teachers and school leaders feel confident or very confident with their day-to-day work around curriculum. However, 61 per cent still consider it a challenging area of practice and 24 per cent believe it is a weakness in their school.

Everyone will have different opinions about these questions (and every education minister will want to make sure we know theirs). There are obviously plenty of challenges in working out what a curriculum should be and should do; perhaps the lesson from the state of play in Scotland, Wales and England today, which I explore on the next page, is that it’s very difficult to get it right. I have always believed that any curriculum intentions are impossible without supporting teachers to be the best that they can be – to bring the curriculum to life and to make it coherent and tangible for children. Without good teaching, curriculum is merely paperwork. ‘We talk a lot about “MCS for Life”. Of course, there is the important question of how well our students will cope with failure during their exam years – but what happens when our students run out of qualifications to take? I am as interested in what success means for former students at 25, 45 or beyond as I am in whether or not they go on to university.’ Helen Pike, Master, Magdalen College School, Oxford

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The ‘curriculum’ in Great Britain today In Scotland, the ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ was introduced in 2010 and promised to provide young people with the knowledge, skills and attributes they need for learning, life and work in the 21st century. It is not as prescriptive as England’s National Curriculum and emphasises overarching aims and skills that go beyond individual subjects, such as developing citizenship or understanding environmental issues. It is not without its critics. Lindsay Paterson (2018), Professor of Education Policy at the University of Edinburgh, for example, says, ‘there is no recognition in the curriculum of a canon of necessary ideas or practices – no acknowledgement of any kind of theoretical framework that might give coherence to each curricular subject.’ The new curriculum has potentially even contributed to Scotland dropping from ‘well ahead of average’ to merely ‘average’ in the international PISA rankings, which measure ability in maths, English and science (Scottish Government, 2016). At the time of writing, Wales is reforming its curriculum in what has been described as ‘one of the biggest shake-ups of the school curriculum in decades’ (BBC News, 2019). The aim is to introduce the new curriculum between 2022 and 2026. It promises to be less prescriptive and narrow than the current curriculum, focusing on six broad areas, including science and technology, health and wellbeing, and the expressive arts. The new curriculum plans to be rich and experimental based. The depth of tasks children are asked to do is encouraging and the wide range of skills may offer a host of opportunities for schools. As with each jurisdiction across the UK, the proof will be in the pudding when we analyse outcomes, exclusions and teacher retention five years from now. In England, the latest version of the curriculum came into play between 2014 and 2017. It is obligatory for all schools maintained by a local authority and the Grim Reaper has made it a key focus for school inspection. Academies and free schools are exempt in theory, although in practice veering too far from the National Curriculum can penalise schools when it comes to league tables and Grim Reaper inspections. This curriculum was driven by the government wanting to create a more academic, knowledge-focused curriculum that would ‘raise standards’; a lot of content was crammed in with the result that teachers are struggling to find the time to both teach it and make it interesting. Who knows how long it will be before the next education minister comes along and overhauls everything again? With ‘intent, impact and implementation’ as current buzzwords, any schools playing league table games will struggle to demonstrate ‘intent’ if a high proportion of students do not complete their studies. Quite rightly, we are slowly shifting our focus back to the interests of students and away from politicians who drive policy, but is it achievable in such a high-stakes state school system?

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Accountability and assessment Helen Pike, who is Master of Magdalen College School, which features in our case study for this chapter (see page 176), warns against confusing ‘curriculum’ with ‘assessment’; the curriculum should not just be a vehicle for assessing students, although of course we know it is often viewed in this way. Helen talks about the challenge of thinking about the curriculum as a means to get good qualifications rather than as a way to develop well-rounded individuals: ‘If we do what everybody in Britain does and confuse “curriculum” with “assessment” for a moment: in terms of how we are assessed, i.e. how we do in public exams, Magdalen College School achieves highly. The kind of fine-tuning and honing it takes to remain at the top of your game every year like that is quite phenomenal. It’s also vital that we maintain morale and manage expectations, and ensure that the school remains the opposite of an exam factory. That’s one major challenge. The other challenge is knowing that “just” getting those qualifications isn’t enough. It’s great that students do well academically, but the kind of skills that are going to enable students to really flourish and be joyful and happy and well-adjusted in their lives are partly examined but often they are not.’ Helen Pike, Master, Magdalen College School, Oxford Unfortunately, we now seem to be in a situation where data collection, marking and testing drives most of what a teacher does in a school classroom. The curriculum should drive assessment, but a lot of the time it seems to be the other way round. Data collection, tests and assessments can make it feel like the purpose of the curriculum is to assess. You will often hear a teacher say that they feel as though they are ‘teaching to the test’ or are teaching something because it’s ‘on the curriculum’, rather than understanding why it’s important to know. This particularly seems to be the case with the latest iteration of the National Curriculum in England, which was heavily influenced by the desire for knowledge-heavy, ‘academic’ content that can be tested in a ‘rigorous’ way through exams. Although there is nothing wrong with students ‘knowing’ things, the current challenge is for teachers to teach all of the material and make it stick! And when the curriculum is straight-jacketed by assessment, it can make it very difficult to break away and do something different. We need to rethink what a curriculum should do beyond providing a child with good exam results, but the focus on accountability and assessment makes this much harder than it should be.

The English Baccalaureate Nicky Morgan – remember her? In November 2015, she announced the government’s plans to ‘tackle failure, raise standards and improve the quality of teaching’ (Policy Exchange, 2015). Apparently the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) was the magic silver bullet that secondary schools in England needed. It not only intended to stipulate what subjects students should study, but became another school performance indicator linked to GCSE data. 163

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The EBacc has become another type of accountability that makes it difficult to design a flexible curriculum that truly suits the needs of students. Its introduction meant that school leaders had to re-engineer student subject options to include English, maths, science, either history or geography, an ancient or modern foreign language and one additional GCSE. This has had a profound effect on subjects that are not one of the core EBacc subjects. Other subjects, such as art, music, psychology or business studies, are usually squeezed and limited in school timetables, and perhaps taught instead after school hours. These departments have been made smaller, as schools have found they can no longer afford to recruit teachers in these areas. The perceived value of these subjects continues to be a challenge too, so even if timetabling allows a student to study a creative subject, they might not want to anyway, because it’s no longer viewed as an ’academic’ subject. Fewer students are studying the arts, and there is less variety and individuality in the curriculum. According to ASCL (2015), 87 per cent of school leaders oppose the EBacc, but it has a stranglehold on schools because it is used by the government to measure school performance. At the time of writing, the Department for Education has started to rank schools by EBacc compliance in league tables. According to data published in January 2019, only 221 out of 3,084 secondary schools currently meet the Department’s EBacc requirements, even though there is a target in place for 90 per cent of students to be studying this combination of core subjects by 2025 (Department for Education, 2019b). What gets measured often gets done by schools, but this is clearly like flogging a dead horse!

Curriculum change fatigue I witnessed how the 2014 curriculum change in England created significant extra workload for colleagues and school leaders. I recall having to engineer many professional development days to give staff the valuable time they needed to plan resources. For the classroom teacher, curriculum reform required updated materials in many forms, from curriculum plans and overviews by key stage to schemes of work and individual resources to support students in lessons. In some cases, particularly in core subjects where teachers worked with students more regularly, teachers were often only one half term ahead of their students, and this made it almost impossible to embed key skills or concepts from the beginning. It’s easy for curriculum change fatigue to set in when it feels like we have to go through this rigmarole every five or so years. When teachers are overworked enough as it is, it’s understandable if there is reluctance to take on the huge and time-consuming task of redesigning the curriculum. You might even feel a sense of futility about it when league tables, exam pressures and the EBacc all limit flexibility and creativity. However, whether we agree with current government policies or not, curriculum change is a necessity and will continue to happen throughout a teacher’s career, so it’s important that we think creatively about what is possible within the limits set by statutory requirements. The aim of this chapter is to present a few starting points to help teachers change their delivery of the current school curriculum and to help middle and senior leaders tweak or change their curriculum to update and broaden it. In the following pages, I will whet your appetite with a range of ideas explaining how you can put this into practice. 164

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Broadening the curriculum

The benefits of a broad and balanced curriculum are irrefutable, and there are ways in which all teachers and school leaders can contribute to broadening their curriculum without completely overhauling their current offering.

Research published by GL Assessment (2019) found that ‘both teachers and parents think that exam pressures are leading schools to narrow the curriculum as more time is taken up for exam preparation’, and that this narrow exam focus is having ‘serious consequences on student wellbeing and behaviour and, ironically, on eventual academic outcomes’. The research also found that: • 76 per cent of teachers and 60 per cent of parents agree that schools are offering a more restricted curriculum from an earlier age than they have been previously. There is little doubt about what is to blame for this: 92 per cent of teachers and 76 per cent of parents cite the pressure placed on schools to deliver good exam results. • Teachers believe the problem is widespread and not specific to any one type of school. 90 per cent think too many schools are pressuring teachers to concentrate on an exam-driven syllabus to the exclusion of the wider curriculum. This narrowing of the curriculum is obvious at GCSE with the emphasis on the ‘academic’ subjects and the gradual decline of ‘vocational’ subjects; however, the effect can also be seen at Key Stage 3 and in primary school too, as a child’s entire school life is now geared towards getting good exam results in the core subjects. The GL Assessment research also suggests that most teachers and parents do not believe this narrowing of the curriculum helps children. They say it prepares children less well for later academic success and life after school, it has a negative impact on classroom behaviour, it disadvantages students with SEND, and it reduces children’s wellbeing and their enjoyment of school. It also means that more children are having to study a curriculum that does not allow their individual strengths and interests to be nurtured. Let me support this with an anecdote that Todd Rose (2017) mentions in his book, The End of Average. Rose explains that in the 1940s, after multiple flying accidents, the US Air Force had a problem. After ruling out pilot error and faulty mechanics, the main hypothesis was that the ‘average’ American pilot had outgrown the cockpit, which was designed during the First World War. In 1950, officials commissioned a study to measure 4,000 young pilots to determine the new ‘average’ pilot. The research calculated the mathematical average of ten physical dimensions believed to be most relevant for cockpit design to determine how many pilots measured near the average for all dimensions. How many pilots were average? Zero. Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single one fell within the average 30 per cent on all ten 165

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dimensions. As Rose says, ‘If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.’ Do we want an education system that compels each student to be like everyone else, or do we want a system where every student can make their own choices and play to their own strengths?

What can we do about it? There are ways to broaden the curriculum that do not require schools to redesign their curriculum completely or to toss the EBacc in the bin. Here are a few ideas for how you might be able to contribute to the development of a broader curriculum in your school, whether you’re a teacher or school leader.

1. Be aware of the government’s desire to see a ‘broad’, ‘rich’ curriculum In England, new inspection arrangements were published in May 2019 and the inspection handbook now states that a school’s curriculum for Key Stages 1 to 3 should be ‘broad and balanced’, and that ‘inspectors will be particularly alert to signs of narrowing in the key stage 2 and 3 curriculums.’ Admittedly, the handbook does then go on to say that the EBacc is still a priority for Key Stage 4, but this warning against the narrowing of the curriculum from the Grim Reaper itself should help to give schools the courage to embrace a broader curriculum. Make sure your colleagues are aware of this and work together to ensure your offering follows these guidelines.

2. Champion the arts subjects The value of the arts subjects needs to be made clear to school leaders, students and parents alike. We know the benefits are numerous: they help to improve critical thinking, creativity, focus and concentration, motor skills, confidence, team-working abilities and more, and there is growing evidence to support this (Salkind, 2008). A systematic review carried out by Durham University, for example, suggests that learning a musical instrument does make a difference to learning outcomes and cognitive skills in all age groups (Huat See, 2015). But it shouldn’t just be about exam results; arts subjects are valuable in themselves, not just as a booster for more ‘serious’ subjects. The arts enrich society, and creative industries are a fast-growing sector in the UK with low risk of automation in the future. One way to boost the profile of the arts is to try to show there is an appetite for them in your school by getting more students and parents interested. Here are a few ideas: • Make the benefits of the arts clear at parents’ evenings; students are less likely to show enthusiasm for the arts if parents are ambivalent about them too. • If you can, build up the creative extracurricular activities in your school. Start a choir, a space, coding or photography club or a drama group. Getting your older students involved with the running of these activities might help to reduce the workload. Building up a strong extracurricular scene takes time and effort, but it can definitely help to boost interest in a subject. 166

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• Make your students’ work public. Get students to perform in assemblies, display their art in the hall or work towards a public concert. It increases motivation and the positive feedback can be a real boost; it’s also a good way to help raise the profile of the arts in your school. Almost every school is doing all of the above, but to have a thriving arts community in a school and also achieve a strong percentage of outcomes in arts subjects and traditional academic areas, where both types of subject are given curriculum priority, is a little rarer to find.

3. Remember other areas of focus Let’s not forget the hidden aspects of the curriculum that we sometimes do not see, such as healthy lifestyles, the use of social media, safeguarding, enterprise and bullying or ‘kindness days’ to name a few. If, as a school, you’re unable to timetable specific lessons in these areas, individual teachers can still teach them within their respective subjects to help broaden curriculum opportunities.

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Question your intent, implementation and impact

It’s not just your intentions to provide a broad, balanced and coherent curriculum that are important but also how you implement your curriculum and its impact on the students. When assessing your school’s curriculum offering, it’s helpful to break it down into these three key areas: • Intent: Your intentions to provide the students in your school with a broad, balanced and coherent curriculum. • Implementation: How well your curriculum is implemented, for example how well subject matter is being taught, the resources and materials being used, and how engaged students are in their learning. • Impact: Whether students are developing knowledge and skills across the curriculum and how well this prepares them for their next steps, whether this is the next phase of their education, future employment or training such as apprenticeships. The following questionnaire is designed to help you reflect on the intent, implementation and impact of your curriculum. I hope it will help support teachers and school leaders to think more deeply about their curriculum and how it aligns across their school.

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Curriculum questionnaire Intent

? m is flexible, broad and balanced How do you know that your curriculu iculum change? How does your school manage curr on the agenda? , does the EBacc feature high or low If you are reading this in England have? What oversight do your governors at all? What ‘say’ have parents had, if any r subject, is the request honoured? If students want to study a particula t stifling teacher sistent curriculum coverage (withou How does your school ensure con autonomy)? (without driving dards throughout the curriculum How does your school monitor stan up teacher workload)? r curriculum? and advantages of delivering you What are the greatest challenges plans on paper to ciently skilled to bring curriculum Are the teachers around you suffi life?

Implementation Does the curriculum reflect statutory requirements?

How does your school develop wider skills and capab ilities across the curriculum? How often do all teaching staff review the curriculum? And not just over the last 12 months… How does the whole-school curriculum plan transl ate into schemes of work and day-to-day lesson planning? Are intentions outlined in your school’s developmen t plan or in the department or year team development plan? Are your teachers involved with their subject associ ations? Does your school actively promote teachers to becom e subject examiners? What curriculum monitoring activities do you use? If somebody visited your school tomorrow, how would you demonstrate curriculum intent? What professional development opportunities are

provided for teachers? Where would you or your school leaders start when introducing any curriculum initiative? When implemented, how are curriculum innovations

evaluated?

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Impact

s this inform re evaluations are robust? How doe What methods do you use to ensu future planning and research? s? the impact of your curriculum plan How would you reliably measure – and in three in terms of success criteria in a year How would you evaluate impact years? d? m, has it added to teacher workloa If you are rethinking your curriculu do you demonstrate impact? Beyond examination results, how and not just uate? Is eSafety on the agenda – What other ‘values’ could you eval during eSafety week? their PSHE curriculum? What do your students say about then inform inations and careers and does this Does your school track student dest forward? your curriculum intentions going ds of all m that does not fully meet the nee How would you address a curriculu students? know? and where is it not? How do you Where is the curriculum working s)? lity curriculum (beyond outcome How do you know you have a qua

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A future-proof curriculum

On the whole, do you believe that schools are preparing all children for the realities of life and the workplace? What might a curriculum that is ‘future-proof’ involve? Here are a few ideas.

There is so much we could discuss about the purpose of a curriculum. How do we develop our students to leave school and become successful contributors to society? How do we get to a place where exclusions decrease and student mental health improves? How can we begin to fix some of the issues in our society, such as crime, poverty and pollution? How can we teach and celebrate diversity and equality? And how can we do all this without ostracising young people in our communities and widening the gap between rich and poor? As educators, these are just some of the questions we should be asking ourselves. We need curriculum pathways suitable for all students. We should also be discussing what information should be taught on the curriculum and evaluating the impact of what has been taught before and how this connects with examination outcomes, teacher attrition, mental health, behaviour and our performance in PISA league tables. For example, what’s the point of teaching children about Shakespeare if evidence later suggests that it promotes social exclusion, poor performance in exams, or whatever the case may be? 169

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But what can we do in the here and now to ensure our curriculum is fit for purpose for our current generation of students? I believe we must enable teachers to teach content that is applicable to their school community without being penalised by external accountability. Teachers must be able to empower students and set them off into the big, wide world with the knowledge and skills they need to be successful. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposed that a large part of our knowledge is based on interactions in our daily lives. Much of a child’s education therefore remains largely outside of the school gates, as they spend the vast majority of their time outside of school, but I believe schools still play a critical role in levelling the playing field. Which of the following ideas for a more future-proof curriculum do you think are relevant to your students and how could you integrate some of them into your everyday subject teaching?

Cultural literacy E. D. Hirsch Jr. argues that many education systems fail to give sufficient attention to developing what he calls ‘students’ cultural literacy’, which he believes helps ‘students traditionally condemned to economic marginalization […] gain entry to a marketplace that promises financial stability and greater access to material resources’ (Buras, 1999). If we hope for our students to develop any kind of cultural literacy, it needs to be taught deliberately. There is, however, a good discussion to be had about ‘whose culture has capital’, questioning core assumptions about what should be taught. At the time of writing, for example, there has been an outcry from a group of parents in Birmingham who are demanding that their children are not taught about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identities in the primary school curriculum. There has been much debate in the national press from politicians, parents and school teachers about what should and shouldn’t be taught and whose decision it is. There is always room for teachers to input new ideas into the curriculum, and they have the freedom to choose textbooks and particular aspects of history or culture that students need to know about, as well as challenging institutional and cultural bias within our society that may still be prevalent in some curriculum content. Many have questioned whether schools should look beyond ‘dead white men’ (Turner, 2018) to make the curriculum more diverse and it’s an important question we all must ask. Fundamentally, we must ensure that our curriculum meets the needs of all students. Despite what any government wants, when the classroom door is shut the decision is largely left to the teacher.

Critical thinking With the increase of vast swathes of knowledge that the internet has made readily available, does this mean that memorising knowledge has arguably become less important than interpreting knowledge? I hope not, but students should be taught how to critique and question everything they read, and this should remain a core skill to be taught in every subject, whether we use a pen, keyboard or dictaphone, so we can strive to create a society that is resilient to the rise of ‘fake news’. 170

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Many argue that the principles of the International Baccalaureate take on some broad principles worth pursuing. At the time of writing, the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) qualification is a particular favourite of mine. This is a thoughtful and purposeful inquiry into different ways of knowing and into different kinds of knowledge. Through discussions and questions, ‘students gain greater awareness of the personal and ideological assumptions, as well as developing an appreciation of the diversity and richness of cultural perspectives.’ (International Baccalaureate Organization, 2014) This is something we would all like every student to achieve, no matter what subject we teach and no matter what our local government is hoping to achieve with statutory requirements. In fact, I would argue that each jurisdiction within the UK is trying to achieve what the IB hopes – to make students aware of knowledge and to help them become thinkers and recognise the need to act responsibly in an increasingly connected world.

Social, emotional and mental health In Chapter 5, page 98, we saw how depression and anxiety are on the rise among young people. Where possible, we should continue to design a curriculum that helps to combat this, perhaps by giving students more choice in what they study and how they study it; perhaps by teaching students more about the issues that can affect SEMH (such as misuse of social media); and perhaps by teaching students coping strategies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). We will see how our case study school achieves this on page 176.

Real-world skills Decades ago, ‘home economics’ used to be a bigger part of the curriculum in schools than it is today. Why is this now restricted to Key Stage 3 or further education? Learning skills that are applicable to the real world, such as managing money, preparing for job interviews, cooking a meal and DIY, are an essential part of becoming a productive member of society. I do not believe these areas should be squeezed into assemblies, tutor time and ‘stop the clock’ curriculum days, particularly when practical skills are required by so many employers in industry. Qualifications are one thing, but real-world application is an entirely different matter.

‘Everybody is a leader and everybody is a learner: that applies to the staff and to the students. Ideally there is a congruence between what you are doing in the curriculum and what’s happening in the staffroom. Our curriculum is knowledge-rich to say the least. It is constructed around the idea of metacognition, and with a care for students’ mental health and flourishing – and that’s what we are aiming for with the staff as well. We have a coaching culture, and it can really improve how everyone listens to each other.’ Helen Pike, Master, Magdalen College School, Oxford

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Global challenges Digital safety, mental health, extremism and politics are just some of the global challenges we are facing as a society. Another example is climate change: the majority of scientists agree that by the end of this century, man-made climate change will have turned the world into a much less hospitable place. Students have a right to be aware of these challenges and to understand what they can do to fight for change.

Technology Children should be taught computer science and programming in school, in addition to how to use technology as an aid to learning and as a responsible member of society. We should be teaching them, for example, when to put the phone down and how to manage their own social media presence. A curriculum for the future should take into account the rising role of automation, artificial intelligence and the digital epoch in our society. More and more people will be needed to create and oversee this fourth revolution.

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Individual choice

Giving individual students a choice in both what they learn and how they learn it is a great way to tailor the curriculum to their individual needs, interests and abilities.

We have seen how the current education system limits student choice. External pressures such as EBacc league tables and school inspections force students to conform to and follow the same curriculum. Students have to sit the same courses and complete them in the same amount of time, so they (and their schools) can be ranked against each other. This system is set up to ignore the individuality of every student, but there is a growing awareness that choice in what is learnt and how it is learnt helps to improve students’ behaviour and wellbeing, as well as their overall academic performance.

Kunskapsskolan schools A good example of schools that are putting student choice and individuality first is the Kunskapsskolan schools. These are a group of schools in Sweden that are pioneering a highly personalised approach to education. This approach (known as the KED Program) is being followed by over 100 schools in Sweden, the Netherlands, India, the USA, the Middle East and the UK. In the Kunskapsskolan model, students follow a curriculum as expected, but as they progress through the school, they are taught how to manage their own learning using coaching and personal goals and strategies. Students start to reach a place 172

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where they can move independently between subjects, deadlines and classrooms. Teachers play a key role and support staff are always present and intervene where support or challenge is needed. The teacher helps each student to set a goal to develop strategies for all schoolwork. With influences from the International Baccalaureate, SAIL (Student Agency In Learning) and curriculum programmes such as the Theory of Knowledge, the KED Program provides the personalisation each student needs according to their own ability, and teachers are empowered to support each student through a carefully designed and organised curriculum. In practice, this requires a great deal of thought behind the scenes to align timetabling with curriculum and student numbers with regular coaching sessions with teaching staff, not to mention the training required. Do not assume this will be successful if self-discipline, self-knowledge and a sense of responsibility are removed. On the contrary, any school that promotes this model requires students to develop confidence in their own ability, and this must be underpinned by constructive attitudes and methods to develop a deep and broad range of knowledge, skills and understanding. This approach to curriculum is possible even within the British education system, which operates on a high-stakes model of accountability and statutory guidance. It enables schools to truly own their curriculum and work freely within the constraints of statutory requirements. When I visited a school influenced by Kunskapsskolan, one of the most heartwarming aspects was observing 11- and 16-year-olds working together, self-regulating their behaviour, emotions and problems. Students had their own individual workspace to return to in-between lessons when specialised rooms and resources were required, with hot desks, ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays, a timetable and pots of pens. Electronic devices were also everywhere but only used as and when required to support the learning – it was like a sweet shop full of children who were able to resist the temptation to fill up on sugar. Students set their own goals to work towards. These goals are monitored weekly and change as a student progresses. Individual evaluations and conversations take place with a coach every week, where a student plans their time and studies so they can reach their goals. This model of education is happening in some of our UK schools today. Context is key but these success stories show that there is another way that we can work with vulnerable students other than a zero-tolerance approach to behaviour management, the effectiveness of which is, to date, not backed up by any robust studies (Rhodes and Long, 2019).

Metacognition and choice in how to learn Metacognition is gradually becoming a more familiar term to teachers and educators in the UK. I am discovering that more and more schools are now considering metacognition, cognitive load theory and other ideas related to how the brain works and how students best learn (see Chapter 3, page 53). Put simply, metacognition is thinking about thinking. In practical terms, it is developing an awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. In the classroom, this might be ‘how to revise’ or ‘how to learn key words’. 173

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One example of a school in England that has prioritised this is Rosendale Primary School in London. The school developed an approach to learning called the ReflectED programme, which aimed to improve students’ metacognition. Through 28 weekly, half-hour lessons, students were taught how to monitor and manage their own learning, which includes how to set and monitor goals, assess progress, and identify personal strengths and challenges. Thinking about learning helps students to work out which learning methods suit them best. Allowing students to use these methods not only helps to improve their learning but gives them an element of choice in a curriculum that otherwise might allow little room for individuality.

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Curriculum delivery

It’s easy to get stuck thinking about what a curriculum should look like, but let’s not forget that how it’s delivered is equally or perhaps even more important. Curriculum intent is meaningless if teachers don’t have the knowledge and skills to be able to deliver it. Whatever is written on paper is useless if your teachers cannot deliver content in the classroom. Teachers must be empowered to be at the forefront of the subject, not only through regular training sessions but also through engaging with examination boards, course specifications, colleagues and other educators working within the same discipline outside of their own organisations. If we are passionate about improving teachers’ workload, subject knowledge and longevity in the profession, we must build in regular professional development for teachers to plan, reflect on and evaluate curriculum planning and classroom delivery, together as colleagues. There must be time for individual year or department teams to discuss the purpose of their curriculum and its key principles and values, as well as defining the content to be delivered. As teams, we should work on mapping the content that all students will be taught into manageable schemes of work, so it can be brought to life in the classroom. We must also think about what formative and summative assessment will look like, as well as feedback and marking, and how interventions will be planned to support individual students through the constant challenge of differentiation in the classroom. You may also want to discuss ‘curriculum instruments’, which, as Mary Myatt (2018) defines in her brilliant book The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to Coherence, include: • questioning, which shifts the focus away from simple content coverage to a deeper understanding and retention of key concepts • ‘intellectual architecture’, which provides a structure that shows students patterns and connections between information and how what they are learning ‘fits into a bigger whole’ • practical resources such as knowledge organisers (see Chapter 2, page 43) and translating etymology of subject language into daily classroom routines. 174

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Reflecting on classroom delivery As individual practitioners, we should also ensure we have time available to us to reflect on our own classroom delivery. There is a false dichotomy in education currently, where teachers are often categorised into two distinct camps – traditional or progressive – with a minority of social media users claiming that teachers can only be one or the other. This argument is simply a political one, and in fact every teacher will champion both a ‘traditional’ and a ‘progressive’ approach in the classroom depending on the age of the children they are teaching, the subject they are teaching and of course their personality and particular approach to the content they are teaching. It all comes down to how we can get the best from our students. As you reflect on your curriculum delivery, try asking yourself the following questions to explore your own teaching approaches and evaluate their effectiveness: 1. What pedagogical approaches are you conscious of using? 2. Do you have strong evidence that your teaching style leads to better student outcomes? 3. How do you gauge the quality of your teacher instruction? 4. Does your classroom climate make a difference, for example students sat in rows or on group tables? 5. How do your classroom management and personality impact on student outcomes? 6. Do your personal beliefs or bias have any impact? 7. Have you conducted any formal observations to compare the differences between progressive and traditional teaching? 8. Have you conducted any structured observations to evaluate the difference between knowledge and skills being taught in a lesson? 9. What value-added models have you used to assess gains in student achievement? 10. Do you have any student evaluations to determine teacher quality? 11. Do you, as a teacher, self-report on the quality of your teaching, for example analysis of classroom artefacts and online portfolios of evidence? 12. If you think you teach in a ‘traditional’ style, what does feedback look like compared to a teacher who believes they teach in a ‘progressive’ style? 13. How would you measure engagement in a knowledge- or skills-based lesson? 14. Does your teaching style match your own experience of schooling? 15. Is your subject more likely to be taught in a ‘traditional’ or ‘progressive’ way?

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School case study ool School name: Magdalen College Sch Location: Oxford, Oxfordshire (MCS) is an independent school Context: Magdalen College School d 16 to 18 in the sixth

s and boys age for boys aged seven to 16, and girl s nd 100 feeder schools. All student arou with form. It is a selective school, and ial ent pot for look and interviews that are required to sit entrance tests . er than simply current attainment rath ks, the way in which a child thin on s ent stud 900 y ord and has roughl MCS is located in the heart of Oxf vide rational, liberal, internationally pro to 0 roll. It was founded in 148 olars for l-versed in Latin and Greek as sch connected thinkers who were wel ks in wor ool sch The . shares its foundation Magdalen College, with which it on act imp an ing hav , itutions in the city partnership with over 40 other inst is ool sch The rs. doo s beyond the school’ thousands of students and others are es uag lang 60 und ure of Oxford. Aro diverse, reflecting the changing nat t) ber of pupils (currently ten per cen num g win spoken at home, and a gro t. receive substantial financial suppor

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? A successful curriculum is so much more than a conveyor belt to outstanding exam results. At MCS, education is a process led by conversation as much as by anything else, and the mathematics of achievement defies simple calculation. We have a curriculum that is unashamedly intellectual. Our A level offer is heavy on facilitating subjects and those closely allied to them. We have a mix of GCSE and IGCSE qualifications, determined by our heads of department, but we have students from age seven upwards, so most of the time our students spend with us is not dominated by the exigencies of exams. In reviewing the curriculum two years ago, we started by looking at the values and attributes that underpin successful learning and workshopped these through various staff, student and parent committees. The aim was to express these values in a way that was useful for all ages and across the whole curriculum, in a language that was resonant to MCS. What we didn’t want was a ‘lucky dip’ of core skills that could be cut and pasted onto or from any school’s website, or a statement of aims and ethos that existed only in our prospectus and inspection documents. In autumn 2018, our core value for the whole school was ‘collaboration’, and at the end of the summer term we had ‘reflection’. The art department has since arranged our values around a picture of one of our Victorian stained glass windows, which contains the school’s motto and lilies (the lily was 176

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our founder’s emblem). Our motto is Sicut Lilium, which means ‘as the lily’ or ‘like the lily’ – a reference to Matthew’s Gospel, where the lilies of the field are the most splendidly arrayed just for being as they are. As a result of extensive consultation, we are now into the second year of all 11- to 16-year-old students having one timetabled lesson a week of Lilium, which is what we call our PSHCE (personal, social, health and citizenship education) programme. As you might expect, it contains a lot more than relationships education; we also study computational thinking and financial literacy among other topics. In Year 9, students have two periods of Lilium a week; the second lesson is based on a scheme of work that includes entrepreneurialism and risk management. Our charities coordinator also launched a scheme that gives groups of students £10 seed money to start a business and raise as much for charity as they can. Guest speakers come in to enhance the programme, many of whom are drawn from a panel of entrepreneurs who advised us when we constructed our curriculum. The Year 9 Lilium course enhances our careers programme, which we have also rethought for students at sixth-form level. We don’t do EPQ (Extended Project Qualification) because we have our own version, Waynflete Studies, which gives most students a tutorial with an academic, usually from Oxford University. The programme now coordinates with mini-internships and practical placements to give a real-world angle to students who opt for that. The speakers mentioned above also advise lowersixth students who can do a practical, business-focused extended project. One of the markers of the success of this work is that it enables everyone to think across the curriculum. Some departments (for example economics, maths, biology and geography) have looked at the order in which they teach material and how they might make better use of the synergy between their subjects. For the centenary of the First World War, we had two days off the normal timetable and produced a whole-school series of interdisciplinary lectures and workshops, looking, for example, at microbes in the war in both biology and art. This culminated with a musical play, Reflections, written by our head of drama and a group of sixth-form students. The work was supported by a short film that reflected on the school’s connections to its 50 Great War dead, and what they mean to us as a community today.

How have you achieved this? We can’t achieve anything without the right teachers, and MCS has the best colleagues I’ve ever worked with. The discretionary effort they put in is phenomenal, as is their work in the classroom. What distinguishes everything we do in the classroom is the quality of the conversation that propels students’ learning, and the pace. I sometimes jest that MCS provides specialist daycare for the severely abled, and I’m only partly joking. Academically able students are as deserving of a curriculum that serves their needs as those who struggle to access the curriculum at all. We operate on the basis that everyone is a leader, and everyone is a learner. This applies to aspiring senior leaders as much as it does to NQTs and students who have just joined the school.

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We have three deputy headteacher roles at MCS: pastoral, academic and education development. The two latter roles relate directly to the curriculum and have both distinct and overlapping responsibilities. The ‘academic’ deputy head leads on monitoring student progress, in partnership with the pastoral deputy and the heads of section and year. The academic deputy also works with the deputy head responsible for all things pastoral. When we debate or pilot subject change, such as which modern foreign languages to offer, the academic deputy leads that. The deputy head who focuses on ‘education development’ looks at learning among students and teachers. The idea is that professional development or extramural learning and partnerships should not be a bolt-on to the ‘core’ curriculum. If we don’t nurture and develop our teachers, how can we get the best out of our students? Every school has someone who looks after the welfare and progress of the students, so why wouldn’t we do the same for our teachers? Most students are in school for 13 years, whereas for teachers education is a life’s work. Let’s make the most of them, and help them to love the profession and not leave it. Our three deputy heads lead a consultative policy committee in each of their key areas: pastoral, academic and education development. Membership of these committees is open to any teacher, and we encourage more recent recruits to take part. (We also reassure heads of department that no decisions about curriculum policy will be taken without a separate consultation with them.)

How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? Ross is right to say that you need to begin by thinking about intention and impact. Why are you doing what you are proposing, and how will you know if it’s successful? Having this straight in your mind won’t just increase the chances of buy-in; it will also tell you whether what you are proposing is worth the resources it requires. Most teachers don’t like change; they like knowing what is going to be happening at 2.30pm each Tuesday, and they rightly resist change for change’s sake (which is something the Department for Education would do well to take on board). So, going into any consultation in an open and orderly way helps to avoid unintended consequences. I would also counsel against consulting about something that’s a foregone conclusion. You might consult about the ’how’ in that circumstance, but people won’t trust you if you present pseudo-ifs, which are really done deals. Drawing on the school’s networks beyond the classroom is also powerful, and it means that teachers are sharing the workload. One of my intentions at MCS is to bring the school more into the wider world and vice versa. I can’t do that without a network of expertise from beyond the classroom, drawn mainly from parents and former students. I went to a northern comprehensive, and since I left I haven’t heard from my old school. People make disparaging comments about the so-called old boys’ network, but it is startling how good many independent schools are at keeping in touch with former pupils for fundraising and networking, and at forging partnerships in their communities. Current students benefit from this in so many ways. 178

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Why does this work? by Andria Zafirakou MBE I wonder what would happen if all schools asked their 16-yearold students to resit their exams in September after they’d had a long break away from lessons, homework and tests. Would their students get the same grades? Would they do just as well? Would they have remembered and retained all prior knowledge? This leads me to reflect on how useful their learning journey was and how it has prepared them for the next stages of their lives. The curriculum is the heart muscle of a school. It is the mechanism that brings the learning to the individual. Therefore, it needs to be considered and designed with great care with the overarching theme: ‘What do we want our students to be taught, to experience and to learn?’ Within this chapter, Ross has taken us on a journey to explore the vital components when considering the design or review of a curriculum. There is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model and this is demonstrated within the case studies throughout this book taken from schools that have reviewed and carefully planned how they will inspire, challenge and enthuse their students. Curriculum planning is about being brave, creative, reflective, open and honest. Ross reminds us that the essential ingredients needed are: to have an inclusive approach; to consider all students’ needs and the potential that lies within each community; and to ensure that the phrase ‘broad and balanced’ needs to be just that. Every child is different, and we need to make sure that all subjects are equally celebrated, valued and appreciated, particularly the practical and creative subjects. We need to make sure that our students leave our schools with a fully loaded ‘toolkit’ of knowledge, skills and experiences. However, in order to achieve this, there must be a change in the mindset that suggests that an ‘academic’ offer is the ‘best’ offer. After all, we are told that the employment landscape is changing, and creativity, teamwork and problem-solving are the key skills required in the workplace. We should therefore not be ostracising traditionally creative and practical subjects in our schools simply because they are expensive to equip or are not viewed as ‘credible’ subjects by our politicians. Ross reminds us that even if we have the dream curriculum drawn up and raring to be launched, it will collapse if we do not invest in the resources needed for this curriculum to be delivered. By shining the spotlight on teacher practice and pedagogy, we acknowledge the importance of constantly reflecting and reviewing our practice, and investing in the continuing professional development of our teachers. Andria Zafirakou MBE has been teaching art and design at the Alperton Community School for 14 years. In 2018, she was awarded the Global Teacher Prize and has recently set up a charity called Artists in Residence to support the arts in education. Andria received an MBE in 2019 for her services to education. 179

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Chapter 9: Research-led practice

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esearch: other than flicking through a library book, I had no idea what this meant as a trainee teacher in 1993. When I was a trainee, you did what you were told and got on with it; this happened whether you had a mentor to guide you or not! Imagine walking on a tightrope every day, not really sure whether what you are doing is effective, research-informed or edu-babble pseudoscience. Today, this is still the reality for some teachers, because they have no access to professional development or expensive research articles, or are simply too busy with the job in hand to have the time to read up. However, the signs are clear that things are getting better and research is being used increasingly by teachers and school leaders to inform practice in the classroom. According to the Department for Education, this is having a positive impact on the quality of teaching in England. In a 2017 research report they commissioned to evaluate the progress of ‘evidence-informed teaching’ (Coldwell et

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al., 2017), they found that ‘the most strongly research-engaged schools were highly effective, well-led organisations within which “research use” meant integrating research evidence into all aspects of their work as part of an ethos of continual improvement and reflection.’ So perhaps it’s time for all teachers and school leaders to start focusing a little more attention on research and evidence, and how it can make a difference to classroom practice. This chapter will explore the importance and value of educational research further and offer ideas to help you integrate it into your teaching and your school.

Why is this an issue? More and more schools, professionals and educationalists are now advocating the use of research and evidence in teacher development. In the book Unleashing Great Teaching, David Weston and Bridget Clay (2018) discuss the importance of research: ‘Research evidence helps us make better decisions. It is an invaluable source of expertise itself and should also underpin all the expertise you engage with. Research evidence can help you understand what has worked, where, why and for whom.’ I believe that part of this explosion of interest in research-informed practice can be attributed to the rise of social media as a tool for professional collaboration and sharing best practice among education professionals. Interest in research has become particularly prevalent among those professionals who gather online to discuss teaching in blogs or articles or to curate their own conferences, perhaps because social media offers an alternative to those who are either unhappy with the professional development being offered in their schools or want more involvement in discussions around best practice.

Research and social media Having used social media professionally for a decade, I have immersed myself in the latest thoughts and research and have sought feedback about my day-to-day work, ideas and school resources. Using Twitter has allowed me to establish one of the largest online teacher audiences in the UK, not only to support and challenge dialogue, but also to influence it, including through connections with Members of Parliament (MPs) and Secretary of State ministers. During the last decade, many other educators have been using social media for dialogue, professional development and, increasingly, to challenge the status quo. Examples of online dialogue are evident in forums constructed by hashtags, technically known as a backchannel. Online conversations are spawning into micro-backchannels for a specific niche, resulting in professional development opportunities and meetings in real life (IRL); popular examples include ResearchED in the UK, which now reaches out across the world. Teacher conferences, dubbed as TeachMeets and EdCamps, etched alongside formal and commercial conferences, are increasingly curated from online networks, often generated by teachers in every pocket of the education community in all corners of the globe. This online professional networking is offering educators on Twitter a chance to develop, widen and enrich the context in which they work. 181

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According to Twitter Power 3.0 (Comm and Taylor, 2015), we ‘send more than 500 million tweets per day […] and 6 billion hours of video content each month’. That’s a huge amount of conversation and opinion, now digitised. Before this epoch, teachers were restricted to connections with colleagues – largely face-to-face or, at best, with two or three others working in nearby schools. A decade later, teachers are now sharing ideas far beyond their classroom walls. A quick status update during a lesson is very much the future-focused teacher’s modus operandi. They can meet together on their terms and critique each other without fear of retribution or job loss (in most cases). Teachers are engaging with others in multiple forums, sharing resources and ideas, seeking research-informed views and pragmatic ideas, and citing Twitter as evidence for new friendships, career moves and alternative income. Hundreds of thousands of teachers are demonstrating something today that is entirely normal, shaping practice in our schools and, in some cases, shaping education policy. In many examples, online petitions and simple hashtags (for example #BanTheBooths) – shared thousands of times – do bring about change. In terms of research-informed practice, the beauty of using Twitter for teachers is that it provides ‘microCPD’: snippets of information for the time-poor teacher. It’s perfect professional development on the go, as it’s free and available internationally to anyone who wants to learn about what the latest research report has uncovered and how other professionals think this translates into best practice in the classroom.

Over half of teachers and school leaders (55 per cent) say that research-led practice is an area of weakness in their school. Only 18 per cent believe it to be an area of strength.

However, using social media does come with its dangers. In recent years, a trend has begun to emerge where educators or even politicians engage in ‘calling out’ other colleagues over their expressed views. Tribalism means that ad hominem attacks are beginning to undermine the early benefits of supportive critique for the individual, driving some teachers away from online communities. In this context, social media is not for everyone and of course some in the profession have not even discovered this tool as a resource for the classroom. We must therefore consider, beyond social media, how we can ensure every teacher has access to academic research to discover ideas to help shape best practice within their own school gates.

A research culture Teachers and schools must ask themselves whether the things they are doing are supported by research and evidence. There is a growing consensus that many school leaders and teachers across the UK are becoming research informed, including in Northern Ireland, where increasing numbers of schools are, for example, referring to John Hattie’s (2009) Visible Learning and the Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit (EEF, 2018e) to inform practice. In schools where this is the case, we should respect what individual professionals and schools are choosing to do; every school is different and works within its own unique context. However, if this isn’t the case, we must question whether we are truly doing the right thing by our students or whether there are other more effective solutions available. 182

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‘If a piece of research backs up what you are doing and your own knowledge can demonstrate why that’s the right thing to do in your school, then that’s absolutely fine. You know your school better than other people.’ Peter Collins, Headteacher, Slough and Eton C of E Business and Enterprise College, Slough

Teachers are learners, and they are more than willing to adapt their practice and try out new ideas if they will make a difference to their students, but we must remember that the busy nature of school life makes it incredibly difficult for teachers to reflect on the work that they are doing. It’s also impossible to be aware of all the research that is available and appropriate, and we could be forgiven for being unaware of even the most critical ideas, such as the conclusive evidence of learning styles, class sizes and feedback, for example, with everything else teachers have on their plates. But how do we find a way to put research at every teacher’s fingertips and encourage them to use it to improve their impact in the classroom? I believe this process must begin by developing a research-rich environment that nurtures teachers to be reflective. We must put as much effort as possible into developing current teachers in the profession, rather than just those new to the profession, and the true power to make this change lies within each and every one of us. As school leaders, we all have the power to enrich every teacher to be the best they can truly be with students, and as teachers, we have the power to reflect and improve on our own practice and support our colleagues too. However, you and I both know that this may not be so easy in some schools that may have a toxic culture. If this characteristic is the dominant force in a school, then a research-led culture is often put on the backburner, exacerbating teacher mental ill health and driving teachers out of the classroom prematurely. A book I recently co-published, sharing the research of Dr Helen Woodley, investigates through teacher case studies the effect of working in a toxic school on teacher mental health and wellbeing (Woodley and McGill, 2018). Through the use of autoethnographic narratives, these case studies unpick the hallmarks of ‘toxic schools’, which school leaders may wish to hide away. It is in these types of schools where research is simply not a priority. Instead, compliance, whole-school consistency and tick-box evidencing form day-to-day practice for thousands of teachers. In my career and on my teacher training travels, I have encountered both types of school: those that are research informed and have a healthy culture of reflective practice in every teacher-to-teacher conversation, and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, those where headteachers are absent from training sessions, where there are certain things you can or cannot say, and where visitors are ushered away from busy corridors during lesson transitions and steered away from closed classroom doors. Any school that invites external support in to work with their staff shows a position of trust and a genuine willingness for school improvement, but sadly there are still some schools with closed doors – those that do not allow teachers to attend external events and very rarely welcome external guests. 183

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In order to develop a research-informed culture, a school must open its doors, inviting in new ideas and perspectives. Teachers must be given the opportunity to read and reflect on a piece of research and how this may translate into their own classroom setting. What is often absent is the translation of theory into practice. When we talk about research, we are often lured in by the headlines and we don’t ask ourselves: how does this work in my classroom? What lies beneath the headline and what can I do with these recommendations? Teachers must be provided with a safe, non-threatening environment to test out researchinformed ideas and solutions in their own classrooms. They might not all work straight away but it’s essential that teachers have the chance to experiment and then reflect on what works best for their students. This ‘experimental practice’ is difficult in a high-stakes environment where student performance must happen within a set period of time, but it’s a non-negotiable if we are to develop the best education possible for young people.

‘We engage with the staff about what they believe is going to work well in their lessons and give them the autonomy to decide on the best approach with the requirement that they share and work with others. We started to drip feed in articles and information.’ Peter Collins, Headteacher, Slough and Eton C of E Business and Enterprise College, Slough

Why is research-led practice so important? As classroom practitioners, we all know how important quality-first teaching is to student progress. In fact, according to Sir Kevan Collins, outgoing Chief Executive of the EEF, ‘Quality of teaching is one of the biggest drivers of pupil attainment’ (EEF, 2017). Looking at the research and evidence behind what works in the classroom and applying this to our own practice can only improve the quality of our provision. Two specific examples of this are, first, using research-informed teaching to support children from disadvantaged backgrounds and, second, using research to improve our understanding of the science of teaching and learning and thereby increase our impact in the classroom.

Narrowing the attainment gap In their report on the attainment gap in England, the EEF (2018a) state that ‘what happens in the classroom makes the biggest difference’ and ‘improving teaching quality generally leads to greater improvements at lower cost than structural changes’. This is why politics will always struggle to influence a classroom. Why? Because once the classroom door is closed, the teacher is in charge. Narrowing the attainment gap must continue to be a key priority for schools, especially since we still live in a world where ‘privilege affects all sorts of life outcomes, in all sorts of ways and all parts of the class structure’. Sam Friedman, 184

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a professor in sociology at LSE, and Daniel Laurison, a professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, write about ‘a gust of privilege’, which they describe as ‘an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort’. They believe it is this that is at ‘the heart of what we call the class ceiling’. The professors discuss a whole range of factors, including class prejudice and discrimination, ‘the bank of mum and dad’, training and experience, and the fact that the privileged are more likely to work in London, but they do attribute the ‘class ceiling’ in part to educational attainment (Friedman and Laurison, 2019). Therefore, although it may feel as though we are fighting a never-ending self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to class-based privilege, schools do have their part to play in changing the narrative. I believe that teachers and schools are generally best placed to get the best out of children from all backgrounds, and, to do so, we must all have high expectations of what these children can achieve and in our own abilities to help them. However, it concerns me that this isn’t happening yet. Research by Simon Burgess and Ellen Greaves (2009) at the University of Bristol suggests that ‘there are enduring and significant differences in teachers’ assessments of pupils from different ethnic groups’, whereby ‘pupils in particular ethnic groups and subjects that typically score highly tend to be over-assessed, and vice versa, which matches a model of categorisation and stereotyping.’ Burgess and Greaves argue that if a teacher has high expectations of the students in front of them, this does make a difference to outcomes: ‘If systematic teacher under-assessment of some groups is reflected in lower teacher effort for these pupils, then this may impact on their educational outcomes.’ The same paper raises the issue of over-testing, arguing that setting too many written tests ‘might be severely detrimental to the recorded achievements of children from poor families, and for children from some ethnic minorities’. It seems to me as though we have this discussion every year during exam season and this is also an issue when we use written tests to ‘set’ students in secondary schools, which we know negatively impacts motivation, engagement and attitudes for learning for low attainers (EEF, 2018d). We must have high expectations for all our students and use research and evidence to find out what works best to help them progress if we are to have any hope of narrowing the attainment gap in our schools.

Developing an understanding of teaching and learning Research can help develop teachers’ understanding of the science behind teaching and learning, which can make a big difference to their classroom performance. One such example is having an understanding of cognition and memory (see Chapter 3, page 53). There are many organisations I would recommend if you’d like to discover more about this, for example the College of Teaching in England, the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS). The Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation in New South Wales, Australia, has an excellent podcast about cognitive load theory, a summary poster for staff rooms and a one-page summary explaining what it looks like in practice: www.cese.nsw.gov.au/publications-filter/ cognitive-load-theory-research-that-teachers-really-need-to-understand. 185

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It’s also worth taking a look at the work of psychologists and leading educationalists on cognition and memory, such as Daniel Kahneman, Daniel T. Willingham, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, or Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, who have shared their insights about cognition, memory and deliberate practice to improve performance in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2012), Why Don’t Students Like School? (Willingham, 2010), Peak (Ericsson and Pool, 2017) and Make It Stick (Brown et al., 2014). These are just a couple of examples of where research and evidence can have an impact on our practice in the classroom. In my view, it is essential that all teachers are able to engage with and use research to inform what they do day to day; I hope the practical ideas that follow will help teachers and school leaders to make this a reality for themselves and their colleagues.

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Becoming a research-informed teacher

When it comes to being a research-informed practitioner, it can be incredibly difficult to know where to start. Journals are often difficult to access and expensive, or there is very little time to read the details and then translate this back into the classroom. However, being research informed does not necessarily mean reading reams and reams of academic papers to find one sentence that’s relevant to you and your context. This idea shares some quick and easy ways for you to begin your journey to becoming research informed.

Sharing ideas Being research informed can be as simple as you and a couple of colleagues reflecting on your own practice and what’s worked well, and then sharing these ideas among yourselves. That’s it! Collaborating with colleagues to find out what does and does not work in your context is an essential part of being research informed. Of course, this can also be rolled out more formally across a department or whole school, and we’ll look in more detail at how this can be achieved in Idea 5, page 196.

Reflective practice Another key aspect of becoming a research-informed practitioner is reflecting on your own practice and being honest with yourself about what is working and what you might need to improve. It’s essential that you can step back and look at what you might need to do differently. 186

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This is a fundamental skill for all teachers, even when it might ‘The craft of teaching requires us to feel challenging to be so brutally constantly revisit what we are doing honest with yourself. I know this is and why we are doing it and be difficult, especially when teaching prepared to do things differently.’ can feel like a very personal art. In fact, in 2019, a meta-analysis (Kim Peter Collins, Headteacher, Slough and et al., 2019) found that a teacher’s Eton C of E Business and Enterprise personality characteristics may be College, Slough associated with effective teaching. A key characteristic noted was ‘emotional stability’, with an effect size of + 0.21 and ‘openness’, with a small effect size of + 0.04. As with all research, it’s important to use this information with caution but the authors of the study suggest how important it is that teachers reflect on how they might be perceived by students and the potential impact of this, and therefore there may be qualities teachers ‘may wish to enhance or suppress depending on the context’. Of course, this is just one example, but serves to show how important open, honest self-reflection is in our profession.

Research-informed interventions As you continue your journey to becoming more research informed, you should begin reading widely so you are clear about emerging trends, particularly in the areas where you think your practice could be improved. This will lead you to find new interventions, ideas or solutions that might work with your students, but you must approach this in a structured, targeted way. First, make sure you have a clear understanding of who you are trying to help – whether one particular student or a group of students – and what exactly the background and issues are. You can then conduct research into evidence-based solutions for this particular context to find what you might be able to try. This means your findings will be more relevant to the student or students in question and the specific problem you are trying to solve. Once you have found some possible interventions, you should tailor them to your context, considering when, where and how you can use them to best effect. Finally, it’s important to persevere with the intervention. The EEF (2018b) found that behaviour interventions led for two to six months made the most impact, for example. Rome wasn’t built in a day so commit to see the impact and progress made before considering what next. For a practical example of this in action, let’s look at how this might work if you wish to consider research-informed behaviour management interventions: • Who? Which student names crop up time and time again? This is obvious for experienced teachers, particularly those working in a pastoral role, but for new teachers a simple analysis of events on a management information system will soon pick up recurring challenges in all aspects of school life. Which students are rewarded most? Which have few rewards and no behaviour incidents and are generally off the radar? There are people in your school who can regularly provide this analysis. 187

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• What? Search for proven programmes to improve behaviour from nearby schools or organisations that can support particular groups of students. To make the intervention truly personalised and poignant, content should largely depend on the issues that arise. • When and where? On which day and at what time should this intervention occur, and in which space? The devil is in the detail. • How? Which adult is best suited to the child? Again, carefully match the intervention to the child, not the adult. • What next? What impact has the intervention had and what progress has been made? Use this to decide on next steps.

Some quick tips Finally, here are a few quick starter tips to help the busy classroom teacher or leader to become more research literate: 1. Sign up to your subject association’s magazine. 2. Subscribe to research organisations such as BERA, BELMAS, the EEF, NESTA, various think tanks, other popular organisations, such as ResearchEd, the Chartered College of Teaching, the Scottish Schools Education Research Centre, the Scottish College for Educational Leadership, the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland and FFT Datalab, and local universities. A simple newsletter subscription does make a difference! 3. Use apps such as Pocket to save any interesting articles you come across and would like to read when you find the time. Boomerang is also a great email-scheduling app that you can use to resend yourself interesting reads at quieter times in the year. 4. Try Audible to listen to books on the move and subscribe to an everincreasing range of teacher podcasts. You can try mine at www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/category/podcasts. 5. Finally, if you are starting to consider a master’s or doctoral degree, consider using plugins on your internet browser such as Mendely, Zotero and Google Scholar, which provide you with references, citations, quotes and a reading list at the click of a button! 188

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Running a research project

Once you’ve started reading up on research relating to teaching and learning and incorporating some ideas into your teaching practice, you might want to conduct your own action research project on a specific area that interests you.

While working with UCL on a research and development project on verbal feedback (see Chapter 1, page 17), Mark Quinn, Carly Sandy and I developed a model of investigation for the teacher researcher. It follows four principles: ask, investigate, innovate and reflect. It’s an ideal framework to help you plan your own action research project to be conducted in your school. It will help you to develop your research question, collect evidence and evaluate your findings.

The model Let’s say, for example, that we want to understand why students are underperforming in a subject. Here is how it could be used:

Ask 1. What do we know about current practice? 2. What types of evidence can we gather? 3. What evidence can we gather that will be valid? 4. What will be an efficient way of measuring change? 5. What should the final outcome be?

Investigate 1. What types of evidence are currently available? 2. How do we test them for validity and reliability? 3. What are the pitfalls of evidence collection? 4. How do we collect evidence without it adding to teachers’ workload? 5. What ethical risks should be considered when collecting the data?

Innovate 1. What tentative claim could we make once you have your focus and evidence and you are starting to trial ideas? 2. What is your evidence currently saying? 3. What is expected, unexpected, overheard and contrary evidence? 4. How can you transfer this knowledge from research and development? 189

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Reflect 1. What do we know about effective professional development in this area? 2. How can your research and development align with this professional development? 3. How can you share and celebrate your findings? This is a simple and highly effective model for teachers who want to begin their own action research.

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Cognitive dissonance

This idea will help you to understand and avoid the pitfall of cognitive dissonance, so your teaching continues to evolve.

Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort experienced by a person when they were absolutely sure something was true and they find out that it’s in fact completely not true. Instead of admitting they were wrong, people tend to use a defence mechanism to protect themselves against this discomfort, re-engineering the story to modify, trivialise or deny the facts to assure themselves that they were right all along. As you develop as a research-informed teacher, it’s important to be able to spot when this is happening to you and others around you, otherwise you may end up carrying on doing what you’ve always done, even when the research and evidence point the other way.

What does cognitive dissonance look like? Cognitive dissonance is prevalent among educators, particularly on social media, because those who use it are seeking out better ways of teaching. The problem is that we often get lost in what is being said rather than how it is said and why. This is a frequent occurrence when discussing ideas remotely without a face-to-face connection. It means that information is often taken at face value, rather than as something more complex and nuanced, and this can produce heated debate. This is why I share online videos to support my blogs and tweets so that context is better understood. As an example, let’s assume a ‘good point’ has been made and, for the sake of argument, Ross says, ‘We should abandon school inspections by the Grim Reaper and reboot the system!’ As Scott Adams (2018), creator of the Dilbert comic strip, suggests, you would think that ‘it’s such an unambiguously good idea, it’s hard to imagine who would complain’. However, some people might collapse the point to one variable and react like this: ‘Ross is just crazy!’ or ‘Ross is just trying to seek attention!’ Again, one variable. What we don’t often hear is this: ‘Hmm, Ross is a little crazy. It is a good way to get attention too, but he has a good point and I think he’s trying to make the world better for teachers.’ If you hear somebody process through all the variables in this way, they 190

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are probably not in a state of cognitive dissonance. If you don’t hear this and you hear someone (a teacher, school leader or an inspector) offer just ‘one variable’, a good question to ask yourself is: ‘I wonder whether this is just a one-variable option?’ One-variable options do exist, but your cognitive dissonance radar should turn on. If someone expands upon a good point to an ‘absurd absolute’, that’s another sure sign of cognitive dissonance. For example, Ross says, ‘We should abolish marking and start by prioritising verbal feedback. Let’s give school leaders the free space in their schools to redesign a new form of assessment.’ An absurd absolute would generate this type of response: ‘Yeah, now you’re gonna let headteachers run their schools any old how and school standards will drop!’ This is a sure sign of ‘absurd cognitive dissonance’. Other signs of cognitive dissonance include unspecific doom forecasting – when someone predicts an extreme, unrelated outcome (such as ‘the end of our school as we know it’) – or when someone simply laughs at your suggestion without giving a justifiable reason.

How to avoid cognitive dissonance As a research-informed teacher, it’s really useful to keep an eye out for cognitive dissonance both in yourself and in your colleagues. It’s a good check to ‘filter’ your own perceptions, biases and assumptions on education. We all make assumptions about what works and what doesn’t in education based on our own personal experiences – whether that’s 25 years of teaching if you’re an experienced professional or your own schooling if you’re an NQT. As you embark on your quest to become research informed, you might find information that challenges your deeply held beliefs. Of course, you don’t have to agree with everything you read – I’ve certainly not always agreed with everything people have said, and I suspect on most occasions many people have not agreed with me. In fact, a disagreement can evolve into something useful, but in the grand scheme of research-led practice, whether we do this online, face-to-face at conferences or in our day-to-day work at school, every teacher should be questioning why they do things and seeking the best academic research available to help evaluate effective teaching and learning strategies. Don’t let yourself fall into cognitive dissonance and don’t rewrite the facts to suit your own narrative. If you spot cognitive dissonance, challenge it in yourself and others.

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Research-led appraisal

Try shifting towards research-led appraisal in your school to develop and improve teacher performance, rather than relying on traditional approaches that measure and divide teachers arbitrarily.

Writing for the Teacher Development Trust, Maria Cunningham (2017) asks, ‘Is your 191

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school’s performance management helpful or harmful?’ According to Cunningham, the National Headteacher Standards require school leaders to ‘establish rigorous, fair and transparent systems and measures for managing the performance of all staff, addressing any underperformance, supporting staff to improve and valuing excellent practice.’ However, Cunningham goes on to explain how a toxic culture of performativity has pervaded our schools over the last two decades with graded observations, performance-related pay, target setting and data collection. If your school still promotes any of the above, there is another way: enter research-led appraisal.

What do appraisals look like at the moment? Currently, in most schools, the performance management system is led by a tick-box, high-accountability culture that essentially boils down to a papergathering exercise driven by the setting of targets. This has been exacerbated by the introduction of performance-related pay in England. Let’s unpick this all a bit further.

A paper-gathering exercise Over the last decade, I have worked in three large secondary schools and have created, implemented and quality-assured the appraisal systems for teaching and support staff, including school leaders, and have reported to school governors. In all honesty, although every system was as accurate and robust as it could be, and even supported by the Investors in People framework (see Chapter 10, page 216), or on other occasions by various pieces of software available to the school, paperwork processes to gauge quality appraisal conversations and staff development can only be as good as the people who have those conversations individually. It took me quite a number of years to understand that the people in schools are what make quality professional development. Logistics are crucial, but processes on a piece of paper do not bring action; people do. Performance management targets have been constructed in line with professional standards as well as numerical data and evidence. Evidence and tickboxing have become the default model for educators. In schools where bureaucracy is king, the consensus is that teachers are gathering reams of evidence to justify their work and that the quality of appraisal is largely determined by the quality of the relationship between oneself and one’s line manager. The problem with this lies in the bias or poor practice delivered by individual line managers. Decisions made are sometimes anecdotal rather than evidential, and this is not only unreliable but it is also dangerous and damaging for teachers who are working to the best of their ability. Appraisal decisions cannot be made simply on the basis that: 1. You do not like the person. 2. They did something you did not like earlier on in the year. 3. The member of staff will receive a large pay rise and they simply do not deserve it or are lazy (delete as applicable). 4. You need to make some money-saving decisions to protect the school budget. 192

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Target-driven Even if we could mitigate the potential bias of managers, are appraisals that are purely target-driven fair and effective? If targets are not informed by research and evidence, they are simply ‘best guesses’. As van der Wateren and Amrein-Beardsley (2018) say: ‘If teachers are to be held accountable for the progress of their students, it must be decided how much progress is enough for the given time interval. Since the targets set by policy makers are hardly backed by research evidence, they come down to little more than pure guesswork.’ I also believe that teachers are not motivated by appraisal targets; they are motivated by what they do in the classroom and what future impact this will have for their students. This notion of ‘future impact’ is relevant in all sectors, not just education. The professional service Deloitte shared some interesting appraisal findings in a video published by Harvard Business Review (2016). In a public survey Deloitte conducted, more than half the executives questioned (58 per cent) believed that their current target-based performance management approach was driving neither employee engagement nor high performance. To address the problem rather than set targets at the start and review them at the end, they sought ways of doing things differently. They have defined three objectives at the root of performance management: 1. to reward performance 2. to see performance – team leader’s perspective 3. to fuel performance. Deloitte’s appraisal system was drastically reformed in line with these objectives and asked a number of questions of line managers: 1. Given what you know of this person’s performance, and if it were your money, would you award this person the highest possible compensation? 2. Would you always want this person on your team? 3. Is this person at risk of low performance? 4. Is this person ready for promotion today? (Buckingham and Goodall, 2015) In effect, Deloitte started asking team leaders what they would do with each team member rather than what they thought of that individual.

Performance-related pay In all jurisdictions across the UK, the appraisal process is incredibly complex and disparate. In England, when performance-related pay was made statutory in 2014, 25,000 schools in England had the opportunity to rethink how they would reward teachers based on performance. Part of the government’s thinking behind performance-related pay was ‘to attract more high performers to the profession and retain them, but the reform deliberately came without a centrally mandated framework. Aside from some very general advice, schools were left to design their own pay schemes and choose their own performance measures (though many 193

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adopted union- or local authority-recommended templates)’ says Simon Burgess (2018), Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol. A report published by the Department for Education (Sharp et al., 2017) set out to identify what reforms schools were making, what influenced their decisions, and the perceived implications for staff and schools. The findings show that the most common types of evidence used by schools to assess teacher effectiveness were: • student progress • classroom observation • teacher standards • measures linked to the school improvement plan • student attainment. The research goes on to suggest that teachers in England had mixed views on the desirability of pay reforms, with only 34 per cent agreeing that it resulted in a fair allocation of pay for staff in the school, and with most headteachers feeling that the pay reforms had not had an immediate impact on teacher recruitment and retention. These findings are supported by Bryson et al.’s (2019) research, which found that ‘increased use of performance-related pay and performance monitoring, which do improve workplace performance elsewhere in the economy, are ineffective in schools.’ According to the EEF (2018c), given the lack of evidence that performancerelated pay significantly improves the quality of teaching, schools should ask themselves how they can redeploy resources in a more cost-effective way to improve teacher quality, motivation and engagement.

Research-informed appraisal It seems then that our current appraisal system needs a rethink and the good news is that there are many schools that have already bucked the trend. Cunningham (2017) advocates the following areas of focus when it comes to reforming performance management: 1. Agency: Allow teachers to have a say in how they are appraised and developed as professionals. 2. Measurement versus development: Avoid setting arbitrary targets in complex areas, as this creates unnecessary gamification and burden. 3. Strengths: Make transparency, trust and fairness priorities. 4. Data: This should be treated with caution and multiple people should collect it and come to a consensus. 5. Career support: The focus should be on developing a teacher’s practice. 6. Student focus: All decisions about performance management should benefit students; focus on why and how potential barriers to classroom learning occur. Over the last five years there’s been a significant shift towards research-informed 194

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teacher appraisal. It’s something I have advocated for a number of years and I believe that it helps schools to focus on the key areas that Cunningham mentions here. I’ve argued that appraisal should be replaced with ‘developmental’ targets and I have encountered many schools that have moved towards a research-enquiry methodology. This means that, rather than being set individual targets that assess a teacher’s performance in the classroom, the teacher develops a research question that will not only make them a reflective practitioner, but will also have an impact on their classroom, their colleagues or the school in which they work. The question is critiqued by a small group of colleagues and the expectation is that the teacher will share findings and regularly report back. Imagine if schools scrapped targets like this: • ‘Achieve 80 per cent good or better pass rate in GCSE design technology.’ • ‘Develop the use of Assessment for Learning techniques in lessons and be Good or Outstanding within an agreed time frame.’ And instead set a target that is research-based, develops the teacher and supports the school. For example: • ‘Why do Year 12 Bangladeshi students drop out of AS level history more than any other group of students?’ • ‘How could the maths interventions used for pupil premium students support all pupil premium students across the school and in all subjects?’ These two simple questions – and how they are worded – totally reverse the nature of target setting from being ‘done to’, and instead shift the onus onto the teacher to ‘research and discover why’, therefore enriching their professional knowledge and, better, supporting the students in your school.

How does it work in practice? Here are some tips for making this research-enquiry methodology a reality for the appraisal system in your school: • Research-enquiry appraisal must be a supportive and developmental process designed to ensure that all staff have the skills and support they need to carry out their research effectively. It should help to ensure that all staff are able to continue to improve their professional practice and to develop in their roles. • Research enquiry is expected to be completed in a systematic fashion, involving professional dialogue. It should encourage the development of confident and professional judgements among members of staff. • Rather than setting numerical targets, appraisal is constructed using a research question, which is then critiqued by a group of peers and the line manager. • The focus is research based and develops the teacher and supports the school. • Part of the process involves the individual demonstrating how they will conduct the research, investigate the question and disseminate the findings. • Oh, and time must be allocated... more than the bog-standard three windows per academic year.

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Collective teacher efficacy If you want to simplify your appraisal process even further, research-led appraisal could be run at a whole-school level in the form of collective teacher efficacy. We know that teachers can have an impact on students’ outcomes to some degree, but often performance in exams is largely outside of a teacher’s control, with grade distributions and external demographics, for example. It could therefore be wiser for school leaders to set a common goal for all their staff, rather than wasting countless hours setting individual performance targets. If a school sets a ‘collective teacher efficacy performance target’, it may motivate staff to be out on corridors, to support all classes, to be out on the streets when an incident occurs, to support staff in setting up examination halls, to deal with an emotional outburst from a student when the revision season kicks in, and so on. If results improve, you could argue that all teachers have collectively improved teaching and learning, behaviour, and exam performance. If the results dip, it’s everyone’s responsibility too. This creates a team effort; instead of individuals even on the same corridor competing against one another to teach the top and bottom sets and refusing to share resources, they collaborate and work in the best interests of themselves and all of their students.

If teachers are to become research-informed practitioners, it’s essential that a research-led culture is developed at a whole-school level.

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Creating a research-led culture

Teachers must feel comfortable, confident, willing and able to try out new ideas in their own classrooms, and to do so, school leaders need to allow them the autonomy to experiment with new practices, analyse results and decide what will work best for their students. Some ideas may work brilliantly first time, but it’s not possible for every idea to work in all contexts straightaway. A supportive culture is therefore a necessity if teachers are to feel sufficiently confident to experiment, even if some new ideas might fail in the first instance or might in fact never work with the students in their particular school. Even if an idea doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean a teacher has wasted their time. Trying out new techniques and approaches is part and parcel of refining and honing teaching practice and becoming a reflective, research-informed practitioner. School leaders need to understand this and must work to develop this culture across their teaching teams. 196

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‘Teachers have to not be afraid to totally mess it up and not feel anything other than happy that they’ve learnt something to not do.’ Peter Collins, Headteacher, Slough and Eton C of E Business and Enterprise College, Slough

However, we must also go one step further than this to enable a fully formed research-rich culture in our schools. We must allow teachers the time and space to discuss teaching and collaborate with one another to find out what works best with the specific students in their setting. Teachers must be sufficiently supported to feel they can invite colleagues into their classroom to observe their successes, and there must be a systematic sharing of best practice, resources and materials among staff.

Sharing ideas To get started with this, in whatever forum your department or school currently offers for professional development, a teacher can share some practice from their own classroom and how they have tried and tested ideas over a period of time. Presenting this information in front of colleagues is difficult for some, so I would always opt for a safe approach to begin with so that the research culture can evolve. Facilitating small workshops and carousel activities with a wide variety of people presenting and plenty of opportunity for discussion is a very useful approach. To ensure ideas are not a flash in the pan, a candid time to revisit the information and then evaluate progress made must be part of a professional development programme.

Plug-in-and-play CPD As sharing ideas, research and best practice becomes more commonplace in your school, you can try introducing what I call ‘plug-in-and-play CPD’. The basis of this idea is firstly choice. In the schools that I have visited and the conferences that I have attended or have had the privilege of being part of, choice is a simple ingredient that has overarching success time and time again. It’s also essential that the content offers ideas or solutions that can be taken away and tried in the classroom the very next day. Essentially, this means that I can attend your workshop, something that I have chosen specifically to suit my needs or interests, and the ideas shared will be something that I can take away and try in my classroom immediately. In the outstanding examples, people attending have been given resources in abundance at a very low cost.

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A ten-point approach The challenge for schools is how they can facilitate this with reducing budgets and busy teachers, but I believe it is worth it for all those who need to move away from a one-size-fits-all method to a more bespoke, rich and fluid approach to teacher professional development. We are re-entering an era of personalised learning for teachers, so we must avoid it being a sausage-manufacturing process! If I could offer a ten-point approach for building this into your own school, I would suggest the following: 1. Allocate a regular slot in the weekly timetable for professional development. This can be anything from 15 minutes to one hour. 2. Even better, cancel a scheduled meeting and replace it with a bite-sized CPD slot! 3. Align the content with school priorities, regular themes such as the chapter headings within this book, or the needs of your individual teachers. 4. Build and share a timetable with dates and times, and protect these opportunities fiercely. The challenge is curating a timetable that is flexible enough for people to attend and will entice the right balance of numbers. 5. In parallel, create research-enquiry appraisal approaches, which are project based (see Idea 4, page 191) so the teaching staff are motivated to share their research projects with one another. 6. Ask someone to capture content in audio, video and written formats for social media channels. Not only will this offer a backchannel but it’s also a great way to promote your school and entice new applicants and interested researchers. 7. More importantly, record this information in your own school journal and publish it once every year. You can use the journal from the previous year to inform the year ahead. 8. When you reach a point of confidence, you may wish for all the work that is being built up through the academic year to culminate in your own school conference, inviting external visitors to join in. 9. Reserve a good part of cash to enable you to publish the research and promote your events. 10. Perhaps turn your work into a book or publication, just like Michaela School in London did with Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers (Birbalsingh, 2016) or Sandringham School in Hertfordshire, who have been publishing a teacher research journal for a number of years.

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School case study rch of England Business and

School name: Slough and Eton Chu

Enterprise College Location: Slough, Berkshire ational secondary academy in Context: Slough and Eton is a co-educ19. It has a sixth form of around d 11 to Chalvey, Slough, for students age , of academic and vocational courses ture mix a for 280 students studying n. is a very diverse, multicultural tow predominantly at Level 3. Slough cent per 70 and ish, Brit ite cent non-wh The student population is 96 per are s ent stud The e. uag itional lang of students speak English as an add , and wed by Somalian-African Muslim follo , slim Mu ni predominantly Pakista a children in the school. there are currently around 35 Rom

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? Research-led practice is an area where our thinking has changed most significantly and one in which we have allowed ourselves to explore new ways of working. What has happened over the last 12 months is that we have noticed ourselves challenging each other with the ‘why’ element of what we are doing. When we updated our school vision, we included the notion that being evidence based in our approach to school improvement was going to be key to our long-term success. The Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit was the start of this work. From there, our discussions quickly moved on, partly thanks to social media, and also because of the keenness of a critical number of staff to engage in professional dialogue about the craft of teaching and the effect that teaching has on the students in our classes. This approach has logically led to our discussions around teaching and learning almost always starting with an article, piece of professional research or book excerpt. What has struck us most is that this is not seen as unusual by the staff team now, but something they are beginning to expect as the backdrop to a professional discussion.

How have you achieved this? It started with the arrival of a new headteacher. He was keen to emphasise the promotion of teaching and learning as being at the core of what we do and that all staff had a responsibility to be constantly reflective and self-improving. It is important to note that what is being described here wasn’t a planned strategy; it is just how things worked out. 199

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The headteacher was a keen reader and would often share articles and reports with a range of staff members, not exclusively with the senior leadership team. This gently started a discussion among staff and promoted the craft of teaching as something everyone should engage in developing. A library of books arrived in the staff room and Twitter began to be used for sharing resources and ideas. Members of the leadership team started looking closely at the Sutton Trust-EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit and explored how it could influence the school’s practice. There had also been a number of new members of staff who were keen readers and research informed. It was a perfect, productive storm around research-led practice. From the context described above, we started trying things out in 2017, growing the culture in such a way that failure and success would knowingly occur on the journey. The English team ran a two-term trial of mixed-ability teaching in Year 8. After the deputy headteacher attended a full day of Mark. Plan. Teach. training with Ross, who then came into school and ran training as three optional twilights to our staff and colleagues from five other invited schools, the marking policy was replaced with a developmental feedback policy. A secondment for senior leadership focused on supporting the development of Years 2, 3 and 4 teachers, and discussion began about what the principles of effective teaching needed to be in our school and who was best to drive those. In the summer term of 2017, we invited staff to apply to become coaches. We had decided this would be a key element of our practice in the new academic year. 12 teachers have now been trained by Ross (again) from a cross-section of staff and almost all staff want to participate in round one of the coaching programme. In conjunction with this, our group study of Making Every Lesson Count by Allison and Tharby (2015) informed the development of a teaching and learning framework, wedded to our behaviour for learning framework. In both cases, these were tied to our school values. This provided us with a foundation from which to energise the development of the craft of teaching in our school.

How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? Crucially, schools cannot become research rich unless there is support for doing so from the headteacher and senior leadership team. Using research to inform your practice means accepting you will spend some time reading things you don’t necessarily use straight away (if at all); it also means stopping doing some things that may be established practice in your school and allowing staff at all levels to have a voice in the discussion. Having said that, everyone can read and reflect on research in their own practice; not everything research-led has to be driving whole-school change. However, there is something in this approach that is about accepting that being a great teacher (and who wouldn’t want to be good at their job?) is about doing more than planning and teaching lessons, talking to students and preparing feedback on their work. Teaching is a profession, and with that comes a responsibility to be aware of the emerging trends in thinking, and to do so, one must read widely. 200

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Social media has made that easier than it ever has been before. Fundamentally, though, when you find something great (through reading, applying ideas or both), you share it and tell others about it – the pros and the cons – and if you are an experienced teacher you make an extra special point of telling new teachers how you worked through the things that went wrong; they need to hear that. Senior leaders need to recognise that you won’t take everyone with you and that embracing the ‘cynic in the corner of the staff room’ is a great way to test why you are approaching something the way you are. Headteachers need to remember that they may be expected to know the solutions to all the problems in their school, but they will generally know the least about what it is actually like teaching in their school and that the wider senior team will be working in a similar bubble – so everyone must talk to and work with a good cross-section of staff. Finally, teachers need time and space to read, share ideas and discuss teaching. We are in no way perfect at this yet and still have a long way to go, but we have made great progress in a very short space of time. The staff body as a whole and their collective support for this work is absolutely key to that position.

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Why does this work? by Mark Martin MBE In education, the terms ‘action research’ and ‘practitioner’s research’ are reflective of one another because they both investigate the role of practitioners in the classroom and wider school life. Action research takes the form of teachers’ self-study in their classroom practice or school systems. The outcome is to enhance their practice in teaching, learning and school culture. The advantages of action research are to make teachers more reflective, to enhance their classroom strategies and interventions and to share good practice with others. However, action research is underpinned by the individual’s social, cultural and school settings. Depending on the culture, and the vision or limitations of the leadership team, action research can either be a seamless activity or a chore. Over the years, I have participated in several action research projects on effective styles of teaching in the classroom, sharing my insights online and with other educators from around the world, and refining the steps to gain a greater understanding of my classroom practice. Teachers, including myself, can become more reflective as classroom practitioners and more confident to share ideas and classroom experiences. The impact has been palpable for me because it has helped me to be open and receptive to constructive feedback. In education, there is no silver bullet to teaching and learning; it should be viewed as a journey and not a destination. It’s a continual process that needs to take place over a long period of time to produce tangible results – and more than just examination outcomes. Teaching is like planting a seed and nurturing its growth by regularly pruning the leaves that don’t work. To see the real gains in action research, you need to have a plan of action similar to a gym workout plan. In order to see a difference, you need to record your progress and measure the impact you are making in each class. The outcome should be visible and it should be clear to see whether progress is being made. To get started, find an area of research you are passionate about and position yourself somewhere you can make a difference. You might find colleagues internally or externally who share the same interest. You need to have a clear and concise area of research that you want to explore with some clear objectives and outcomes. Narrow the focus and seek critique, in terms of what evidence you want to demonstrate, but be conscious of research methods and bias when starting out. Mark Martin MBE, aka @Urban_Teacher, is recognised around the world for his insight and passion for education and technology. He has taught ICT for over ten years and has become an expert in helping teachers and schools use technology to improve teaching and learning.

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I

f we genuinely want schools in the British education system to be world class, then we must provide the conditions for our teachers to thrive. To achieve this, professional development, far beyond the first year of qualification, must be present throughout a teacher’s career, and every school must have the facilities and capacity to nurture this. To meet the challenges of today and to ensure teaching is a well-respected profession and is able to address its retention and recruitment challenges, we must enable teachers to grow; we must support and empower them in order to develop the best possible education system for our children. Professional development is an entitlement. It should be protected for every teacher in every school. It goes without saying that we need support from the government to achieve this, but I believe that if teachers can mobilise themselves, professional development can begin at a grass-roots level, with teachers and school leaders facilitating opportunities simply to talk to one another and reflect on their practice. In this chapter, we will explore what professional development in schools looks like currently and consider some ideas to develop CPD from the ground up.

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Why is this an issue? Some jurisdictions across the UK appear to be prioritising teacher CPD. Scotland, for example, requires teachers to undertake 35 hours of CPD activity every year. In Northern Ireland, rates of participation in teacher CPD are similar to the international average, and while Wales is below the international average in terms of participation in subject-specific CPD, there have at least been national initiatives to provide structured CPD and increase subject-specific support (Cordingley et al., 2018). In January 2019, the Department for Education in England published their Early Career Framework (ECF) to support new teachers in the profession (Department for Education, 2019a). This strategy was not only designed to streamline the application process for those wanting to get into teaching, but it also introduced the prospect of specialist qualifications, intended to appeal to experienced teachers who may wish to move into leadership positions, as well as job sharing and the promise of stability. This initiative has been welcomed by educators, as teachers Jon Hutchinson and Caroline Spalding (2019) write in the TES: ‘New teachers will receive what other professions have enjoyed for a long time: a structured, consistent and coherent induction period, in which they are taught the accumulated knowledge and skills necessary to not only survive but thrive in their chosen profession.’ So this is a very promising step in the right direction, but is it enough, given the serious challenges we are currently facing as a profession? When we look at international research, for example 31 per cent of teachers the Teaching and Learning International Survey and school leaders (TALIS), it’s clear that British teachers work some consider CPD to be a of the longest hours and get paid one of the worst strength in their salaries in OECD countries. The Education Policy school and Institute’s analysis of TALIS 2013 (Sellen, 2016) found 39 per cent that long working hours are hindering teachers’ think it’s a access to CPD, and long hours, low starting pay weakness. and limited access to CPD create a risk of teacher ‘burnout’, especially among those in the early stages of their careers. In relation to the average number of days spent on CPD, England was ranked 30th out of the 36 jurisdictions taking part, with teachers spending only four days on courses, observational visits, seminars and INSET. We only need to look at Shanghai, where teachers are allocated an average of 40 days per academic year for professional development, to see how shocking this is in comparison. Furthermore, as we discovered in Chapter 4, page 71, targets for teacher training applications have been missed, at least in England, for the past six years. Pathways into teaching have seen various reforms, whether this is to offer a wider range of access routes or to try to unlock the hallmarks for effective teacher training that equate to teachers staying in the profession for a longer period of time. Whatever method has been used, the challenge has persisted, so why should the ECF make any difference? 204

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Teacher motivation Despite this seemingly bleak picture, I do believe it is possible to entice people to stay in the classroom and even to return to the classroom if we can gain a clear understanding of what motivates individuals to become, and to remain, teachers. This must be a key focus for us all, as a profession; as Worth and Van den Brande (2019) argue, ‘the recruitment, development and retention of teachers and school leaders is a crucial underpinning for a successful education system’. Loic Menzies (2019), director of the think tank LKMco, sets out five key lessons for school leaders based on research on teacher motivation, and I believe there is much we can learn from this when it comes to improving our professional development offering: 1. Teachers go into the profession for different reasons, but the most common is ‘making a difference to pupils’ lives’, followed by ‘subject interest’, then a ‘desire to work with young people’. 2. Interestingly, the ‘quality of leadership and management’ was the least important motivating factor for entering the profession, ‘pay’ the second least and ‘holidays/time off’ the third least. 3. Recruitment is place-based, meaning teachers want to find schools near where they live, or where they wish to live. LKMco advise school leaders to look on their ‘front doorstep’ for the next generation of teachers. 4. Some teachers have motivations relating to transforming society or helping a local community, so schools in a difficult context should make this a selling point. 5. Many enter the profession accidentally, so schools should create opportunities to get people hooked. ‘Taster days’ or following up any applications with ‘an invitation to look around’ would be a sensible approach in the current recruitment climate. From these results, it’s clear to me that most teachers enter the profession knowing that they will be working long hours and the job will be hard, but they also really want to do a good job, whether that’s because they want to make a difference to the lives of young people or society as a whole, or impart their subject knowledge to the best of their abilities. To achieve any of these aims, teachers need quality professional development and I believe most individuals enter teaching expecting that they will be supported and receive the best training possible in their schools, but is that what we’re really offering them at the moment?

Quality of teacher professional development Teaching is not a job that can be achieved from a qualification on paper, yet often the default mode for teacher training is to provide lots of information and expect teachers to be better from receiving it, rather than spending the time learning how to use that information back in the classroom and later refine it. We cannot encourage our teachers to be better if we do not give them the time to learn how to become better. 205

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‘Professional training isn’t a tick-box exercise. As a profession, we continually need to be refreshed. Look at the medical profession, for example; they are getting continual training all of the time. Why don’t we get that as teachers? What absolutely has to be protected is the provision of that time. Dedicating fixed time to delivering high-quality CPD is my top tip in terms of facilitating anything else that takes place.’ Adrian Kidd, Headteacher, Trumpington Community College, Cambridge

For years, I and countless others have complained about the quality of teacher training on offer inside schools as well as outside. Rarely have I met a teacher who can count instances of high-quality training more than the number of fingers on both of their hands. The quality of our offering must have an impact on participation levels in professional development days. There are several reasons why quality CPD is lacking in our profession, including, to name but a few: • teachers lacking the confidence to share ideas with one another, perhaps due to an unsupportive environment or high-stakes accountability • lack of funding • lack of time (the proportion of teachers agreeing that their work schedule represents a barrier to professional development is the seventh highest in the 36 countries taking part in TALIS 2013; Sellen, 2016) • lack of relevance relating to individual needs • countless initiatives and priorities • goal post changes by government policy, which then determine training needs • administration tasks getting in the way • isolated training days, rather than training aggregated over a longer period of time offering, for example, retrieval practice (see page 58) • poor delivery • poor learning conditions, for example a cold school hall with no food. If professional development is poor or lacking, then teaching and teacher quality, as well as the wellbeing of teachers themselves, can never be world class. If we want to reduce the high turnover of teachers and entice more people into the profession, then our government must invest substantially, not only in initial teacher training but also in schools, so that they can provide the training they need for their own teachers. If we do not end this self-fulfilling prophecy, then we can expect to waste significant sums of money for another generation. If Britain, the fifth largest economy in the world, does not believe that it needs to invest more in its teachers and schools, we can start to assume that the world of education is simply not a priority. There 206

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are some schools in England who have already shifted to a 4.5-day week to make the school budget operational. Rather than seeking to improve prevention at the grass-roots level to further improve society, governments would rather spend more money on policing and nursing, which one could argue are sectors of our society that are there to cure elements and behaviours that may have been avoided if investment in education could support people in making better decisions. Of course, as teachers and school leaders, there is a limited amount we can do to entice the government to invest more in our education system. However, I believe the issue of quality professional development absolutely must be a cause for concern for all teachers and schools, and there are solutions to be found even at a grass-roots level. I hope the suggestions in this chapter will help you to find some ideas that work for you, your colleagues and your school.

How can we tackle it? ea 1

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A 20-point CPD plan

Regular professional development that is wellstructured, collaborative and relevant to a school’s context is absolutely essential throughout a teacher’s career. In this idea, I share my 20-point plan to help schools deliver this quality training to their staff. I have worked in some very challenging schools and overall behaviour management has been a fundamental asset in my teaching repertoire. The knowledge I have developed has been largely self-structured, but it has been significantly supported by very well-planned and timely teacher training days within the schools in which I have worked. In each of these examples, conversations about behaviour management strategies have made an immediate impact in my classroom the very next day. At a deeper level, the impact of high-quality professional development is significant on staff motivation, self-esteem and confidence. This then soon permeates across the teaching community and, in the case of behaviour, makes a difference to student incidents and general classroom and corridor behaviour. But how can all schools make this a reality in their own contexts? I have come up with an ambitious but achievable 20-point plan to help schools improve their professional development offering. This is based on what I have seen working in schools across the country, not just those institutions highlighted in this book, but in all the Early Years, primary and secondary schools, independent and state schools, free schools, grammar schools, boarding schools, PRUs, academies and international schools I have visited.

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The 20-point plan 1. Professional development is protected. It is treated as a non-negotiable part of school life and what the school offers to its staff. 2. Professional development is calendared in advance for the academic year, and this schedule is adhered to without fail (see Idea 2, page 209, for more on this). 3. There is a clear programme of study, linked to whole-school priorities as well as the national agenda. 4. Accessing educational research has a grass-roots approach, with all colleagues opting into training sessions to meet their own needs. 5. The leadership team takes a step back from the delivery of the sessions, but always takes part. I’ve lost count of how many ‘emergencies’ pop up during teacher training sessions... 6. Teaching and learning ideas are presented and interpreted during training sessions, and then taken away for practice in the classroom. 7. Ideas are revisited and evaluated after the sessions; teachers regularly discuss how they are working in the classroom and are in keeping with cognitive science recommendations about retrieval and deliberate practice (see Chapter 3, page 58). 8. Discussions are always honest, non-threatening and reflective. 9. There is a collegiate feel, with external visitors and partnership schools collaborating, where needed. 10. Support staff are catered for and they lead on aspects of professional development and sometimes drive the agenda; there is a collegiate approach to whole-school improvement, rather than an ‘us and them’ mentality. 11. Support staff feel valued; they stand up in front of teaching colleagues and present about things they have learnt and how this translates into their school work. 12. Memberships to organisations are encouraged. This may include the British Council, the Chartered College of Teaching, subject associations, teaching unions, the Scottish College for Educational Leadership, BERA, BELMAS, the Arts Council for Wales and NAHT Cymru to name a few. Membership is either subsidised or paid for by the school. Perhaps governments could offer some obligatory memberships to level the playing field. 13. If possible, one per cent of the school’s overall budget is used to fund teacher training, external pathways and formal qualifications. 14. There is a mixture of morning, lunch and after-school sessions to meet the needs of all staff, including those with flexible working conditions. 15. In situations where part-time members of staff cannot attend, there is a follow-up session to ensure no one misses out. 16. Childcare facilities, diversity and gender are high on the agenda. 208

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17. Gone are the days of one person at the front, reading PowerPoint slides to a room full of adults. All sessions, even theory, are made as pragmatic as possible. 18. There is a move away from the traditional training days, which are often three or five isolated days per academic year, in favour of disaggregating the time throughout the year to offer a more regular, rhythmic and longer-term approach to enable ideas to be revisited (see Idea 2, below). 19. Alternative approaches to lesson observation are available, for example where teachers build up their own portfolio of evidence, containing videos of ‘teaching’ inside and outside of the classroom, and a list of professional development attended – including those at the weekend or in their own time, as well as alternative methods such as social media. 20. Finally, appraisal moves swiftly from performance management to research enquiry (see Chapter 9, page 191).

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Interleaving and spaced CPD

In a climate where more and more educators are considering cognitive science, for example interleaving and spaced practice for revision and teaching techniques in the classroom, it makes sense to use this model in our own professional learning.

Imagine joining a new school and having little or no idea about the professional development and opportunities available to you. This is the reality for some teachers, who are given the bog-standard induction programme, whether they are experienced or inexperienced, with no follow-up ‘check-in’ to gauge whether policies live out on paper. Often, teachers settle into their schools, and as they progress through the years working within the same institution, they forget there may be development opportunities available to them. Most schools still operate on the typical five days per academic year for professional development. However, some research schools in the UK have now moved to a model in which this time is disaggregated into multiple sessions over an academic year. I would advocate that all schools consider having regular professional development sessions staggered throughout the year and being completely upfront about what is available to staff right at the beginning of September. This allows for key learning and ideas to be revisited over the course of the year to help them become embedded in teachers’ day-to-day practice, rather than mentioned in a one-off training day in October, then forgotten about by Christmas. The calendared time should then be protected. Spending time on regular teaching and learning sessions is much more likely to drive up standards than wasting resources enforcing a high-stakes environment that monitors the number of coloured pens being used for marking. 209

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How can we achieve this? There is nothing more frustrating than your school CPD leads having to spend hours trying to conjure up a professional development programme that is meaningful to every individual. This has happened to me on countless occasions over the decade during which I led professional development for around 1,000 teachers. It’s a challenge but if we expect our teachers to meet the individual needs of our students, then surely we should expect our schools to meet the individual needs of their staff. What I have learnt to do is to publish a ‘CPD menu’, where new and current staff can see at a glance what development opportunities are available to them, whether funded or part of the school’s day-to-day training schedule. You can then consistently communicate professional development events with all staff. The best way to achieve this is to have a schedule published one year in advance, with a range of colleagues leading, contributing to and attending various CPD pathways that introduce then revisit ideas over the three terms. Design a simple calendar and align each event with school priorities and recurring themes, for example assessment, curriculum, marking, lesson planning, safeguarding, research and so forth. Each theme could be published into a calendar cycle, which repeats itself throughout the year. The calendar should be easily accessible online and discussed regularly. ‘We started small-scale by introducing colleagues to ResearchEd events, the idea being: come along to these research events, identify the areas of training you’d like to be more directly involved in and exposed to, review and evaluate those elements and then start to disseminate and share them back here as part of distributed training in short, timelimited slots.’ Adrian Kidd, Headteacher, Trumpington Community College, Cambridge

You could even try adding CPD ‘clinics’ into your calendar. These can then work as regular slots where people can have professional development conversations about what they are interested in. Surely this would be a simple and highly effective way to raise the profile of ‘adults as learners’ in your school. The transparent and published schedule will ensure that all staff are aware of plans and will also raise the profile of professional development and its importance. This communicates to all colleagues, including the school leadership team, that CPD is an essential. Other than safeguarding, I see no other aspect of school life that takes precedence over developing our workforce. Why? Because all areas of school life can be developed in CPD sessions rather than left to chance. Of course, school is complex and sometimes things such as inspections, snow days and travel disruption can scupper even the most carefully laid-out plans. But there 210

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is no excuse for a school to knock a professional development plan on its head simply because another priority has popped up. A school will always have countless priorities, but there is nothing more important than ensuring there is long-term continuing professional development in place. If an incident does occur, having a calendared schedule will give you a stronger case for the professional development plan remaining, especially as in some schools it is the first thing to be culled when an emergency arises.

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Grass-roots CPD

It’s best if CPD events are carefully calendared, as I explained in Idea 2, but if this isn’t possible, every teacher and school leader can nonetheless start implementing CPD from the ground up, so colleagues can share best practice and develop their skill sets and teaching repertoire. The most powerful grass-roots teacher training events I have tested in my own schools, as well as those I have led across the UK, are incredibly simple to facilitate. They depend on two basic human constructs: speaking and listening. Here are some of the best ways I have found to facilitate these events and I hope they’ll inspire you to run your own.

Marketplace Simply choose a topic to discuss and bring teachers together, just like you would see people shopping in a street market. This can be standing or sitting, but the principle is that people come to share and compare ideas, and teacher voice is at the heart of the training. Interesting ways to increase engagement could be selecting a few of the best ideas for a whole-school presentation, having all the ideas presented at separate tables and teachers visiting each table in turn, or capturing the events in another format, for example photographs or a live video broadcast on social media to the world. This last idea might sound complicated but it’s actually easy to do and definitely a good way to increase the stakes and offer excellent exposure to your school – try Periscope via Twitter for an easy fix! To give you an example of how this might work in practice, let me introduce you to the ‘marking marketplace’. Each year team or department brings a range of books to share and compare ideas about assessment and a student’s experience of work in each subject. The event should take place in a large hall and departments move from table to table to look at how a child performs in each different subject. Alternatively, all the teachers move to a similar subject area to compare teaching and learning ideas. It doesn’t have to be marking. Instead, try a classroom resource, a Twitter training session or an app or set of inspirational resources. Whatever you want to share, the principle is that teachers visit one another’s methods and strategies within a whole-school setting. 211

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‘There is tremendous good practice that exists throughout the school. Nobody owns that. Everybody here is incredibly open-sourced with their top tips – some colleagues have called them Top Trumps – and sharing their good ideas. It takes place in an informal setting.’ Adrian Kidd, Headteacher, Trumpington Community College, Cambridge

Speed dating I thought of this idea in 2014 after a bottle of red wine, so be careful! I recall vividly one or two of my colleagues, who were very experienced, were quite happy to share their scepticism before we launched this idea with all staff. I’m pleased to report that they came back at the end of the session and expressed their deepest thanks. ‘This has been the most powerful CPD session I’ve attended,’ one member of staff said to me. Speed dating works on the same premise as the marketplace, but brings people closer together in one-to-one conversations. Now, a disclaimer: I have never attended speed dating events to improve my love life, but I am aware of how they operate – having conducted some detailed, evidence-informed research! Therefore, imagine a school hall with tables around the perimeter of the room. On each side of the table sits one chair for one colleague to sit upon. We now have a ring of chairs around the room, with a ring of tables in front of those chairs, and another set of chairs inside the inner circle facing the table and the opposite chair. The principle is that the person sitting on the inner chair moves to the next chair after a set period of time. I have tested various time limits and one minute seems to be a good starting point. Each participant has 30 seconds to share one of their best ideas in the classroom. The other participant takes 30 seconds to listen to the other and then they swap. After the minute is up, the person on the inner chair stands up and moves around with everybody else in a clockwise fashion. While that is happening, the individual marks off whether they like the idea or not. The marks are then counted at the end of the session, and you announce the top three teaching and learning ideas to the group. In my experience, the idea voted top of the list becomes a key strategy for all teachers to consider using in their classrooms. Where there is a physical resource involved, you could commit some school funding to having it manufactured for all classrooms or make it for all classrooms. It’s a simple way to gauge the mood and needs of your staff and it requires two or three people to manage the instructions and dynamics! Visit www.teachertoolkit. co.uk/speed-dating-cpd to discover all the resources you need to get started. 212

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TeachMeets

‘One thing that is effective is If you are feeling adventurous, try ensuring that the CPD isn’t TeachMeets, which have been just delivered by the colleague around since 2008 and have responsible for teaching and evolved from their original origins learning. It is instead a contribution in a pub in Edinburgh to marketed from everybody. Having that events with sponsors and prizes, distributed ownership empowers drawing in crowds of 400 or 500 everybody to see the relevance of people. I first attended a the CPD and how to apply it. It’s TeachMeet in 2011 in Essex, and making the best use of everyone’s then spent the next four years skills and interests to contribute to networking and bringing the greater good.’ thousands and thousands of teachers together in TeachMeets Adrian Kidd, Headteacher, across London. They are a great Trumpington Community College, opportunity to bring lots of Cambridge external people into your own school setting, but this does come at a cost because organising events does significantly increase your workload. So, delegate to willing colleagues and use the teacher social media community to bring in willing volunteers and speakers. I’ve even organised one on a London red bus and on a boat floating up and down the River Thames! Whether TeachMeets happen during the week or at the weekend depends on the context. If you want to create a live event during school hours, then you may not be able to recreate a TeachMeet-style atmosphere, but you can certainly replicate the principle. Essentially, teachers spend roughly five to seven minutes standing in front of their peers and sharing what they have been doing in their classroom. We ask students to do this every day in every lesson, but we seem to have forgotten what it’s like to do this as a teacher. Many teachers are fearful of speaking in front of their peers, but I would encourage everyone to do so in order to support a culture of curiosity. After all, just because we are teachers, it doesn’t mean we’ve stopped learning, and by doing so, it builds up your public speaking confidence. I would argue that this very activity has helped me to develop the confidence to speak at keynote conferences around the world to hundreds of people. If you keep a close eye on social media, you will see teachers all around the world curating their own events through ticketing pages and their own websites to bring people together to talk about teaching and learning. Funnily enough, the 213

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TeachMeet concept has also recently evolved back to its original origins of bringing a group of teachers together in a café or bar for refreshments and snacks to share and talk about teaching. One such example is #BrewEd and another is #EdCamp, which is a model from the US. If you want to find out more about how to try something different, where all teachers can have a voice, visit www.teachertoolkit. co.uk/edcamp-model and discover all the ready-made resources on www. teachertoolkit.co.uk/teachers-talking-about-teaching.

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New to teaching – CPD

There are many pathways in place to support new teachers to the profession, but I would like you to take a moment to consider what is available for new teachers inside your school setting.

In England, new teachers can follow countless pathways into the profession and thereafter. In January 2019, the Education Secretary of State Damian Hinds announced a £130 million investment as part of the Early Career Framework (Department for Education, 2019a; see page 204). However, there is little or no support for unqualified teachers and when you break down the overall cost versus the number of schools in England, the amount of cash available for one school barely offers an additional two hours free for a new teacher to gain support. In a large inner-city secondary school, in my experience, we often had five to ten newly qualified teachers every academic year, so this funding will not go very far in a school of this size. In Wales, the Education Workforce Council (EWC) is responsible for administering induction funding to schools. The Professional Teaching Standards (PTS) have five areas of values and dispositions to develop a professional learning passport on the EWC’s website. I have argued for years that this is what is needed in England and, just like in Scotland, where our colleagues develop an online portfolio, this can be shared with future employers or other colleagues when discussing professional development needs. In a period of time when we are immersed in technology from all aspects of society, one does wonder why our English system does not yet have this in place. The Welsh government requires all individuals to be recognised as qualified teachers in Wales. Again this is something that is echoed in Scotland but not in England. In Scotland, new teachers are supported by the General Teaching Council Scotland (GTCS). All teachers teach the areas of Scotland’s curriculum for excellence with various routes into teaching, including the traditional primary and secondary pathways, leading to a degree. Some courses reach five years of study and some steer towards a master’s degree. Distance learning and the Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) are also offered. What I have always admired about the Scottish system is that all teachers are strictly registered and receive coaching.

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In Northern Ireland, all teachers must be registered with the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland (GTCNI), the Education Authority or the Northern Ireland Substitute Teachers Register (NISTR). Qualification here means that the teacher can work anywhere across the UK, but further induction will be needed to understand curriculum and qualification differences; every new teacher builds upon the career entry profile portfolio of evidence in the initial year of training. If a teacher moves from elsewhere in the UK to go and work in Northern Ireland, the same induction applies.

Supporting new teachers So, that’s the background for each country in the UK, but if you’ve been assigned an NQT to mentor or you have some NQTs in your staff team, what can you do to welcome and support them? Here are some top tips for you and your school: 1. Bombard your new teachers with tons and tons of classroom resources – anything to help make day-to-day classroom management easier: board pens, miniwhiteboards, stationery and coloured paper. 2. At least once a half term, check in with them and check that everything is ‘working’, for example radiators, the whiteboard or projector, the electrics and that broken table leg that may help a child behave better in class. 3. Build a buddy system where experienced teachers are paired up with a new teacher outside of their team or department. If strong relationships are developed, this teacher can become an alternative sounding board for critical friendships and advice. 4. Take your new teachers out for a social event once a term to help build up a camaraderie spirit at ground level. 5. Sow the seed early on that they will all be speaking about ideas they have tested in their classrooms in front of all staff. This ensures development and growth on their part and gives all staff an opportunity to hear what newer teachers are doing and get to know them. 6. Test your school leadership team with photos of new teachers in the school. Remove their names and specialisms, and instead offer an interesting fact as an ‘easy way in’ for school leaders to engage with all new staff, not just the NQT lead. 7. Invite school leaders to the occasional NQT session to hear key topics, and ask various teachers to attend and lead CPD sessions for NQTs. Context is key and some schools may not have the capacity, but the NQT induction lead shouldn’t really be leading all of the training sessions. New teachers need a wide lens, early on. Do not let your school leaders play down the importance of attending these sessions. We can all learn from one another. 8. Avoid anything happening on a Friday, apart from celebrations! 215

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Investing in teachers

To get a real sense of how enhanced your professional development work is within your school, I would advocate looking externally, not just to other schools but also beyond the world of education. One method of doing this is through the Investors in People framework.

Investors in People (IiP) is a not-for-profit organisation that offers an international framework for reviewing appraisal, professional development, recruitment and retention, staff wellbeing and perceptions. It has accredited thousands of organisations across the UK and further afield, both in the private and public sector, and this includes many schools. In fact, they claim they have ‘made work better for over 11 million people since 1991’ in over 75 countries around the world (Investors in People, 2019). In my time as a leader of professional development, I facilitated three separate visits from IiP, all achieving an international benchmark. The review includes an evaluation of: • health and wellbeing strategy and resources, for example staff absence and HR processes • staff and leadership management • management effectiveness, recognition, reward and empowerment • how performance is measured and evaluated. If you would like the IiP accreditation (and have budget for this), it is most certainly worth inviting them into your school to conduct an official review. Visit www.investorsinpeople.com for more information. However, I also believe that there is plenty we can learn from the IiP processes in order to assess and improve how we support and develop our teachers. A way in which schools can assess this for themselves is to conduct regular and anonymised surveys to gauge policy and staff perception. A simple fix to ensure staff voice is high profile is a ‘You Said, We Did’ display, which shares ideas from staff and what the school leadership did about issues raised. It’s a useful feedback methodology, and we all should regularly remind ourselves of the problems that have come before and how we have tackled them. We need to encourage more problem-finding, not just problem-solving. If we understand more about ‘what works’ in the classroom, we should also do more to understand ‘what works’ in terms of how we treat our teachers and the impact this can have on staff performance and student attainment.

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Teacher development Here in the UK, when we talk about ‘investing in teachers’, I believe a core focus should be on developing teachers, so they can be the best they can be in their classrooms. Simon Smith (2018) has several recommendations as to how schools can achieve this: • Teachers should have autonomy over their own professional development, deciding what they need, when they need it and why. • Schools should invest time in developing every teacher, providing the right opportunities for each individual’s specific needs. • School leaders should set time aside to listen to teachers and what they want from professional development, and then set goals based on these requirements. • Line managers should be clear about what a staff member is doing well – they need to know that they should keep doing it! • Schools should make sure appraisal is of high value to the teacher and should consider carefully what is measurable and achievable (see Chapter 9, Idea 4, page 191). Compare these ideas to the high-stakes accountability model we have been so accustomed to seeing in schools. Which do you think is driving teachers out of the profession and which is empowering teachers to become even better classroom practitioners? I know what my answer is. Taking the time to invest in what your teachers need and want from their careers and their day-to-day professional lives is a hallmark of what IiP cite as best practice. Placing professional development at the heart of your school can be achieved, even in difficult circumstances, and if you can create an environment where people are working to the best of their abilities, everything else will fall into place.

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School case study nity College School name: Trumpington Commu Location: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire lege is a relatively new, stateContext: Trumpington Community Col s on the southern fringe

to 16-year-old of-the-art secondary school for 11ort ber 2019, it will have its first full coh tem Sep In of the city of Cambridge. of y acit cap full a to eventually leading of students from Year 7 to Year 11, es rd-winning architecture that facilitat awa an 750 students in 2021. It has of use ted gra inte ly leading in the high innovative practice and is a school . ning lear and hes to teaching technology to support new approac

Why is this area a particular strength at your school? There has been an increasing challenge over the efficacy of more ‘standard’ approaches to CPD delivery, such as separate, infrequent or disjointed INSET days or twilight sessions, where, for example, colleagues attend one of a range of workshops. There is uncertainty in the consistent cascade of sharing of good practice from these sessions. Furthermore, there is a question over whether there is any sustained impact or ‘stickability’ of any practice that is shared. Trumpington, therefore, has approached CPD differently to bring all colleagues together more regularly, facilitate opportunities for everyone to contribute, and expose colleagues to the best, most relevant educational research. The current programme of 15 minutes of daily CPD allows all classroom colleagues to deliver, learn, discuss and debate, agree on application, test, evaluate and provide feedback. It has impacted NQTs especially by bringing them regularly into close contact with experienced colleagues to support their early career development. There is increased exposure and discussion around the most effective pedagogical techniques; colleagues are openly engaged in their own research and the sharing of outcomes with everyone. Following training, quality assurance and observation evidence are a significant improvement in the consistent application of identified actions. Many areas now show greater consistency for the application and highquality delivery of educational routines or techniques. There is more work to do in this regard and we are moving to ensure techniques are embedded and applied even more consistently.

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How have you achieved this? Investing in colleagues’ continual development became both a key priority and a non-negotiable. Alongside this was a fresh perspective for NQTs and how they should be supported. There are too many instances where these colleagues, who require the greatest initial professional support and development, are unintentionally ‘neglected’. The NQT year should not be about surviving; rather, it should be about flourishing. Get it right with these colleagues, as with all, and we have a solid bedrock for continuing school (and system) improvement. There also needed to be an adjustment to the appraisal process to wrap all these developments together into a well-integrated, more coherent process. Each colleague has been provided with a sum of money to identify how to use materials to support their professional development. Colleagues are entrusted to use this sum to benefit themselves in the best way. Resources are added to the professional library in the school’s training room for others to benefit from. Access to events, such as ResearchEd or the Cambridge Festival of Education, are supported. A new approach to high-quality teaching and learning took the form of a Code of Practice, which identified a core of well-known, high-impact techniques that centre around Rosenshine’s Principles. These important principles have been supported through an understanding of ideas developed by Lemov, the Learning Scientists and McGill. Consultation helped to develop the strategy for the provision and delivery of CPD throughout the academic year. There is an ongoing focus on these core techniques as the essential basis for the school’s practice. Teacher voice has been developed further. It is not enough for colleagues to be directed towards professional development. They should be comfortable and empowered enough to identify their own needs. Quality assurance processes were adjusted to include the opportunity for professional self-assessment. Accompanying feedback informed the school of more bespoke development needs, which were then integrated into the daily CPD sessions or voluntary afternoon workshops led by a practitioner strong in a given identified area. Appraisal now includes one target that is research based. Outcomes from some research areas feed directly into CPD and are led specifically by that particular colleague, supporting the school’s wider drive to promote leadership and wholeschool impact. There is an increased openness and trust to try out new ideas – or to make existing ones even better. Colleagues are keen to share their innovations and demonstrate how improvement can come about: this only adds to the ongoing momentum and ownership of CPD. There is an understanding that this approach to CPD is aimed at improvement, in terms of both workload and balance, as well as teaching and learning. There is a genuine value placed upon CPD. 219

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How could other teachers and school leaders apply this to their own practice and school context? Teaching is perhaps one of the few careers where training is not prioritised well enough or given the time and value it deserves, especially when compared to other high-value professions. We are responsible for a significant proportion of the next generation’s development, so surely it is essential that we are as skilled as possible through considered use of research to deliver an educational experience that is of high quality, high impact, up to date and relevant. The first step is to recognise this and to seriously reconsider the importance of training. Investing in high-quality CPD can also support recruitment and retention and bring benefits to workload and work–life balance – issues that persist negatively for the profession. CPD should be viewed initially as the solution to a number of issues: improving consistency, stickability and delivery; developing NQTs as excellent practitioners; developing autonomous, self-reflective professionals; and releasing much needed time. Schools should also reduce the amount of training provided after school when colleagues, frankly, are tired. Consideration about the timing and placement of professional development is important. A well-planned, highly focused activity with everyone involved, improves consistency, supports the sharing of good practice and encourages interesting discussion. Some of the allocated time in the morning may be handed over not to meet as a whole school, but instead as smaller groups with similar needs, or simply to have time to put into practice what has been learned. Time to practise the application of core techniques is also something to consider and currently this is seen only in a minority of schools. CPD and its delivery should not be thought about as an individual component: it’s important to evaluate the whole system and consider how, at the next level, this approach to CPD seamlessly integrates across other elements without duplicity, acting instead to enhance. Essentially, it is the development of a coherent vision for CPD that brings about purpose. Wrapping professional development around a core of well-defined principles rooted within a spectrum of well-researched and balanced evidence has worked well. While directed time requires factoring in and that rigour and accountability in follow-up and assessment is in place, nurturing a positive culture that supports buy-in to professional development, by highlighting within the rationale the clear benefits in terms of improved skills, workload and work–life balance, is a far better approach. Encouraging all colleagues to contribute to leading CPD sessions and fostering ownership is something we openly strive to encourage and support.

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Why does this work? by Professor Andy Hargreaves On one of my mountain hikes on the Appalachian Trail, I shared a hut with the transportation manager for a large school district. ‘What’s the most important thing people need to know about school bus drivers?’ I asked. ‘The school bus driver is usually the first person kids see outside the home before school starts, and the last one they see coming home,’ he replied. Shared joys and warning signs of bullying or abuse all start with the bus driver. Everybody matters in the school, including support staff, and so does CPD that improves their relationships with the students. The most effective CPD is collaborative, as many of Ross’s examples show. In Norway, we studied a school where the principal involved the teachers in deciding the future direction of the school, including decisions about CPD. Too often, headteachers get the big picture while teachers are given the big binder, but professionally respectful CPD engages teachers in the big picture too. I have witnessed teachers’ industrial action in several countries, including the UK. This often involves a chopping-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face strategy of refusing to participate in CPD. For the first few months, teachers say they love it. There are no more meetings, and finally, they can just teach. Brilliant. Until they start to miss learning and sharpening their saws by talking with colleagues about their practice. CPD is an entitlement, yet it is also an obligation. CPD is something teachers cannot go without for long. In Hong Kong, Fan Ling College receives 100 visitors twice a year to watch complex lessons in self-regulated learning. At the end of the lesson, visitors give feedback, some of it critical. ‘Why did you only call on four students to answer?’ ‘The lesson goes very fast; what about those who can’t keep up?’ Why doesn’t the observed teacher collapse in tears? First, because she and her colleagues have planned, practised and revised their lesson together. It’s not her lesson. It’s their lesson. Second, there are protocols that separate critical feedback from supportive feedback. Being critical is a role, not a personality disorder! Great CPD is collaborative but also challenging sometimes in pushing each other further. Ross’s great chapter for great teaching confirms the research – great CPD is collaborative, embedded, well resourced, timely, and often teacher driven in a school environment that helps teachers connect their own passions and motivations to school priorities. Effective CPD is pursued together, happens everywhere, ultimately includes everybody, occurs all the time, and, in terms of the benefits for all the adults in the school and those they serve, lasts forever. Andy Hargreaves has worked in education for over 40 years. He is Research Professor at Boston College, Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa, and Honorary Professor at Swansea University. Andy serves as an Adviser in Education to Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland. Learn more on www.andyhargreaves.com and via Twitter @hargreavesbc. 221

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Conclusion From the many schools, colleges and universities I’ve visited and the thousands of teachers I’ve engaged with, both in person and on social media, I am reassured that many educators are meeting the ten challenges presented in this book. All schools are doing remarkable things with our children – the ten schools featured in this book are a mere snapshot of the incredible work already taking place in thousands of schools across the country. As a profession, we have our challenges, and I don’t know all the answers, but I’m prepared to spend the rest of my working days trying to find a better solution and helping to change the narrative across the UK. Teaching should be one of the most respected professions within our society. Along with police, doctors and nurses, we are best placed to meet the needs of our young people, and we must be given the right tools and conditions to thrive. To achieve this, we must come together. Sadly, I’m beginning to see teachers criticising rather than celebrating one another, and for me, this is an indication that politics is beginning to drive pedagogy. Instead of giving into this, we, as teachers and school leaders, must fight to challenge perceptions in the media and help to broadcast how important we are as a collective profession. We must be a part of challenging the status quo and encouraging our societies to invest in our education system. Only then can we enable all teachers to thrive and to deliver great teaching, every day, which is what our young people need and deserve. When it comes to accountability, we do, of course, need to hold ourselves to high standards – and even my good friend the Grim Reaper has a part to play here. We need to draw upon evidence and research and have protocols in place to ensure our successes and failures can be handed down to the next generations. Yet, when we have a system where our most vulnerable children are numbers on a spreadsheet, or where a funding decision can be made that later impacts on their opportunities and the life chances they may have had, we start to understand that we are working within a very complex sector. Any business capital model is difficult to evaluate when people are the key ingredient, and when our accountability systems hinder innovation and red tape gets in the way of people being able to do their jobs, we can hold schools behind. Teachers simply need the time and space to teach with simplicity and passion, to collaborate and develop – simply to be in front of their students and stand alongside colleagues. That’s it. That’s Just Great Teaching. So, as we reach the end of this book, there is just one thing I hope you will remember: as a profession, we need to talk up teaching. We need to celebrate the amazing work that our teachers do. I urge you to speak with one another about teaching and learning and to have meaningful conversations about pedagogy. The schools that are thriving are designing one-to-one conversations for teachers for classroom observations, research and appraisal. Do that only and do it well. As educators in a complex world of politics, we should respect one another’s views and recognise that, while we all work in different circumstances, we often face the same challenges. Only then can we reshape the narrative and convince the public, parents and politicians that all that matters in our education system is making it a place for our teachers to thrive. 222

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Index A

B

accountability 50–2, 78 Adams, S. 190 adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ) 11, 12 see also comparative assessment ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) 122–5, 139 Allen, B. 2, 5 AP (alternative provision) 119–21 see also exclusions appraisals collective teacher efficacy 196 research-led 191–5 target-driven 193 see also professional development apprenticeships 127–9 Armstrong, A. 51, 60 arthrogryposis multiplex congenita 139 artificial intelligence 19–20, 25 arts, the 164, 166–7 assessment and artificial intelligence 19–20, 25 characteristics of 5 comparative 10–12 data collection as 4–6 day to day 1–2 exit tickets 16 formal 1–2 formative 10 give me five 16–17 key word bingo 17 as limiting metric 3 over-aiding in 4 plenaries 15–17 questioning 14–17, 36, 59 quizzes 17, 36, 58, 59 RAG123 self-reflection tool 16 role of technology 12, 20, 25 tracking progress 2–3 whole-class 13 see also marking; testing assessment by pairwise ranking (APR) 11 see also comparative assessment attainment gap 184–5 austerity 119 autism 139, 153–5

Balls, E. 161 Bambrick-Santoyo, P. 41 Barry, J. 70, 71, 76, 78, 91 Barton, G. 103 Beadle, P. 15 behaviour managing 118, 132–3, 134–6, 173 see also exclusions Bethune, A. 96 Blunkett, D. 161 Bonner, H. 27, 30 boundaries 133 Bourdieu, P. 170 Bousted, M. 73–4 Brady, J. 75 Brown, P. 186 Browne, A. 159 bullying 82, 101, 107 Burgess, S. 185, 194

C case studies CP Riverside School 134–6 Fettes College 66–8 Homewood School and Sixth Form Centre 156–8 Layton Primary School 21–4 Magdalen College School 176–8 Parson Street Primary School 93–5 Queen Mary’s Grammar School 113–15 Slough and Eton Church of England Business and Enterprise College 199–201 Trumpington Community College 218–20 Ysgol Henry Richard 45–7 Celebrating Difference 109 CENTURY 12, 20, 25 cerebral palsy 139 change of routine 143 Child Poverty Action Group 79–80 Christodoulou, D. 10 chunking 36 Claxton, G. 24 Clay, B. 181 Clotfelter, C. T. 79 Clucas, J. 6, 15 coaching 63–5 coaching conversations 40–2, 83–4

Coe, R. 5 cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) 171 cognitive dissonance 190–1 cognitive load theory 53–4, 173 cognitive offloading 35 cognitive overload 35 Cole, T. 117 Coleman, R. 53 collaborative planning 38–40 colleagues, bullying from 82 collective teacher efficacy 196 Collins, K. 184 Collins, P. 183, 197 comparative assessment 10–12 consistency 133 Corbyn, J. 99 counselling services 103 CPD see professional development critical thinking 54–5, 170–1 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 8–9 cultural literacy 170 Cunningham, M. 191–2, 194 curriculum assessing 167–9 broadening 165 ‘change fatigue’ 164 delivery 174–5 future-proofing 169–72 history of 160–1 individual choice 172 ‘knowledge rich’ 28 National Curriculum 161–2 planning 28–9, 42–3, 47 purpose of 163 real-world skills 171 in Scotland 162 in Wales 162

D data collection 4–6 ‘data drops’ 4–5 Daulby, J. 137 declarative knowledge 28–9 Dellenty, S. 109 developmental coordination disorder (DCD) 145 see also dyspraxia Devon, N. 104 Donaldson, G. 78–9 dual coding 56–8 dyscalculia 139, 148–50 dyslexia 139, 141, 150–3 dyspraxia 139, 145–8

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Just Great Teaching

E education, health and care plan (EHCP) 140, 153 Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) 2 Education Policy Institute, on challenges in education 71–2 Education Reform Act 1988 161 Education Scotland 78 Education Support Partnership 27 Elliott, V. 10 emotional decisions 63 encouragement 133 English Baccalaureate (EBacc) 163–4 Epstein, R. 34 Equality Act 2010, on mental health 84–5 Ericsson, A. 186 eSafety 107 Estyn 78 ETNI (Education and Training Inspectorate) 79 evaluating 62–5 Evers, J. 20 evidence defining 51 need for 51–2 see also accountability exclusions ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) 122–5 benefits of 121 effects of 120–1 facts about 117–18 managed moves 129–31 off-rolling 4, 120, 122 Progress 8 118–19 reducing 122, 132–3 exit tickets 16 Eyre, M. 121, 127, 130, 132

F feedback and marking 6–7 and motivation 36 policy 88–9 verbal 17–19 written 17–18 Firth, J. 36 five minute digital lesson plan 31 flow, state of 8–9 Ford, T. 120 formative assessment 10 Freedman, S. 78 Friday call 127 Friedman, S. 184–5

funding cuts 77, 119 impact on mental health 103 for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) 142

Kohn, A. 8 Kuepper-Tetzel, C. 69 Kunskapsskolan schools 172–3

G

Lakhani, P. 24 Langton, R. 107, 111, 113 Laurison, D. 185 learning dual coding 56–8 evaluating 62–5 hands-on 133 making learning visible 84 and memory 35–6, 43, 58–60 objectives 32–3 planning for 35–6 process of 33–4 retrieval practice 58–9 see also teaching learning walks 62 Lees, S. 144, 153 lesson plans 30–2, 38–9 Leverage Leadership 41 Lister, K. 16 live-marking 19 Longfield, A. 120 long-term memory 34–5, 58 long-term planning 28 Lowbridge-Ellis, D. 86

‘gaming’ 4 gender stereotypes 127 generalisations 105 Generation Z 107 Gibb, N. 99 give me five 16–17 Global Teacher Status Index 75 Goddard, V. 137 Google Classroom 12 Google Scholar 53 Gove, M. 161 grass-roots teacher training 211 Greaves, E. 185

H hallmarks of great teaching 55–6 hands-on learning 133 Happé, F. 154 Hargreaves, A. 50, 221 Hattie, J. 8, 37–8, 182 headteachers, retention of 79 Hidden Lives of Learners, The 13–14 ‘hidden’ SEND 139 Hirsch Jr., E.D. 170 home–school links 125–7 homework benefits of 8 online 9 at primary level 9 purpose of 7–8 setting 9 Horvath, J. C. 33 Hunt, J. 108 Hutchinson, J. 204

I images, triggering 104 independence, and dyslexia 152 initiation – response – evaluation (I-R-E) method 14 International Baccalaureate 171 Investors in People (IiP) 216

K Kahneman, D. 186 Kerr, K. 18 Key Stage 2 SATs 2 key word bingo 17 Kidd, A. 206, 210, 212, 213 Kimbell, R. 11 kindness 132 Kingsnorth, S. 74 Kirschner, P. A. 53 knowledge 28–9 knowledge organisers 43–4

L

M Makedon, A. 49–50 Making data work 5 managed moves 129–31 marking 1, 6 comparative assessment 10–12 consistency 6–7 as feedback 6–7 live-marking 19 reducing 9–12, 89–90 zero-marking policy 1 see also homework Martin, M. 202 mastery-approach goals 36 May, T. 100, 112 McPhee, S. 107, 110 medium-term planning 29 meetings 90–1 memorable moments 35–6 memory 34–6, 58 and learning 35–6, 43, 58–60 mental health awareness week 111–12 sources of support 111 stigma of 108, 111 of students 97–112, 116 of teachers 1, 17, 27–8, 81–2 whole-school approach to 108–9 Mental Health Charter 104

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Index Mental Health in Children and Young People 100 Menzies, L. 205 metacognition 173–4 Microsoft Teams 12 Millar, F. 76 millennials 106 Miller, M. 43 mnemonics 36 Morgan, N. 163 motivation 36, 205 Moyse, C. 63 multi-academy trusts (MATs) 3 multiple-choice questions 36 My Activity Passport 9 Myatt, M. 174

N National Careers Week 128 newly qualified teachers (NQTs) 23, 204, 214–15 supporting 215 no-homework policy 7 No More Marking 11, 12 non-teaching tasks 74 non-verbal cues 57 Northern Ireland apprenticeships 128 funding 77 newly qualified teachers (NQTs) 215 school inspections 79 wellbeing in schools 75 Nuthall, G. 13–14

O observations 40–2, 63 see also evaluating off-rolling 4, 120, 122 Ofsted on cognitive load theory 53 on the curriculum 166 on evidence of improvements 52 on lesson plans 30–2 on plenaries 15 school inspections 78, 162 on teacher wellbeing 77 over-testing 99 Owen-Moore, T. 121

physical impairments 139 Pike, H. 161, 163, 171 planning 26–7, 48 collaborative 38–40 curriculum 28–9, 42–3, 47 knowledge organisers 43–4 learning objectives 32–3 lesson plans 30–2, 38–9 long-term 28 medium-term 29 for memorable learning 35–6, 57–60 for observations 40–2 schemes of work 29 short-term 30–1 using storytelling 37–8 planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time 27 plenaries 15–17 ‘plug-in-and-play CPD’ 197 Pollitt, A. 11 Pool, R. 186 potential, limiting 3 poverty 79–80 PPIPL technique 41 praise 125–7 presenteeism 84 privilege 185 procedural knowledge 28–9 professional development 63–5, 91, 197, 203–17 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2, 8, 162 progress defining 51 demonstrating 51–2 tracking 2–3 Progress 8 118–19 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 3 PRU (pupil referral unit) 118–21, 130 PSHE (personal, social and health education) 111

Q

P

questioning 14–17, 36, 59 see also quizzes Quigley, A. 28 Quinn, M. 189 quizzes 17, 36, 58, 59

Paivio, A. 56 parents expectations of 7, 76 Friday call 127 home–school links 125–7 Paterson, L. 162 performance-approach goals 36 performance-related pay 193–4 phraseology 104 phronesis 76

RAG123 self-reflection tool 16 ranking schools 3–4 students 3 teachers 3 reading skills, and dyslexia 151–2 real-world skills 171 reasonable adjustments 85

R

reflectiveness 24, 56, 83, 186–7 Researching Practitioner Development Framework (RPDF) 92 research-led appraisal 191–5 culture 182–4, 196–8 practice 180–98 research projects 189–90 resilience 24 retention, of teachers 72–3, 78–9 retrieval practice 58–9 revision strategies 59–60 Roberts, H. 76 Rose, T. 3, 165 Rosenshine, B. 53, 55 routines 83 rule of three 60

S safe space 144 SAIL (Student Agency In Learning) 173 Sandhu, D. 12 Sandy, C. 189 Schank, R. 28 schemes of work 29 school inspections 53, 78 schools funding cuts 77 league tables 76 links with employers 127–8, 129 multi-academy trusts (MATs) 3–4 ranking 3–4 Schwartz, B. 82 Scotland apprenticeships 128 curriculum 162 newly qualified teachers (NQTs) 214 professional development 204 school inspections 78 Sealy, C. 28 self-harm 104 Shephard, G. 161 short-term memory 34–5, 58 short-term planning 30–1 single-parent families 98 smartphones 106–7 Smith, M. 36 Smith, S. 217 social, emotional and mental health difficulties (SEMH) 139, 143–4, 171 social media 101–3 and research 181–2 socio-economic inequalities 8, 79, 185 Spalding, C. 204 237

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Just Great Teaching special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) 138–9 Code of Practice 139 defining 139 education, health and care plan (EHCP) 140 funding for 142 hidden 139 statistics 140 teachers with 141 special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) 138 speech, language and communication needs 139 Spielman, A. 78 standardised tests 2 ‘statements’ see education, health and care plan (EHCP) stereotyping and the attainment gap 185 gender 127 mental health 98 Stop Talking, Start Influencing 33 storytelling 37–8, 48 stress 27–8 students bullying 101 with disabilities 142 see also special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) Generation Z 107 getting to know 42–3 how they learn 33–4 learning experience of 13–14 listening to 109 mental health of 97–112, 116, 143 see also social, emotional and mental health difficulties (SEMH) metrics limiting potential 3 millennials 106 over-testing 99 praising 125–7 reflectiveness 24 resilience 24 self-assessment 16–17 and social media 101–3 socio-economic inequalities 8, 79 stereotypes of 98 unrealistic expectations of 107 xennials 106 subjective decisions 63 suicide terminology 104 Sutton, R. 82

T teachers falling numbers of 71–2

hours of work 26, 204 leaving teaching 27 mental health of 1, 17, 27–8, 81–2 motivation 205 newly qualified 23, 31, 204, 214–15 pay scales 71, 193–4 performance-related pay 193–4 physical health of 27 professional development 63–5, 91, 197, 203–17 professional wisdom 76 ranking 3 retention 78–9 retention of 72–3 trainee 31–2 wellbeing commitment 80–1 wellbeing of 70–92 workload 27, 48, 73–4, 88–9 teacher training see professional development teaching accountability 50–2 as art or science 49–50 collaborative approach to 23 critical thinking 54–5 dialogic 23 dual coding 56–8 evaluating 62–5 funding cuts 77 hallmarks of great teaching 55–6 improving 49–50 planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time 27 reflective approach to 56 retrieval practice 58–9 revision strategies 59–60 sharing ideas 186, 197 using storytelling 37–8 see also learning; planning; verbal feedback teaching and learning policy 60–2 TeachMeets 213–14 technology in the curriculum 172 role of 12, 20, 25, 31, 39–40, 126 terminology, and mental health 104–5 testing 11-plus test 99 and artificial intelligence 19–20 effects on students 3 over-testing 99 reliability of 2 standardised tests 2–3 The Best for My Child: Did the schools market deliver? 76

Theory of Knowledge (TOK) 171, 173 think – pair – share 59 Thorndike, E. 3 Thurstone, L. 10–11 trade unions 86 trainee teachers 31–2 triggers awareness of 144 and mental health 104 Twitter 181–2, 211

U Unleashing Great Teaching 181 Unsworth, R. 48

V van Daal, T. 11 verbal communication 57 verbal feedback 17–19 vocational qualifications 119 Vohra, S. 100, 116

W Wales apprenticeships 128 curriculum 162 newly qualified teachers (NQTs) 214 school inspections 78–9 Weinstein, Y. 35 wellbeing 70–92 whole-school wellbeing policy 86–8 Weston, D. 181 WhatsApp 101, 103 ‘What. Why. How. What if.’ 57–8 Wheadon, C. 10 whole-class assessment 13 whole-school wellbeing policy 86–8 Wiliam, D. 14 Willingham, D. T. 54, 186 working memory see short-term memory work–life balance 83 see also wellbeing workload 27, 48, 73–4, 88–9 work selfies 126 written feedback 17–18 see also marking

X xennials 106

Y ‘You Said, We Did’ display 216

Z Zafirakou, A. 179 zero-marking policy 1 zero-tolerance approach, to behaviour management 173

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