Mr Cameron sends in the "hit squad".....

This week, Mr Cameron made an interesting announcement about education.  The Prime Minister has announced that rescue teams will be sent into failing schools.

Cameron to send hit squads to failing schools

I’m sure we will see more of these headline grabbing press releases in the run up to the next election in May 2015.

But, who would have thought that such a simple speech,  which is no doubt appealing policy to certain sections of society, could be wrong on so many levels.

Firstly, I’m so disappointed that we are still branding schools as “failing” based solely on such a narrow criteria.  Schools that are below the national average for the proportion of students attaining a C or above in both English and maths GCSE are at risk of being labelled as “failing”.   I’m sure we all agree that attainment in English and maths is important but I would also hope that we would agree that education is about so much more than simply attaining a C or above in 2 subjects.

So, I am hopeful that the new measure of Progress 8 (where schools will be measured on the progress of students across 8 subjects with English and maths counting as double) will start to address my concerns.  The government does have some potentially good ideas.  The way to understand Progress 8 is that English and maths will each be worth 20% of the progress 8 measure with the other 6 subjects being worth 10% each.

Back to the “hit squads”……

There are probably a small number of secondary schools in the country where chaos has descended and the only solution is a completely fresh start with a completely new Senior Leadership Team.    A “hit squad” is probably the only way the students in those schools will get any chance of academic achievement.

However, Mr Cameron has mentioned that there are 500 schools who are at risk of the “hit squads”.  I don’t believe there are this many failing schools and am not personally aware of any school that needs a “hit squad” or know any teachers who would say this about their place of work. 

On the other hand, I welcomed regional school commissioners, with a hope that collaboration would become the way in which all schools could improve attainment.   But, it seems Mr Cameron thinks the “regional school commissioners” are the army generals who decide where the hit squads go next.

Sensibly, most regional school commissioners have accumulated a group of successful head teachers to work in their area at supporting the schools that are supposed to be failing.  Sadly, in my area, all of these head teachers come from schools that are in affluent areas.  Not one head teacher from an inner city school or deprived area is represented.

So, is every inner city school failing or could there be other factors at play here?

Well, there are hugely successful inner city schools out there – we will just never recognise them whilst comparing them with schools in affluent areas.

Am I just being “unaspirational” then?  (If I would be allowed to make up my own words!)  Well, no.

If a student has 100% attendance at a school then they are in lessons for just 13% of a calendar year.  

Assuming students sleep for 8 hours a day, which would be 33% of the calendar year, they are still left with 54% of the calendar year.  This 54% is the part that parents and local communities control.

Having worked in an affluent school, which got 3 “outstandings” in a row from Ofsted and worked in 3 inner city / deprived area schools which have never got above a “satisfactory” or “requires improvement” I feel qualified to judge.

Many of the parents in the affluent area know instinctively what the benefits of education are.  Students arrive in year 7 assuming they are going to go to university.  The parents value homework, take a huge interest in the education of the whole child and make the 54% of time they have valuable.

It would be very simple and guileless to say that inner city schools have the exact opposite.  They don’t.  There are plenty of parents in affluent areas who don’t support the school with aspirational expectations for their children.  However, these parents are in the minority.  In some cases, these students coast and get grades at a mediocre level for them but in many cases the peers of these students drag them up and teach them to value education.

However, there are more parents in inner city and deprived areas who either don’t value education or don’t know how to support their children.  We have a heartbreakingly high proportion of students who have never left the city, let alone experienced a beach, or the moors or even a train journey.

I am proud of the school I work in and we work very hard at engaging with the whole community and spend a huge amount of time showing parents how they can / should be helping their children.  This type of school need the best, most creative teachers but this type of announcement from Mr Cameron will just make it less likely that good staff will want to work in schools like this.

For example, I took a phone call this week from a parent who was deeply annoyed at his son’s maths teacher for setting homework.  The homework was not done and, after waiting a day or two for it to be handed in late, the teacher phoned home to ask for support.  The father announced that he had told his son not to do the homework as when the son leaves school then that time is his own to do as he pleases.

This was on top of a phone call last week in which a different year 7 parent told me that his son would not be doing a detention for continuously disrupting a lesson because I hadn’t proved that it had effected the learning of others and if he wanted to misbehave, and the teacher couldn’t control him, then why should the parent be punished? 

(It turns out that this year 7 lad is required to pick up his younger brother from the local primary school on his way home and if we detained him then the parents may have to turn off “4 in a bed” and go and pick their own kid from the local primary school.)

The boy in the first phone call now does his homework after school in his teacher’s classroom and the year 7 lad did his detention…after the Principal told his parents that he either did the detention or found a different school to go to.  The amount of time this took up has obviously lowered the amount of academic progress these students have met but it was the right thing for the school to do but Ofsted won’t care that we face additional challenges.

Now, I am proud to work in a school that meets these challenges head on and they are two extreme examples.  However, in the school which served an affluent area, I would have parents phoning in asking me to recommend private tutors or asking for extra exam papers. 

The league tables register none of this.

I have no doubt that there are students in affluent areas whose parents let them down but they are few and far between.  Equally, there are significant numbers of parents in my current school who are eager to support their child and have positive aspirations for them.  Sadly, there is a large number of parents who either take no interest in their child’s education or simply don’t value it as  “I never had an education and I’ve done alright”.

So, my hope for the “regional commissioners”?  Well, I hope that they understand the context a school finds themselves in and understand that some schools need a longer journey to reach the same destination as some other schools.  It would be wonderful for the mantra to be collaboration, collaboration, collaboration not “judgement, hit squads and failure”.

I believe the mantra of “collaboration, collaboration, collaboration” will mean that education will become better for all…sadly, I feel I am in a minority….

Things I wish I had known as an NQT - marking!

Marking

Whether you are a primary or secondary school teacher, marking is going to become a key part of your job.  It will take up a lot of your time and it is important that this time is used for the maximum benefit of the students.

Most schools now have a marking policy which you must follow.  Consistency in feedback for students across subjects is hugely under rated in my opinion.  However, many marking policies are on purposefully vague to allow teachers to use their professional judgement.  Indeed in some schools you will still not find a marking policy.

So, what should you mark?

Firstly, you will never be able to mark every piece of work a student completes.  You might be able to keep it up for a few weeks but you will be working to midnight every night and will eventually go off sick for a few weeks with exhaustion.  You are no use to your students when you are off sick so I hope we all agree you can’t mark everything.

Secondly, the marking needs to be purposeful.  The days of “tick and flick” are long behind us, thankfully so!  Students need to understand the marking which must inform them how they can move forward with this piece of work.

Finally, it must be done by the teacher.  I am all for peer marking and self-marking but there comes a time when a teacher needs to give formal feedback.  When you have work to mark I advise you to hide away at school and get it done.  I speak from experience that if I take home 45 mins of marking I am able to make it last 2 or 3 hours.  Additionally, I can easily socialise away an hour at school with other teachers when I could have got my marking done.  When you have marking to do, hide yourself away and get your head down and get it done!

Here is what I do.

My school has a vague marking policy.  So, at the start of September I explain to my students how and when their work will be marked.  I do this and encourage them to hold me to account to this as I hold them to account with their homework etc.

Our students have maths for 4 hours a week and I typically teach 4 groups, although I used the same idea when I was an NQT teaching 22 hours a week.

I mark on a 2 week cycle.  For us this is 8 lessons. 

I explain to the students that in lessons 1, 2 and 3 they will learn about a new objective or two.  For simplicity sake let’s say this is working out how to do long division and long multiplication.  The three lessons will have a range of tasks, peer marking, self assessment etc.  At the end of lesson 3 they will get a homework that is due in on lesson 5.  (The hope being the can ask for a bit of help in lesson 4 if they got stuck).

I always offer additional homework online (e.g. www.mymaths.co.uk) but always provide a worksheet for homework.  This worksheet is also emailed to the student's school email account so they can print a spare out if they have lost the original.

In lesson 5 I collect the homework in and give each question a simple tick or cross.  I normally give a score e.g. 8 / 10.  

In lesson 6 the students are challenged to figure out where they went wrong whilst working with a partner.  If they scored 10 / 10 I have extension work available.  In some of these lessons I have to re-teach some aspects of the objective again.  Often, in lesson 6, I spend a lot of time extending the topic.

In lesson 7 they have a formal 30 minute assessment that I have written.  It is a bit of work in the first year but once you have the tests they will always be useful!  Ideally, the whole department would join in and help you write them.  We have 60 min lessons and I would spend the first 30 mins revising.  This gives the students some experience at how to revise which becomes so important for their A Levels.

After lesson 7 this piece of work is formally marked.  I have found that the more able students prefer to do this assessment in a separate book and the lower ability students prefer doing it on the sheet.

My formal marking gives them a score or percentage.  I am not comfortable giving them a GCSE grade or KS3 Band at this point but will let them know what grade the objective examines.

When the student gets their assessment back I have done the following.

1.       They get a mark / percentage.

      2.    They get an effort number for the past 7 lessons (1 is rubbish, 5 is excellent.  You can't get a 5 without          good, on time, homework).

      3.    I pick out something they have done well either on the test or in the previous 2 weeks.  (E.g. you have          asked some very probing questions recently)

      4.      I highlight what they need to do next to get better at this topic (E.g. your long multiplication is great but         you need to now practise multiplying with decimals).

Lesson 8 is my key lesson as each student will have a different target (number 4 above).  However, I have found that because I fortnightly assess, the class will only have 2 or 3 different targets between them.  Lesson 8 is spent giving the students the opportunity to reflect on their test and give them the opportunity to go back over some learning and demonstrate they can do the objectives they got wrong.

Lesson 8 can be quite difficult to plan but www.mymaths.co.uk can be very useful here as you can set different students different work which allows you to give attention to smaller groups as and when they need it.  

For the last 20 minutes of the lesson students are to re-do the test questions they got wrong (in silence).  I project the answers at the end for them to self-mark or copy down.  By the end of lesson 8 every student has a copy of the correct answers for the test.  

Those who still find it a complete mystery are encouraged to come and see me after school to sort out the issues.   I will also phone a couple of parents whose youngsters have impressed me during the past 2 weeks at this time.

Obviously, I stagger it at the start of term so that my classes don’t all get to lesson 7 on the same day as this would be a lot of marking and planning in one evening!

My marking system isn’t perfect but I think it works quite well for the students and I feel it is a good use of my marking time. 

Let me know what you intend to do and whether it works!

How to get the most out of your child's start to Secondary school maths.

Now that we have hit August the shops have started their “Back to School” sales in their bid to grab the academic pound.  Whilst most teenagers will be returning to familiar terrain, around half a million youngsters and their families will be especially nervous this September as they move from their Primary school up to Secondary school. 

With all the concerns of moving to a Secondary school, how do you make sure you get the best maths education for your child?

    1.   Be in it for the long haul.

A good secondary school will develop your child socially and emotionally in partnership with you.  But, academic qualifications are the main remit for schools.  The aim of the maths department is to ensure your child leaves with the best GCSE grade (or level) that they are capable of.

Don’t worry if things fail to get off to an explosive start.  Schools often have very little meaningful data on students in September when they join.  (Indeed, more and more schools are testing their year 7 students on entry to get around this problem).  Don’t assume we have their SATS scores – we normally don’t!

In addition, Year 7 students won’t be the maths department focus for the first week or so.  Appealing GCSE grades, getting the right youngsters on the right courses in the 6^th form and ensuring the new Yr 11 have started their final year well will be. 

Things should be flowing well by the 4^th or 5^th week and if they aren’t use the next point (which you will have done in the first week of September) to find out more.

    2.   Get in touch with your child’s maths teacher.

The beauty of email allows parents and teachers the opportunity to communicate effectively at a time convenient to both.  Send your child’s maths teacher an email to introduce yourself and to let the teacher know that you are there to help support your child’s learning.  Ask what day homework is set and when it is due.  Additionally, ask if there are any resources online that the school subscribes to as most schools now subscribe to something (Mymaths, Mathletics, Conquermaths etc) that students can access from home. Teachers really value knowing there is someone at home supporting them and the school.

    3. Take the opportunities – send them on a residential.

A benefit of a bigger secondary school is that they have the finances and staff numbers to offer more things to the students.  Encourage your child to get involved in new things and broaden their experiences.  More and more schools now run year 7 overnight events to help students bond and get to know each other and the staff.  Make it a priority for your child to go on these as it will help expand their friendship group outside of their current primary school friends.

Teachers will always tell you that the academically most successful students are  the busiest having taken advantage of the extra-curricular opportunities on offer.  Encourage them to get involved in the school play, join an academic after school club, join a sports team or start to learn a new musical instrument etc.

    4.    Big fish, small pond.  Small fish, big pond.

Many students start year 7 in a cohort of 200+ having come from a primary school where there were 30 or 60 in Year 6.  They may well have been the best in the year group at maths at their old school and are less likely to hold that title now.  We all like doing what we are successful at so be on the look-out for declining attitudes towards maths as your child realises they aren’t at the top anymore.  Some students react positively to this change and work even harder (this is the response we want), some accept it and continue to do a good job and a few blame their teacher (this isn’t the response we want!) citing personality clashes…. 

    5. Understand the school’s attitude to your child will be different.

In Year 6 the academic attainment of your child was hugely important for the primary school’s league table results.  To that end, it was likely they would have had the best teacher available and as much support and intervention as the school could afford.  The same happens in secondary schools – but in year 11.

See this change as an opportunity to encourage your child to develop an understanding of maths, which takes time, rather than an immediate focus on “knowing how to do it” and moving on as there is an important SATS exam around the corner.

All in all, the overwhelming majority of students flourish at secondary school.  Make sure your child knows you value education (social, emotional and academic), keep in regular touch with the school and give the school the opportunity to iron out any things that do go wrong and you should have a stress free year 7!