The school where teachers learn from the best of them

In recent years, a number of attempts have been made to improve schools. For example, the school effectiveness movement in the 1990s developed those famous checklists of eight, ten, fifteen or twenty things that ‘effective’ or ‘high added value’ schools should do, ranging from capable management to generating a climate of high expectations.

While useful in some ways, this phase of educational reform had a number of limitations. First, it was based on giving schools ideas that had been generated externally. Consequently, schools and teachers lacked ‘ownership’ of the ideas, which hampered full implementation.

Second, with increasing numbers of schools now doing what the evidence suggests they should be doing the prospect of future returns from these improvements are limited.

The effectiveness of the next two phases of educational reform has similar limitations. Although prescriptive practices outlined by government in the Literacy, Numeracy and Secondary strategies may give a short-term boost to teaching skills and test scores, they do not facilitate long-term development of the profession.

Similarly, ‘school-to-school’ methods may not be particularly powerful in all cases and contexts because schools can be geographically, as well as psychologically, distant from one another. Furthermore, the potential networking between schools or school federations is restricted when schools are competing against each other in educational markets.

Despite these shortcomings, no one would suggest that ‘school-to-school’ networking is not useful. At the level of subject specialisms, contact between departments in the same subject in different schools can be very powerful and many schools have benefited through this sort of collaboration.

The ‘Within School Variation’ (WSV) Project represents a new take on educational reform. It is a collaborative effort between The National College for School Leadership (specifically, its Leadership Network), over 50 schools, higher education (the sector that I represent) and the Innovation Unit from the Department for Children, Families and Schools (DCFS).

Unlike the methods discussed above that promote external solutions, this project encourages schools to learn internally from their best staff members.

The evidence for WSV is compelling. If we look at pupils’ value-added scores, the range of variation between primary school teachers or secondary school departments within a single school is four or five times higher than the variation between schools when all individuals or departments are added together.  While this finding may seem logical, it does not appear to have influenced educational policies.

Awareness of this variation has been growing over recent years for a number of reasons (e.g. increased availability of data on school performance and the use of observation systems in increasing numbers of schools). However, actually addressing these variations remains problematic. For instance, it can be difficult to distinguish the personal reasons for some teachers’ or departments’ performance from the methods they use.

Between 2003 and 2006, our group of schools made significant progress in working out how to learn from WSV in order to raise achievement while reducing the variation range within each school.

The majority of schools in our First Phase Secondaries improved their value-added scores and reduced within-school variation in Key Stages 2-4, 3 and 3-4. This improvement cannot be attributed solely to school improvement efforts or other factors.  In our analysis, there is a high correlation between getting WSV down and value added scores up.

In particular, the schools focused on:

• School culture to ensure an atmosphere of openness, collegiality and willingness to learn, without which mutual learning could not take place;

• Data usage to convert raw data into information that is useful for staff and management (this included using data to track pupils, to look at affective as well as academic areas, and to assess pupils against their abilities and expectations);

• Teaching and learning by encouraging pupil feedback on teaching and learning, facilitating discussions about ‘teaching’ rather than ‘schooling’, and developing a common language to describe classroom processes that encourage participation in discussions of ‘effective practice’;

• Middle management training involving ‘buddying’ that extends training to Heads of Year (or House) as well as Heads of Department, and to middle managers in important areas such as coaching and mentoring, data and classroom observation.

Further innovations were being made in two other areas — capturing pupils’ voices and developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) — as the project finished. Pupil attitude surveys were being used more frequently, alongside genuine attempts to involve students in the formulation of plans for their future education.

SOPs were becoming important tools for achieving consistency in procedures and expectations among departments, and in reducing the isolation of staff. SOPs also ensured that there were clear expectations of pupils’ behaviour regarding timekeeping, uniforms, and equipment.

Conclusions

The full results of the project will be published this Spring and will include a ‘tool kit’ of instruments, approaches and systems that have worked effectively in the areas noted above. Additionally, we now have a group of experienced school head teachers and staff who can act as mentors.

Just imagine — a world where schools don’t wait for help from the outside but actually take initiative to improve by learning from their own best people.  In this world there are no excuses for poor pupil performance and excellence is not hidden, but is celebrated and learned from for the benefit of everyone.

Lessons learned from this project may help facilitate public sector reform more generally. For example, public sector reform has focused on improving service delivery through improved pre-service and training across many professions.

However, maximising knowledge transferrequires further investigation. It is believed that organisation–to–organisation knowledge transfer is  improved by varying the external contingencies within which state welfare works (e.g. the use of the private sector to raise standards in the public sector, or performance information and public choice to expose poor performance).

While such policies may encourage welfare organisations and professionals to work harder, they will not generate smarter working unless practitioners can draw on more effective ‘technologies of practice’. Moving these between schools, hospitals or prisons when all organisations have relatively impermeable cultures and boundaries remains problematic.

Fortunately, we now are now beginning to understand how to work ‘smarter’. It involves providing organisations with performance data on sub-units or individuals that can then be benchmarked against internal best practice. It also requires systematic attempts to transfer knowledge between professionals. Working smarter means making fundamental knowledge of good practice available to individuals and organisations.

IT systems are making this much easier. It also involves charting the views of consumers directly. Finally, working smarter requires that we make use of the naturally-occurring variation that exists within organisations for the benefit of the organisation’s effectiveness by creating an engine of improvement that operates independently of outside organisations.

That ‘engine’ can operate at the local level, within each organisation and workforce, without any need for national ‘top-down’ strategies. If implemented effectively, this may just be the way forward in restoring disappointed hopes of public sector reform.

David Reynolds is Professor of Education at the University of Plymouth and Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Exeter. Email: dreynolds1@plymouth.ac.uk