Data for Progress and Achievement – death by traffic lighting
My role for next year is gradually become more defined. In a nutshell I will be in an educational marriage with performance data; SIMs, RaiseOnline, FFT and SISRA the new framework. It is a role anchored to hard data, hard policy and efficient data collection procedures and there is a contrasting supportive / training / building confidence side to the role empowering colleagues to use data to inform their teaching and to manage their department. My first thought is that these two roles require two very different skill sets; an analytical skills set and a training / coaching skills set, combining these skills offers a significant professional development opportunity for me personally. This is also the first significant leadership role that is mutually reliant on another. The effective use of data and effective teaching and learning are explicitly underlined in the new Ofsted framework and I am genuinely looking forward to working with and learning from this professional relationship I am not sure I am looking forward to a slow death by traffic lighting.
Moving forward…
My focus this term has been to define what Outstanding ‘progress and achievement’ monitoring looks like, in much the same way I previously tried to define what Outstanding learning looked like. Hence every spare working moment has been spent sharpening my axe; learning about ’progress and achievement,’ reading the support documents on data platforms and really drilling down on the new framework, though clearly focusing in on achievement and finally getting to know the school current progress and achievement data. I must admit, I was surprised at how narrow my understanding of the school data was, I knew about my lines in detail, about the schools general progress but not about how all the parts contributed to the whole - but then again ‘you don’t know, what you don’t know.’
I still have a great deal to learn myself, however these early reconnaissance efforts have taught me I have a significant role to play supporting colleagues develop their own ‘progress and achievement’ analysis skills. For planning learning and teaching, for department improvement, for career progression, and to underline that whole school progress and achievement is all our responsibility. Somewhere within that outline is a ‘training’ requirement to ensure that all staff have the confidence to use data to inform their teaching. Take week one seating plans, seating plan should be informed by student progress and the aims of the learning, not on boy/girl seating.
My summer preparations will now focus on ‘how’ to promote an awareness of, and use of ’progress and achievement’ data as well as securing the systems in place to collect (communication), monitor and feedback data to colleagues. When I have it tightly woven into the schedule with the documents constructed, with links to teaching and learning performance management I will share it here.
