As the Euros blurred into Wimbledon which in turn blurred into the Olympics, a summer of sport is soon going to take a hiatus for the most important competition of the year; results days. Whilst the rest have very clear definitions of what winning looks like, results day does not.
It’s likely your school will have numerical targets that have been set which may or may not end up being met… but there are no winners, not officially. Some schools will top league tables for various metrics but there are over 3,400 schools in England so does this mean there will be a handful of winners and a hell of a lot of losers. That doesn’t seem right though, not when so many schools are working hard, doing the right thing, and making good progress. It’s time to rethink how schools interpret results day. Let’s do that through answering a series of questions.
Here are the questions:
- Is competition OK?
- How should results be analysed through the lens of school improvement?
- How much improvement is enough?
Is competition OK?
100% it is. Teachers are some of the most consistently competitive people I’ve ever met. Competition is no bad thing and, when gone about the right way, can be a powerful and useful leverage. Just be very careful who you get into competition with. There are some amazing schools out there and some of those will likely have a similar demographic to you. There are state schools delivering transformational educations in inner city, rural locations, coastal settings… using these, especially those in a similar situation to yourself, for inspiration makes perfect sense, but for competition does not.
The only school I think is worthwhile any school being in competition with is itself. Schools leaders inherit schools in various states and the only requirement on them should be to try and work towards improving the school at the quickest rate they can whilst remaining sustainable in the long run. Competing with an established school that has been doing this longer than you, is like trying to win a race against an Olympic athlete who already has a head start.
In some years this might mean an increase in exam results is expected, in others, if there have been massive staff shortages, local troubles, finance issues, strikes… then even maintaining results could be considered a win. Context is king here.
How should results be analysed through the lens of school improvement?
The short answer to this is: CAREFULLY!
Let’s say you’ve visited a school that you love. It’s results are amazing, it’s staff and students are happy. It’s everything you ever wanted to create. Let’s then say that you spent last year building that in your school and it was a success. If all that has happened then your results that year still aren’t even going to be close to emulating the results of the other. Results are the slowest thing to be affected by school improvement initiatives. Why is this? Simply it’s because results aren’t the result of the current state of the school but the culmination of a learner’s entire journey through it. No matter how good a student’s Year 11 experience is, no matter how much intervention you threw at them, how much you spent on residentials, nothing even comes close to the power of 5 years of consistently high-quality teaching.
This means new initiatives should not be abandoned just because they appear ineffective in the short term. A sensible follow-up question this does raise is how do you know if something IS working?
Well, the safest thing to do here is not to innovate but to personalise. We know enough about what works to know that if you are leading in a school or department sitting outside the top 5% performing then it shouldn’t be your job or responsibility to invent something. It should instead be to implement something which has been proven to work elsewhere in a similar setting. This still will require levels of personalisation as, no matter how closely aligned to your setting it is that you can find a great school, yours will be unique and strategies will need adapting. You need to focus on the active ingredients of what made it work for the other school. (For an example of this when it comes to the effective teaching and learning, check out the T&L Framework here: https://teachsolutions.uk/files-and-documents/).
There is too often a need in education for people to reinvent the wheel, to discover some new silver bullet, to innovate. In education, you don’t need a USP, you don’t need to compete with the market in the same way that Samsung and Apple do, you can shamelessly copy what works without fear of being sued, so do it! Take the 90% of the active ingredients that make great schools great and use them. Just be careful not to visit a school and then only take the easy superficial stuff (for more on that idea, read this https://teachsolutions.uk/2023/07/18/buying-coconut-oil-didnt-give-me-a-six-pack/).
Too often also, school initiatives belong to individuals, rather than to the school. School’s policies, visions, systems… should reign supreme here. Anything major that a leader starts, should be approved from their line manager with careful thought about how this work can, if successful, be continued when the leader leaves the building. What documentation exists? What writing exists? Senior leaders tend to stay in schools from between 4-7 years. That is just over 1 full cohort of Y7-11 going through. To ensure that the school doesn’t have to start again from scratch but that systems can be tweaked, rather than created anew, structures (and not just temporary scaffolding) need to exist which ensure the school can continue to move from strength to strength.
How much improvement is enough?
If we change what winning looks like to thinking about improvement, year-on-year, a very reasonable question is “how much progress is enough?”. This is a tricky one. At this point I can only comment on what I have seen and lead on myself. As a head of department in a school with supportive systems, a fully staffed department (though with our fair share of ECTs), we managed a consistent 0.45 progress increase year on year from 0 when I took over to 1.8 the year after I left. That is a target I informally set heads of department to make (whilst appreciating there are lots of mitigating circumstances that might make it not possible). Whatever other metrics you might have in place, at the end of day, there should be a real impact on the children being served and, although it might not be how we would always want them to be judged, the outside world treat exam results as a keys where the higher the results are, the more doors you can open. Until that changes, exam results are crucial when judging our impact as educators.
The big day
When the day comes then, take time to celebrate successes, to congratulate colleagues, to spend time celebrating with proud students and their families and consoling/coaching those who are less happy. Then, when it comes to doing the analysis, be sure to not look around the country and your local area so much but look at your past self. When drawing up or editing school improvement plans, don’t throw everything away if you’re not happy, remember that change, real change, takes time.
Teach Solutions 