school – Teach Solutions

School Leaders: Cultivate, Don’t Innovate

A post addressing the need for leaders to go out and visit other schools. To find best practice and bring it back to their setting instead of feeling the burden of finding new solutions to old problems.

Imagine you were working in the private sector, for a mobile phone company say. Let’s also say you measure success by how much money you make. If you had two options then, one where you unashamedly steal (with no adverse or legal consequences) all the best bits from Google, Samsung and iPhone and the other where you start from scratch and take a punt on something completely new and untested, which would you choose?

This question has an obvious answer but also due to copyright laws and patents etc. can only ever be hypothetical in the private sector.

Success in the private sector is driven by innovation. New ideas. Things that make you stand out. Something sparkly that will pull customers in. This thinking, this idealisation of being unique, seems to exist in the education sector. But should it? Can we apply the same thinking in the scenario above to the education sector?

The issue with innovation

However you measure success in education (whether it’s by results, pastoral, extra-curricular opportunities…), there are likely a dozen schools who are already doing this incredibly well and much better than you are. That’s no disrespect to your setting, it’s just likely given how many schools there are that, at least a handful, who are doing what you want to do, but better. They have already solved your problem.

There are no laws against copying an educational approach. Schools don’t patent their approach to teaching. Headteachers don’t erect walls around their schools away from the prying eyes of visitors. So why doesn’t this happen? Why don’t people just choose to visit those that are doing what they want to achieve already and implement the same thing in their own setting?

Inevitably, some tweaks, maybe some superficial changes, will be necessary to ensuring the way of working fits into a school’s unique setting but as long as the active ingredients remain, it should still be effective.

It’s hard not to think that ego plays a role in preventing this from happening. That leaders have the desire to devise their own way of doing something and won’t employ any strategy that’s used elsewhere but that can’t be the full answer. Many a time I’ve heard advice be directly given to schools to find innovative approaches to their problems. These schools aren’t top of their class and their problems aren’t unique. So why innovate? Why not send leaders out into the world to cultivate instead? To find the best of what’s out there and then use their skill and expertise to make the thing work in their own setting.

We work in such an open and giving sector, I’m yet to encounter a school that, given the opportunity, won’t open its doors to other teachers to help them out. So why doesn’t this happen more? Whatever the reason (my current theory is just that a private sector mindset has just seeped too far into the world of education) it is hurting the children we have all set out to serve.

The challenge of cultivation

Leaders in schools should see it as their job, and be empowered to, go out and cultivate the best of what is it out there. Their efforts should be spent personalising it to their setting, devising an adequate implementation strategy and then sustaining it. That is hard enough. They shouldn’t be expected, or encouraged, to find a novel solution to problems that people have already solved. They shouldn’t be wasting their time on innovation.

This still won’t be easy. It is hard to do the above. It is also hard to visit a place demonstrating best practice, getting the outcomes that you seek, and for one to decode what the active ingredients are. It is so easy to walk away with a superficial takeaway which is easy to implement but ultimately ineffective by itself (see the dangers of that here).

A plea

The next time you have a problem to solve in a school. Like a really big problem. How to increase attendance? How to increase results? How to decrease suspensions?… Don’t feel like you need to find a new solution. Go out and visit places, see what works, and then think about how you can take this tried and tested process and make it a success in your setting.

School leaders should be encouraged to cultivate the best of what is out there, they shouldn’t be wasting time needlessly trying to innovate. There is no shame in that and, ultimately, the children we serve will benefit.

Rethinking Results Day: A Guide for School Improvement

We’re used to thinking about winners are losers, and this summer of sport has been no different. But how can this lens be a used productively when thinking about results day?

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.

This is an incredibly fitting reference for this blog but is also very niche (2 points if you got it)

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.

Do You Know Where Your Holes Are?

Ever wondered why ancient buildings are so beautiful and strong that not only are they are still around today, but they can also still create such awe and wonder? “We don’t make ‘em like we used to”, hey. To find out why this is the case, we will travel back to WWII.

When planes were sent over in the war effort their damage was analysed upon their return. This was to see where reinforcement should be placed in order to better protect them from enemy fire.

Analysis of all the places planes are being shot at, like in the image on the left, would let engineers know where to add extra armour. The aim here was to ensure more planes returned home than previously. Armour was added to the red areas, since this is where the data suggested the enemy guns were hitting, and planes were sent out again. Unfortunately, it had little impact.

Enter Abraham Wald. He was a Jewish Hungarian, who, when antisemitism rose in Europe, moved to America. When the war broke out, he was at hand to aid to Allied effort. Like so many unsung heroes of WWII, he was a mathematician. He said that if we only look at the bullet holes of the planes that have survived then we are leaving out a crucial set of data, those that did not.

Whilst it would be impractical to go and find the planes that had been shot down, perhaps we could infer this information from the survivors. If we look again at the image of the plane and realise that these are the bullet patterns of the planes that have returned, it suddenly isn’t a big leap to say that the armour should go where the red dots aren’t. It is likely the planes are being shot everywhere but, since we can’t see any planes that have been shot in certain areas, this is more likely due to shots there being devastating to the plane, rather than that area being missed.

This is an example of survivorship bias – only looking at the data of those that have “survived” to inform your decisions. This is also the reason why it can appear that all ancient buildings are strong and awe-inspiring; the reality is those that weren’t have either collapsed because they weren’t sturdy or have been demolished because they weren’t impressive. There is little choice but for the ancient buildings that are around today to be strong and beautiful, they wouldn’t be here otherwise.

What does this have to do with education?

It is not uncommon to see in the public domain, people deriding the use of explicit methods of teaching. Phonics and fronted adverbials are common targets here.

An author (as all the people above are), criticising how reading is taught in schools is another example of survivorship bias. They think that, understandably, they managed to flourish without needing these methods so therefore it isn’t needed for anybody. What they are omitting from their data is the thousands of pupils (more likely than not, disadvantaged pupils) who left the education system the same year as them with little to no literacy. This explicit teaching is not for the few who survived, it is for those who otherwise wouldn’t.

“Since the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the percentage of Year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard in reading has risen from 58% to 82%, with 92% of children achieving this standard by Year 2.” DfE

What about teachers? Do we carry this bias around with us and how might it present itself? If you’re teaching in a school the chances are you have a degree, for that, you probably did pretty well at school. Whatever your background, you most likely found ways to navigate the system. This can lead to assumptions about all learners. It can lead to assuming that others don’t need certain structures put in place because you survived without them. It can lead to people deriding, not explicit ways of teaching vocabulary, but explicit ways of teaching anything.

If you’ve successfully navigated school and are now a teacher, you might ask:

Why do I need to explicitly teach learners how to revise?

Why do I need to teach self-regulation?

Why do I need to use routines in my lesson?

…after all, I survived without them.

If you’ve successfully navigated being a teacher, and are now leading teacher in some way you might ask:

Why do we need these frameworks and policies?

Why do I need to show others how to explicitly teach/plan?

Why do I need to share my tips for teaching?

Why do I need to line manage people so explicitly?

…after all, I survived without them.

It’s important when systemising processes and making things more explicit that we do not take agency away from individuals and that our plan, in the long run, is for them to be successful independently of us. Our aim is to produce a cohort of staff and students who don’t just survive but thrive in the education system. To do this though, we need to look beyond the success stories, the top sets, the high fliers, and think about those that might be struggling and what extra armour needs putting in place to ensure they succeed too. After all, a bit of extra protection, if you don’t need it, does no harm.

Summary

It is important to know that in many ways, you are a survivor. This is something to be celebrated but also something to be acutely aware of. As a teacher, you likely need to give many students more explicit help then you ever received yourself. As a leader, you likely need to give many teachers more explicit help than you ever received yourself. Remember, this isn’t for those people who are going to be fine otherwise (though they are likely to benefit too), it is to ensure that no matter what, when you work or learn at a great school, you have just as much chance of succeeding as anybody else. In short, make sure you know where your holes are, or perhaps more aptly, where they aren’t.

I’m always interested in what people make of this so please feel free to comment with thoughts, questions or incomplete musings. Follow this or my Twitter account Teach_Solutions for similar content in the future. Also, check out the rest of this site, there’s some good stuff knocking about the place.