Ros McMullen: Things I've learned and things I'm learning

The new measures will apply from 2016, but schools can choose to ‘opt in’ from 2015.

 Every school’s floor target will be different  as it will be based on progress across 8 subjects, known as ‘the basket’

 ‘The basket’ contains English (which will double count unless not doing Lit in which case stays as a single count), Maths and any 3 of – core science, additional science, biology, physics, chemistry, computer science, geography, history, any classical or modern language. The additional  3 may be BTeC or GCSE

 It will be possible to fill ‘the basket’ without doing a science at all, or a humanity or a language and ‘the basket’ clearly gives plenty of room for specialisation.  Eg. A student could do Bio, Chem, Phy, Engineering, Product Design and Business.  Another could do Geog, His, Latin, Art, RE, and Sociology.  ‘The basket’ does not need to be filled, but unfilled spaces will score nil.

 Exams will still be graded, but the progress measure will use points with A*=8 and G=1.

 A school’s floor standard will be the average expectation of progress minus 0.5 of a grade across 8 subjects.  Eg  if a student should get 8xA* (64), the actual floor target would be 4xA* and 4xA (60). This is averaged across all the cohort and becomes the  school’s floor target.

 When the cohort is in Y9 the matrix of the floor standard will be issued, based on the exams last summer and how students did then compared with their KS2 results. So we are due this during this academic year.  (We are assured that government realise there will be an effect of exams ‘becoming harder’ and so they are working to factor this in.)

 More than 8 in ‘the basket’ will not be counted, but less than 8 will.  This means that if a student is expected on prior attainment to get 8×1 from ‘the basket’, in order for the school to a) ensure the student gets qualifications with a better currency b) ensure that the student is not a ‘drag’ on achieving the floor target, and c) provide an appropriate curriculum diet, they could only  5 within the 8 but get more than the 8 points. Eg Maths, English and 3 BTecs. (We see this as very positive news for SEN and likely to raise aspirations and achievement)

 The DfE intend to put ‘a widget’ on every school’s website which gives the following information:

* Your average VA per grade (eg 0.5 or -0.5 etc)

* Your average grade in ‘the basket’ of 8 (C+, D- etc)

* Your %C+ in En and M

* Your % EBacc

I like accountability and, as I have said many, many times, the system was a disaster for poor kids before we had proper accountability for governing bodies, Headteachers and schools.

 There are lots of streams of accountability in education, including the accountability of policymakers.  We need ways of evaluating the success of education policy to ensure that such vital investment in our nation’s future is not purely at the whim of “here today and gone tomorrow politicians”, sometimes with personal axes to grind and even messianic delusions.  Then there is the accountability of those who govern our schools – the LAs, the chains and federations and the local governing bodies.  We need ways of evaluating their understanding of what is happening to the schools in their care, their ability to manage the conflicting pressure and demands on their leaders, managers and staff in order that the students in their care benefit from the huge investment for which they are ultimately responsible.  Headteachers and other leaders need to be accountable for the outputs from their schools, for the myriad of decisions and strategies they implement which enhance or hinder the ability of staff to be properly effective and the life chances of individual students.

Our accountability mechanisms don’t do all these things for us.  

I know that the argument goes “government are the most accountable because of elections”, but that is rubbish actually because elections are never solely about our schools.  It seems to me that government adopts a “heads we win / tails you lose” strategy which works like this:

Stage One – past improvements in outputs were due to – 

• measuring the wrong things
• “gaming behaviour” / cheating
• erosion of standards

Stage Two – change what is to be measured to demonstrate –

• standards did not improve under the last lot
• induce a change in behaviour of schools.

Stage Three – Heads we win / tails you lose

• measured outputs go down: we’ve made the system more rigorous
• measured outputs go up: now it is genuine improvement

I don’t understand why, when accountability measures are subject to sudden changes at the whim of politicians (as a clear substitute for reasoned policy change based on research), school leaders jump to change their decisions and strategies to ones they don’t think are in the students’ best interests.

Oh ……. actually that last one maybe I do understand, even though it depresses me and saddens me the most. I understand because it is such high stakes for heads and school leaders.  And, sadly the “middle tier” (both chains and LAs) are often not effective at understanding and managing the conflicting pressures and demands on their leaders and schools in order to best support them in serving the students.

Which is why I don’t understand why accountability mechanisms do not hold LAs properly to account, or chains to account at all!  

It is not a popular view, but I do think there has been an erosion of academic standards over many years

I helped teach Sociology GCSE a couple of years ago (my original degree) and I was pretty disappointed about how little academic sociological content is expected now compared to when I did O-level.  It took me three attempts to get a Maths O-level (which I finally did aged 21 at the same time as my degree!). I suspect I would have sailed through GCSE.

We are an IB school at DYCA because I don’t believe A-level helps our young people adopt a properly academic approach to studies, or prepare them for success at university.  Our first IB Diploma cohort spent Year 11 learning “proper subjects” as we banked their GCSEs in Year 10 at Cs and Bs.  I taught them philosophy, politics and economics, Lynne taught them Science and ethical decisions for 21st century leaders, Al taught Theory of Knowledge and Sean taught Art Appreciation.  OFSTED weren’t too impressed with their levels of progress, but when inner-city teenagers were stopping me on corridors asking if I had read John Stuart Mill, asking me to arrange work experience in the House of Commons with the local MP, applying to Russell Group and not being fazed by the interviews, I knew I had judged education quite rightly to be about more than GCSE!  The fact I had some hard conversations with an HMI who lacked such understanding was the system’s problem, not mine!

I’m not sure about this “grade inflation” argument though.  The fact I find GCSE and A-level limiting is about my vision as someone who believes in education: grade inflation is the territory of those who don’t.  That last sentence is a bit arrogant so I need to try and explain.

Grade inflation is frankly not the issue

I’ve seen the charts about how the huge national increase in pass rates of English and Maths GCSE has been, and been present at the debates of whether this can possibly represent “genuine improvement”.  I’ve also listened to the government state that every student should keep re-taking English and Maths until they get a C grade up to the age of 19.  And then today the government were respectful enough to announce through a press leak, that only a student’s first grade will count in a school’s league table.  

So …. only the first time counts, but you have to keep doing it until you get to the standard we require.  Confused? You should be. The confusion is because the premis of all this is completely spurious.

If you make a high stakes accountability system in which heads literally lose their jobs and create “cliff edges”, don’t be surprised if every single drop of energy goes into that cliff edge! (particularly so with this measure which the vast majority of heads actually thought sensible) It would be far more astonishing if the C grades hadn’t dramatically risen over the last few years.  Anything which gets 100% attention and effort will show dramatic Improvement.  The better question is: should we have given this cliff edge 100% attention and effort?

But no, it was important for “Stage One” (as mentioned above) to concentrate the mind on grade inflation and gain a consensus about the need to do something.  The “something” turned out to be “comparable outcomes”. Never in educational history has it been so obvious that the wrong answer is being given to the wrong question.  I have struggled over many months to fully understand this and I am pretty sure that I do.  I also think comparable outcomes was developed as the right solution to a real problem in the past, but the way it has been used over the last two years is something which shames us all.

The real issue is: what do we have exams for?

You see I think there are two equally valid interpretations of what we have exams for.  Over recent years you will have heard colleagues across the system discussing “criterion referencing” and “norm referencing”.  I’ve listened and read lots and, at first, I really thought a lot of these people were cleverer than me (remember that maths O-level!), but actually this is an issue that requires a proper examination of basic principles.  It is about criterion and norm referencing, but let’s put it back to basic principles – what do we want our exams to do?:

• Should a grade awarded in an examination say “this student can understand / knows / is able to apply subject content at a set and understood level”?
• Should a grade awarded in an examination say “this student is in the x centile of their year cohort in knowing / understanding / applying this subject content”?

These are both valid purposes of exams BUT THEY ARE NOT THE SAME.  Furthermore, I am now sure that an exam cannot do both no matter how clever these assessor bods think they are!

If we have exams which are designed around the first principle, then we have a good mechanism for measuring school and system improvement, but unless we get the accountability measures right, we will get behaviour which leads to improvements we don’t believe in.  This is were we were.  There are solutions to this problem.  I respectfully suggest two: firstly government should take advice from the system (@headsroundtable?) about what accountability measures should be used to mitigate against undesirable behaviours, and should ensure proper criterion based standards in examinations through a properly accredited professional body of Chartered Assessors.

If we have exams which are designed around the second principle, we can always “stratify” a cohort, (understand that an “A” means “A” and an “E” means an “E” – useful to university and employers perhaps?), and it might be useful in judging system improvement in that if you need to score 10% more to get an “A” this year then the previous year, then the cohort has improved on last year’s.  This might be analysed further: eg was there an initiative / policy introduced when they were in KS1 which we can see made a difference?  So, you see, I am not totally against norm referencing: indeed as long as we understand that is what we are doing, it could be useful. What it cannot do, however, is be used in accountability measures at school level.  

If we are using examinations around this second principle we cannot measure school improvement and we cannot have schools collaborating if we try to do so. We have created a zero sum game.  If this is what our exams are to be about, we have to introduce a different measure of data-based accountability, which is, of course, another challenge.

The current mess we are in is because (amongst a number of other nonsenses) we have no agreement about what our examinations are there to do.

I have come to the inevitable conclusion that we need to face the question and we need to face the answer: what do we want our examination system to do?  To be honest, I can live with either answer because there are plenty of arguments on both sides.  But this does not mean we can do both, and we certainly cannot answer the accountability challenges while we are attempting to do so.

Data isn’t the only form of accountability

We need proper judgement-based accountability too (see back to my earlier description of a Year 11 curriculum and why).  Part of the reason for the complete and utter mess we have got into is that judgement- based accountability now seems to rely totally on data-based accountability.  We need to acknowledge that we need both, and they need to have a clear relationship.  At the moment, however, we have HMI (who really should know better) stuck in a morass of data which is rapidly losing credibility.

Phew …….. I feel a lot better for that!

Thanks for getting to the end!

We are flawed in so many ways, but perhaps the most disturbing aspect is this constant desire not just to know how well we are doing, but to know how badly others are doing. I don’t like this aspect of myself and I like it even less in others. It is closely aligned to our wish to ‘be proved right’, which is so often about the wish ‘to prove others wrong’.

The problem with this aspect of our basic human nature is that it gets in the way of unleashing our own greatness. To fulfill our potential we need to be collaborative, embracing, open-minded; we need to believe in ourselves and our great potential and that of others. It is vital that our self-esteem is not reliant on looking down or up to others, but rather on understanding a) our own uniqueness and b) what each of us contributes to the whole.

It is so depressing when we cannot bring other leaders to the table because they believe that Heads are in a desperate competition with each other and one school’s success means another’s pain.

It is so depressing when a student makes a huge leap in performance but cannot feel happy because ‘the others are still much better than me’. And this is all the more depressing because what research has shown and what every teacher knows is that what we believe to be true about our own ability is the truest predictor of performance.

It is so depressing when I manage to do 2.5k in 20 mins on the cross-trainer (this is a huge achievement by the way), only to have it made clear that this a poor level of fitness.  (And I can cope with that because my self-esteem is pretty good and I suspect that maybe the ‘gym bunnies’ isn’t!)

As teachers and sports trainers so often say ‘ignore the others; concentrate on your own performance’.

This is why models which measure both achievement and attainment should always be about what we can do, not about what we can’t.

I need to know that I can get fitter and I need goals.  I need to have assistance and help to get to those goals. I know I will never run any races (let alone win any), but I have to say that I do not need to know what centile of fitness I am in for 51-year-old Principals.  It would add no value and could be de-motivating.

The principle of ‘knowing exactly where my child is in a national ranking’ plays into the very worst aspects of ourselves and limits potential.

Firstly, it says ‘it matters not how well or badly you are doing against a set of criteria; what matters is your relative position to others’. We therefore need others to be ‘less good’; we are not interested in how well we have done and what we have gained – only in how we look in comparison. Dear me!

Secondly, while I am happy to accept that the job of a measurement is not to assist progress, it certainly isn’t to limit it. There is a massive psychological limiting factor to rank ordering and placing in deciles. Children may know who is cleverer than them at ‘this’ and ‘in this lesson’ and ‘this year’; that is very different to a snapshot test at one of those points putting them in a decile. This is likely to have the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly as it is a zero sum game. They will see very clearly that these deciles are not about them, but about relative performance. “I am in the bottom 50% so this is how I will achieve”. Yuck!

Thirdly, if we are interested in being able to measure individual, school and system improvement (and I think we are), then we cannot introduce processes which mitigate against that. We have all had a bit of fun on Twitter about the shock / horror headlines of “50% still below average”, and “10% of our children are still in bottom 10%”, but actually this is a huge problem.

People who are far cleverer than me (see blogs from @director_ioe and @headguruteacher) have explained the intricacies and difficulties with measures, but this I do know: any measurement which is a ‘zero sum game’ does not help me understand, progress or collaborate.

I used to worry it was arrogance …..

and to be entirely truthful it is a bit.  I have come to realise, however, that it is more faith than arrogance; or at least more akin to faith as the years roll by.  The certainties of youth have gradually become replaced by a solid belief that it is actually possible to effect transformational change. During the days when I see less of the students than I would like and more of the problems than I want to; on the days when people seem to be forming a queue to tell me how badly I am doing, and the backlog of work is obscuring the vision – on those days how I control my thoughts becomes very important. I focus on the transformations I have seen and the faith I have in those who will not give up. The signs of the transformations committed colleagues of goodwill achieve are all around us. I stand at my window and remember when this academy wasn’t here: I can still see the land with a couple of burnt out cars on it. I remember the predecessor schools to the academy – dreadful physical environments. I think about the quality of outputs from those schools, the lack of aspirations of the teachers for the students and the students for themselves. And then … I go for a little walk around our academy and see high quality teaching and learning all around in a beautiful and inspiring physical space; I talk to students who are applying for apprenticeships and university places and I see smiles all over the place. This transformation happened and it didn’t happen by accident. It was tough, and if committed people of goodwill had not held strong and firm, it would not have happened. If this transformation can be achieved, then I am a fool to doubt. I have the faith to carry on.

Someone once told me that successful headship was a “relentless optimism, even in the full face of the facts!”

and I have always remembered that because so often, when serving challenging communities, fellow professionals treat you like some kind of optimistic dreamer or deluded fool. I lost count of the amount of people – many of whom ought to have known better – who told me that the children of Seacroft wouldn’t wear smart uniform / attend regularly / achieve above the floor targets etc etc. In fact the thing that keeps me going is not a dreamy optimism, nor a political position, not even a personal ambition to prove myself right (although in weaker moments that sneaks in a bit!); what keeps me going is hope. We have writing on the wall outside our staffroom and part of the quote is “… we are touching and shaping tomorrow”. I defy anyone to walk past that and not be filled with hope. There is nothing more thrilling, awe-inspiring and humbling than the potential every child brings into our schools and academies. Every child has their own unique potential to help create a better future for their generation and future generations. There is no other profession that has such a profound influence on the future as we educate, shape, nurture that potential. Sometimes it is hard to feel that hope when struggling with the problems and backgrounds the children bring with them, and we can get worn down with the repeated battles and relapses. The thing that makes it easy to come back confident and smiling and to never give up on them is the hope the children give us everyday as their gift: their unexpected (and sometimes inappropriate)kindnesses; their humour; their resilience, the sudden leap in achievement (apparently from nowhere) and the gentle shoots of aspiration. A quick glance through the average Headteacher’s twitter feed every evening has these examples of hope which we share because we know they keep us all going!

We say that our academy runs on love and we are quite open about this

We pay and treat our staff well, but ultimately my staff serve our community motivated by, and with,love. I see a thousand examples everyday; not only in the interaction between staff and children, but also between staff themselves. And love is catching! It is actually quite hard not to respond positively to a tough and truthful love which refuses to condemn, refuses to compromise and refuses to give up on you. As I watch the selflessness and commitment of each team of staff giving their skills willingly and cheerfully, helping to transform the lives of countless generations of children, supporting each other when the going is tough and striving to be the very best they can be I know that I can do no less in leading them. So in the end it really is these three things: faith, hope and love……. And the greatest of these is love.

Firstly, accountability measures have powerful effects on behaviour – some of which are intended, but some of which are not only unintended, but also damaging. They are never properly ‘stress tested’ for this. Floor targets, performance tables and OFSTED are all useful and powerful levers and I certainly wouldn’t want to do away with them (I’m old enough to remember the days before them and it makes me shudder!) but government could and should work with system leaders, from a wide variety of backgrounds, to predict what these unintended behaviours may be and so adjust measures accordingly.

Secondly, the reason why accountability measures are such powerful levers for changing behaviour is because of the huge stakes attached to them. Even when there are not huge stakes attached to measures we adopt what seem to have become known as ‘gaming behaviours’ due to our basic human nature. (I had a renewed sense of this when sitting exams for my MBA. Each exam was terminal and 3 hours long and I entered each exam room knowing exactly what I had to do to get a B grade – because I had decided to get a ‘with merit’- with no intention of expending effort over and above exactly what was necessary) So …. when the stakes are quite literally a headteacher’s job, of course behaviours appear that owe more to ‘saving our skin’, than improving quality.

Thirdly, the schools and students who suffer most from damaging behaviours which are indirectly the result of the accountability measures are those without strong and confident leadership. Furthermore, they are often, although not always, the schools which require the most improvement.

What are these behaviours which we don’t wish to encourage and are the unintended consequences of accountability measures? Well, this is where it gets complicated! Because (and I think here I am quoting President Santos -West Wing Season 7) ‘in this, as in all things, context is king’

To start with – there are some schools happily cruising along, doing a satisfactory job and not being motivated to do anything more: the schools that achieve over 75% 5+, and the same figure for 5+EM, and the same figure for EBacc. A school with this profile is failing with a substantial percentage of its students and we know immediately that its curriculum is turgid. (If DYCA can have 98% at 5+, then everyone can!) But there is no motivation to innovate, take risks and unleash greatness. Security is provided by accountability measures focused on adequacy and narrow (or, dare I say, politically-inspired) definition of greatness.

Then, at the other end of the market, so to speak, we have the schools struggling to hit the floor targets. Now here I’m on my own turf,and I know a lot about this! So indulge me, and let me move onto school improvement.

My experience has taught me that there are a number of stages in school improvement.

Stage One is about creating the conditions for improvement. At this stage, frankly, accountability measures are entirely irrelevant. When a school has below 50% of teachers at ‘satisfactory’ (indeed a critical mass of ‘supply / agency), student attendance below 85%, a vocal minority of criminal families calling the shots and drug dealing on site, any Headteacher who focuses on the government accountability measures will fail to effect turnaround. The agenda in schools at this stage is clear – create the conditions for school improvement, the conditions for teaching and learning to take place, a safe and secure environment, take on the bullies (and in my experience this included the LA) and exude confidence so that no-one in the community believes you will blow in the wind. When I did my first headship, if I had focused on the current accountability measures (or the ones which existed then, to be honest) in the first year the school wouldn’t have turned around. The key accountability measure at the time I was learning about turnaround headship at the coal face was 5+ and the ‘gaming’ was rife. For some reason I had the confidence to ignore and brought in real work-related qualifications, which had no performance table equivalency, but which did deliver the first generation for a while to get jobs.

Stage Two is about adequacy. Floor targets are useful here, but schools in challenging circumstances face their biggest challenge here, because if they get stuck on floor targets they don’t look at what will be required in the next stage. The social context schools are working in does not change and so it is extremely easy for a school which is improving rapidly to make one of the following 2 mistakes:
1. Continue using the strategies which got them above floor targets for too long. These strategies are context specific and once the floor targets are reached they need ‘pruning and challenging’, or they actually become limiting. We have seen this clearly with ‘early entry’ at DYCA. In a culture where no-one had ever passed an exam, proving it could be done a year early gave the students and families a fillip and the academy a bit of breathing space; now it is ridiculous because the student culture is different and we want to discourage ‘I’m happy with my C miss!’
2. Believe that all performance tables measures are important and do not have the confidence to know what is right for their school and contextualise. These are the ‘sad schools’ which are forcing every student to do ‘the EBACC’ (an imaginary qualification with limited / no currency) We know that if we forced this performance table measure in our context the following would happen:
– EBACC measure would rise
– 5+EM would fall
– attendance would fall

Stage Three is about the confidence to be great, and once again context is everything. The social context within which the school is called to serve remains unaltered, and the school is required to behave self-confidently in knowing and understanding its journey if it is going to be great. Sadly the existing accountability measures work dramatically against this happening. They drive headship behaviour about ‘preparing for OFSTED’: a desperation to be recognised for the mountains that have been climbed is almost impossible in the current framework, and so working to be recognised as ‘good’ (for heads at this stage that is heard as ‘safe’), becomes paramount (or even worse – a desperation to be ‘satisfactory’) I know and understand and empathise with my colleagues who behave like this, but using the OFSTED framework as a way of moving a school from adequate to good is never going to work. Indeed the OFSTED framework is now so limited and data-driven, focussing on it alone is always going to be detrimental to the improvement journey.

Stage Four is in some ways the most worrying in terms of the negative impact of accountability measures. This is where a school has become secure and ‘good’ and has a huge amount to offer in terms of system leadership and sharing across the system. How do the accountability measures mitigate against this happening? Massively. We see heads focussing on ‘preserving my outstanding judgment’, instead of focussing on innovation, system leadership and sharing (needless to say this takes their schools backwards), we see the ‘good to great’ never happening because the accountability measures discourage risk whereas we know greatness relies on self-confidence and risk, and, finally, we have no incentives in the system to make me as responsible for the students in the school down the road as I am for my own.

If I really have great moral purpose I want to be responsible for the students in the school down the road and I want a sophisticated system of accountability measures which makes this happen. I also want to be of service to my government helping them devise measures, avoid pitfalls, and put my experience to good use. Otherwise it doesn’t really feel worthwhile.