Primary Teacher UK

86% of school leaders think OFSTED pressures deter would-be head teachers

Research published by the NAHT suggests 86% of school leaders think Ofsted pressures deter would-be head teachers. The current OFSTED regime encouraged schools to deny problems for fear of being publicly shamed said Mick Brookes. He said:

"We do need to dare to be creative; we do need to shake off the oppressive burdens of targets, tests and tables. We have to free ourselves from the clutches of curriculum accountants and assessment auditors. And yes… it is high time to trust schools."

The NAHT survey of 500 members, released at the conference, found 86% thought the impact of Ofsted inspections meant potential head teachers were put off applying. More than two-thirds thought the impact on their school was at best neutral, and at worst very unhelpful. The research found 86% of members thought inspections increased vulnerability and insecurity.

The survey of heads, deputies and assistant head teachers also suggested nine out of 10 worked longer than 48 hours per week with a fifth saying they were seriously considering changing jobs in the face of an "uncontrolled and expanding workload".

You can read the full findings of the survey on the NAHT website if you log in.

Link: http://www.naht.org.uk/

Extra Help for Black Pupils Needed

Black pupils should get extra help so they progress faster than their classmates, a government report says.
The strategy paper says all schools have a duty to narrow the achievement gap under the Race Relations Act.

Black pupils do worse than white ones even when class is accounted for - 25% of black Caribbean boys got five good GCSEs, compared to 43.5% of white boys. Institutional racism, the report claims, is the most destructive element in the education of black children.

The report: Ensuring the Attainment of Black Pupils: Management guide, was produced for the Department for Children, Schools and Families by Capita Strategic Children’s Services.

Do flutes have to be for girls and tubas for boys?

Schools are now acutely sensitive to most forms of gender-stereotyping. Girls can join football teams, boys can play netball, and cookery lessons are open to all. But not enough is yet being done to challenge the stereotypes that influence children’s choice of musical instruments, researchers say.

Nearly nine in ten flute-players in English schools are girls while almost four in five young tuba-players are boys, an article in the latest issue of the International Journal of Music Education points out.

The most “gendered” musical instruments are the harp (90 per cent female) and the electric and bass guitars (81 per cent male). Girl violin-players outnumber boys by roughly three to one in primary and secondary schools, while the position is reversed for the trombone.

“Historically, instruments such as drums and trumpets have tended to be played more by boys, while the clarinet has tended to be played by girls,” say researchers from the Institute of Education, London. Factors such as the shape or size of the instrument, its pitch, or the physical characteristics needed to play it appear to be responsible for these traditional gender divisions.

Parents also sometimes direct children towards instruments that they see as appropriate for their gender. Smaller, higher-pitched instruments are, for example, often seen as more suitable for girls.
However, Professor Sue Hallam and her co-authors believe that children may also be making stereotypical choices because they fear they may be bullied or lose popularity if they choose the “wrong” instrument. The way an instrument is presented to pupils – and whether the person demonstrating how to play it is male or female -- may be influential too, they say.

Teachers should make it clear to children that it is appropriate for them to play any instrument and should try to ensure that boy flute-players and girl trombonists are not bullied, the researchers add.
Professor Hallam suggests that some schools could even consider the radical option of setting up all-male or all-female musical ensembles because they would require boys and girls to play the full range of instruments. The government-supported Wider Opportunities Programme is already offering more whole-class instrumental teaching to primary pupils, but she says it is too early to gauge whether it is helping to close the gender divide.

“Some people may say ‘why worry about the instruments that boys and girls choose?’ but I think the world would be a poorer place if James Galway had been discouraged from playing the flute and Evelyn Glennie had been told that girls shouldn’t become percussionists,” she says.

The full report is available online at http://ijm.sagepub.com/current.dtl

Male Teacher experience in primary schools

I've had a request from Robin Hadley from Manchester School of Education who is looking into the possibility of conducting research on the male teacher experience in primary schools for an MSc in Educational Research. He is wondering if there are any willing participants who read this blog?

He is currently building a case for funding and it is valuable for him to include sources of potential participants. If you can help Robin email him at Robin.Hadley@manchester.ac.uk.

Children spoilt by their parents can cause disruption in the classroom

Research for the NUT has found that primary schoolchildren spoilt by their parents can cause disruption in the classroom by repeating manipulative behaviour used at home. Cambridge University held 60 interviews with staff and pupils in 10 schools. Two examples cited by the BBC are:

A mother who celebrated the fact she had been able to get her five-year-old to bed at 1am instead of his previous bedtime of 3am and a seven-year-old who smashed up his Playstation in a tantrum, then spent a week pestering his mother until she bought him a new one.

The researchers said some parents simply could not say "no" when their children demanded televisions and computers in their bedrooms. Others would do "anything to shut up their children just to get some peace", it said.

Schools' rosy self-evaluations not always put to the test

Some school inspectors are now too ready to accept headteachers' assessments of how good their schools are, researchers believe.

Since 2005, schools in England have had to produce self-evaluation reports as part of the "lighter touch" inspection process managed by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). However, researchers at the Institute of Education, London, are concerned that inspectors do not always properly test a headteacher's claims before producing their own rating of a school.

Sara Bubb and Peter Earley say that school self-evaluation has been a positive development overall. It has encouraged schools to identify their strengths and weaknesses in a more methodical manner, and helped them to focus on improvements that should raise standards.

But their 38-school study of how self-evaluation can help to identify and meet staff-development needs suggests that schools' sometimes glowing self-assessments can result in over-generous Ofsted reports. One local authority adviser told them: "In the current short inspection system, especially with less rigorous (inspection) teams, schools can definitely get rosier Ofsted reports as a result of a well-written self-evaluation that 'bigs up' the school."

The researchers also interviewed a headteacher who admitted that she deliberately used "phrases that Ofsted would like" and adopted a positive tone throughout her self-evaluation report. Her assessment was then judged accurate by an inspection team.

"School self-evaluation needs to be more than a game that people play in order to pass their inspection," the researchers say in a paper to be presented to the American Educational Research Association conference in New York later today. "It needs to be an integral part of the school inspection process in which priorities will be identified and associated staff development needs will be acknowledged."

Bubb and Earley carried out a 20-month study of 13 secondary, 22 primary and three special schools in 22 local authorities. The study also found that some schools were "overly concerned" with producing evidence to support their judgments. A few had gathered reams of material for Ofsted or commissioned companies or consultants to survey parents and pupils. "This did not seem a good use of time and money," the researchers comment.

They add that although most staffrooms they visited "were happy places buzzing with conversations about children's learning" ill-considered self-evaluation appears to have damaged staff morale in a few schools. "Self-evaluation has not only led to a rise in the number of observations of teaching but even to schools grading teachers on Ofsted's four-point scale,” they say. One deputy head said that teachers had been "intimidated and damaged" by the new observation system.

"In one school all teachers were observed (with grades) 10 times a year," the researchers say. "Although this monitoring was meant to be developmental, the high turnover of staff suggests that the stress it caused outweighed the benefits."

Memory Issue hits 10% of pupils

One in 10 children might have a "working memory" impairment that causes them to do less well than expected at school, research suggests.

A Durham University team identified the problem in 10% of more than 3,000 schoolchildren, across all ages.

They say teachers rarely identify it, tending to label pupils as being unmotivated daydreamers.

Working memory involves such things as remembering verbal instructions, new names or telephone numbers.

The researchers say that if the finding of 10% of children having the problem held true for all children, then almost 500,000 in primary education alone would be affected.

The researchers believe that early assessment - which they say can be done reliably from the age of four - would enable schools to adopt new teaching methods. 

We have been trialling memory techniques in our school, with some success, particularly in writing. We used it across the school from Year 1 to Year 6 to enhance the children's ability to remember the sequence for writing a setting for a narrative. It helped the children not only to remember the sequence for their chosen setting, but it also gave them a variety of sentence openers and connectives - even from Year 1's! I have attached the Smartboard version that we used as a visual hook for the children for writing a setting, but it would be good to hear if any one else has used this method for other areas of the curriculum.

Download memory.notebook

Reducing class size ‘not a cost-effective way to improve pupil performance’

Reducing school class sizes in an attempt to raise pupil achievement is a waste of money for all but the youngest children, according to one of the country's leading teacher-educators.

Cutting class size by 30 per cent gives children the equivalent of four extra months of learning per year but costs around £20,000 per class per year, says Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the Institute of Education, London.

By contrast, he calculates that "formative assessment", a tried-and-tested approach to assessing and responding to children's learning needs, can provide eight extra months of educational development for only £2,000 per classroom per year. "It can therefore be 20 times as cost-effective as reducing class size in terms of pupil achievement,” he told the annual Chartered London Teachers Conference today.

“Smaller classes do confer a benefit if pupils are unruly, because fewer pupils in a class means less disruption. But as long as pupils are well-behaved, then what you can do with a class of 20 is generally possible with a class of 30. Smaller classes can also be more cost-effective for five to seven-year-olds, but research suggests the class size needs to be reduced to 15 or less."

Professor Wiliam says that investments in ICT have also shown a poor return. However, international studies have confirmed that formative assessment can double the speed of pupil learning.

Teachers adopting this approach are expected to monitor their pupils' progress continuously and provide appropriate feedback. Some teachers use a "traffic lights" system and ask pupils to hold up different coloured cards to show whether they have understood what they have been told. Red means "no", amber means "partly", and green "yes". Pupils are also encouraged to evaluate their own work and advise their classmates on how they can improve.

The English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish education departments have all provided varying degrees of backing for formative assessment. But following three years of research in both the UK and the United States, Professor Wiliam has concluded that the approach will only take off properly if teachers work together in school-based groups to refine their classroom methods.

Having studied various types of “teacher learning communities” Professor Wiliam and his co-researchers have found that groups of 8 to 10 teachers who meet once a month for at least two years can be most effective. "It takes time to change teachers' ways of working, particularly if they have been in the classroom for many years," says Professor Wiliam. "Simply telling teachers what to do doesn't work.

"For example, most teachers have heard about research from the 1980s which shows that if they wait three to five seconds after asking a question their pupils' performance improves because they have been given some time to think. Even so, many teachers are still allowing less than a second for pupils to respond. The conclusion we can draw from that is that knowing what to do is the easy part of teaching. Actually doing it is what's hard."

Pupils’ behaviour tends to improve if they do well in English

Young children’s behaviour often improves markedly during their primary school years if they do well in English at age 7, new research suggests. Researchers who tracked more than 2,000 children between the ages of 8 and 10 found that those who had made a good start in English became much less likely to get involved in antisocial activities such as bullying. Pupils who were good at maths at age 7 but struggled with English showed fewer improvements in behaviour during their junior school years. Dr Leslie Gutman, the study’s principal author, said:

“This does not necessarily mean that we will see an improvement in children’s behaviour by enhancing key stage 1 English scores. It could be more complicated than that. It may be that aspects of development associated with English proficiency, such as communication skills and sociability, promote positive behaviour.”

Although there was no evident association between good grades in maths and improved behaviour, children who did well in maths at 7 generally had stronger feelings of control, more confidence in their scholastic abilities, and less depression.

Parents believe their child is safe at school

Nine out of 10 parents believe their child is safe at school, according to a survey by the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations (NCPTA). Despite reports of the Home Secretary calling for airport-style metal detectors at school gates to combat knife attacks, pupils’ physical security in class is not high on their families’ list of fears. Just three of the 501 parents questioned in a telephone poll for the NCPTA said they were worried about knife or gun crime.

And teachers have told The TES they do not want schools to become fortresses. They say ministers have
overreacted and they would prefer a less confrontational approach. Even Sally Coates, head of Sacred Heart RC School in Southwark, south London, where a 13-year-old girl was stabbed last week and a 14-year-old boy arrested, said that security arches were not the answer.

Yesterday, the Association of Chief Police Officers detailed plans to “nip youth offending in the bud” through Safer School Partnerships. Police will work with schools and other community groups to target prolific young offenders who are involved with gangs, guns and knives. The NCPTA survey found the main concern of parents was pupils’ bad behaviour in lessons disrupting their child’s learning. Nearly half said their child had been bullied at school, but 62 per cent felt schools were doing enough to deter bullying.

Overall, 73 per cent were satisfied with their child’s education and nine out of 10 parents got their child in to their preferred school.