Staff Development
This is what John Tomsett has to say about staff development[1]: ‘In the last six years it has become plain to me that the quality of teacher learning is central to putting staff first. Any teacher, at any stage of his or her career, has to accept, continuously, the professional obligation to improve his or her teaching. Period. And once the teacher has accepted that obligation, the school has to accept the responsibility of providing the very best teacher learning opportunities. School leaders cannot just wish teachers to improve their teaching. School leaders have to put their staff’s learning needs first.’
John also points out that staff learning needs to be aligned with the school’s performance management system. Now the default practice in much of the sector is for the performance management systems to be underpinned by data. The intelligent way to use data is to analyse the results of the public tests, or large scale comparative judgement sessions, in order to develop some hypotheses about what needs to be done to improve outcomes. But this reliance on data is often taken too far. This happens when internally generated school data is used for pay awards. The inherent flaw is that school internal data is neither valid nor reliable. If this is the case, why would it be used as part of a performance management process?
This is what happens in many parts of the sector: targets are agreed, which usually relate to whole school priorities, departmental or phase priorities and the performance of pupils in individual classes. It is the last which is the hardest to get right. Why is this? Well too often, the indicators for making judgements are based on numbers. So, what is the problem with numbers? Well, these numbers usually relate to the attainment and progress which pupils in a group or class have made. But what do the numbers signify and what are they based on? Any number is only a symbol for what a child knows, understands and can do. And a number cannot capture the whole picture of a child’s achievement. The further problem with numbers is that they are often driven by tracking systems. As teachers go through the curriculum with their pupils, they are often expected to track their progress on the system. The goal is to improve the numbers or turn the children ‘green’ as proof of progress. Yet this takes no account of the complexity of learning, nor of the authentic progress pupils might have made, nor of the gaps which remain to be filled.
A further problem with linking performance management to data, this time external data such as SATS or examination results at key stage 4 and key stage 5 is that the results which pupils achieve are not solely down to an individual teacher. At the end of Year 6 pupils will have had at least six years of schooling and the impact of these years should not solely be used to judge a Year 6 teacher’s performance. There are too many external factors in how well pupils do at the end of year 6 to say that one teacher is responsible, and that their pay should be contingent on this. And when it comes to secondary, the performance management targets based on Key Stage 2 SATS results are deeply flawed. How can a teacher in humanities or arts and design technology be held to account for baseline data which are not related in any way to their subjects? Bonkers.
If we are not going to rely on internally generated school data as the basis for performance what might we do instead? To draw on John Tomsett’s work again. As he argues ‘school structures which have informed leaders of teacher learning, and time for teachers to work on improving practice, also require coherence with a school’s performance management system. A feature of our mature, coherent model of performance development and our related CPD programme is our Disciplined Inquiry objective. It is the only objective in our Performance Development. All teachers and teaching assistants – some 120+ colleagues – identify a feature of their practice which they would like to develop and then they evaluate that development of their practice against its impact upon their students’ performance. They are expertly trained in the whole process by colleagues from our Research School who introduce colleagues to, amongst other things, interventions, treatment groups, control groups and effect sizes. They have time to complete their inquiry – we call it their Inquiry Question, or IQ for short – and at the end of the year they write it up on an A3 pro forma.’
This way of working chimes with Philippa Cordingley’s ‘Pockets of Excellence – Beacon or Blindspot?’summarising her research in schools attempting to scale up pockets of high quality practice. Philippa comes to some very interesting conclusions - that the scaling up of excellent practice is subtle and complex. The nub of the paradox appears to be that many school leaders attempt to gain momentum by providing support for teachers. A good thing in itself, but when CPD is provided by leaders and positioned as an executive role, what is often missing is the chance to understand, experiment with, and explore the underpinning rationale of the practice in the same way. When CPD is top down, middle leaders often miss out on developing their learning leadership through working out how to facilitate the learning of their colleagues.
'By contrast, 'exceptional' schools placed a great emphasis on building a shared understanding of the school’s model of pedagogy and its underpinning rationale. By ensuring that all development focused on identifying and removing barriers to learning and building a shared model of and language for teaching and learning, the extensive monitoring in 'exceptional' schools worked to build coherence for learners and develop a commitment to collective efficacy.'
In the exceptional schools the emphasis was on 'highly professionalised CPDL (Continuing Professional Development and Learning), constructed as a professional and accountable partnership between leaders and teachers. Mentors, facilitators and coaches were trained and the effect of their support on colleagues and on their pupils was evaluated. These trained facilitators of professional learning were distributed across all levels of leadership.'
It is this sort of endeavour, rich, professionally rewarding that improves standards. As David Weston of the Teacher Development Trust says, ‘If we are going to have more schools where teachers keep improving, we need to make staff learning just as much of a priority as student learning.’
[1] Tomsett, J, Uttley J (2020) Putting Staff First: John Catt Educational