Adding the icing to the ‘outcomes’ cake…
By Richard James, Assistant Headteacher, @jamesrsci
At my current Academy our Vice Principal often refers to a tiered approach to school systems, today’s article is very much about the icing that could be applied to a well-established cake. The impact of the strategies outlined below are completely reliant on a bedrock of an:
Effective safeguarding and behaviour for learning policy
Effective strategies to increase student attendance
Effectively sequenced curriculum which is designed to promote long term learning and recall based on a foundation of explicitly taught knowledge
So, what is this about? Below I will outline our current strategies to secure improved outcomes across a Year 11 cohort.
Before I begin, I must pay credit to the colleagues / speakers from PiXL and other organisations (Greenshaw Learning Trust, Edutwitter, Oasis Community Learning) who have helped shape and suggested some of the strategies outlined below. If you are looking for the impact of this work, it’s hard to articulate at this stage. On a smaller scale, I’ve led some of these initiatives within the faculty (Science department) and achieved ‘significantly’ above national average results in 2019, though I confess at whole-school level I’m yet to see a reliable quantitative impact due to COVID.
In short, please take and adapt what you like to your setting, ignore what you don’t, and feedback or suggested improvements are always welcome.
Context – Our school is situated in South Bristol with 150 students currently on roll in Year 11. We enter >80% for the EBacc and have a disadvantaged cohort of 36%.
Basic intervention model
For more information on this please read my previous article:
The key four principles of this are:
Identification – Which students are underperforming?
Plan – What is the simplest way a student can improve? How long will it take? What will they do each week?
Track – Who is doing it? Who isn’t? How can you reward the students who are actively participating in your plan? What will you do for those who are not participating?
Evaluate – How will you assess the impact of the intervention? Who stays in the intervention group? Who graduates from the group? Who joins the intervention group?
Base Grades – prerequisite for identification
In my current school, we use ‘Base Grades’ generated from KS2 prior attainment. We follow the DFE model averaging Maths and English. Ultimately, this is an internal indicator of performance. We can never predict what Progress 8 the Base Grades would provide the school following a GCSE Exam series though we can use them as loose indicators of cohort performance. As a school we have moved away from sharing base grades with students, choosing instead to focus on assessing learning, instead of assessing learners.
Interpreting the data
The way that we identify underperformance effectively comes down to two scenarios:
Scenario 1 – student sits a GCSE paper/s which have national grade boundaries. Identify grade achieved. Compare to the ‘Base Grade’ described above. If the grade achieved is below the identified base grade, the student is deemed to be underperforming.
Scenario 2 – student completes an assessment standardised across the year group. Identify rank within cohort. Compare rank to baseline KS2 rank. If the student is working below their baseline KS2 rank, they are deemed to be underperforming.
We only aim to intervene on the bottom 10-20% of the cohort for progress. If you have a scenario where most students are performing below where you would expect, I suggest going back to looking at the ‘bedrock’ – what is happening day to day, week to week within that subject.
Identification in Year 10 ➡️ Fast Start Year 11
We typically run a set of summer exams for Year 10. The purpose of these assessments is to inform the curriculum planning moving forward but also to identify students who are performing significantly below their base grade. We then ensure that the basic intervention model outlined above is in place for the start of Year 11. In Year 11 we would run at least 3 cycles of intervention:
September Year 11 ➡️ Mock Exams 1
Mock Exams 1 ➡️ Mock Exams 2
Mock Exams 2 ➡️ GCSE Exams
We currently have a flexible approach to this whereby staff members can run their own strategy and track how they choose though a guideline sheet is provided if they choose to use it. In an attempt to keep everything on 1 page the outline below is being used this year, though teams can make duplicate sheets for different cohorts e.g. disadvantaged, gender, prior attainment.
The most important here though is not the format, it’s that something different is done and its impact is measured.
Boost Lessons / Period 6
This is a common strategy used in many schools (so you may wish to skip this section) though I’ll outline the approach I currently take in setting this up to ensure that all subjects get a fairer shot at this extra curriculum time.
What is it? Additional curriculum time for 45minutes at the end of the day
What happens? Sessions are based on exam skills and practice. This is an I do, We do, You do session focussing on a live model and deliberate practice of the highest leverage exam skills / questions before removing the scaffold and allowing students to practice independently.
How often? Term 1 / 2 we run two boosts, Term 3 / 4 we run three boosts, Term 5 / 6 we run up to four but on a flexible timetable based around exams
How? We have Period 6 enrichment built into 1265, these 45min sessions take up one of those slots for staff members
We always increase the demands on our students incrementally, so that we can avoid students ‘peaking’ too early – as well as staff. To maximise fairness, we are currently running the current model:
Preparatory sessions
‘If it’s good enough for private schools, it’s good enough for us…’
If you have teachers in your school who work as tutors in the evening, do the following:
Ask how much they charge
Ask them to run core knowledge tutoring sessions via Microsoft Teams for 45mins at 7pm instead
These sessions are free to access for all our students. Many of our families can’t afford or access private tuition for their children so instead, we provide it via an online platform. We use Formative / Microsoft Forms to track student engagement and diagnose common misconceptions at source but similar to Boost these sessions involve our I do, We do, You do, model whereby the scaffold is slowly removed as students practice skills / question styles to mastery.
1-to-1 Progress Meetings (students)
Every disadvantaged Year 11 student and any other students whose parent / carer did not attend parents evening receives at least one progress meeting per year. The purpose of the meeting is to identify how we can best support the child moving forward or to challenge the student academically to ensure they are prepared to achieve their best possible outcomes.
One aspect of this meeting is to identify the next steps for each child and ensure they have applied for a course / apprenticeship post-16. We do have a careers advisor we use but these meetings encompass the academic aspects to ensure all students have the currency and qualifications required for their chosen destination.
We use ALT member and the head of year for these meetings and each student receives 10minutes with the option of ‘follow up’ meetings where required.
Raising Attainment Meetings (subject leaders)
Every Friday morning at 8.20 am we meet with subject leaders to ensure they are best supported with key students / cohorts. These meets are two-fold in that they challenge the members of staff to ensure they are enacting and effectively implementing their intervention plans but also to provide a platform whereby staff can request additional resources / time.
We run English and Maths meetings biweekly with other subjects interspersed in the other weeks. A sample termly RAP Meeting plan can be seen below:
Options Days
The final strategy I’ll share is our ‘Options Days’ model. We have two options which students can take in Year 10 ensuring that all students study 9 qualifications in total. As the students selected these subjects at three points each year (6 days in total), we collapse the timetable for Year 11 and students have a whole day with their option’s subject teachers. This is incredibly beneficial for vocational qualifications (Hospitality and Catering, Construction, Sport) whilst also providing additional support for coursework-based GCSEs (Art, Photography, and uninterrupted time to work on the Computer Science project). For option subjects that have terminal exams these days are used to cover linked content in more depth. This strategy was in part introduced to ensure students have sufficient time to complete portfolio work following the first COVID lockdown though it is becoming a staple day that students really look forward to.
The students chose these subjects for a reason, in most cases, our students really embrace this additional time to focus on their passions.
Summary
So, as was mentioned in the initial blurb, take what you like, ignore what you don’t, feedback, and suggested improvements are always welcome. Alongside this, we are trialling strategies such as mentoring (external agency e.g. PWC) and school-led tutoring though these aren’t sufficiently embedded at this stage to report on impact. To reiterate, these ideas are very much the icing on the cake. They aren’t going to see a significant impact unless the main systems of the school are functioning to an effective level.
Richard is an Assistant Vice Principal and Science teacher at a large 11-16 secondary in the South West. He has successfully led two Science faculties in multiple roles and since becoming a senior leader, has held responsibilities for Teaching and Learning and more recently Outcomes and Assessment. Passionate about sustainable school improvement and ensuring that all staff has the opportunity and capacity to thrive in their roles. Follow him @jamesrsci