Improving Schools Programme Autumn Term Network Meeting Narrowing the Attainment Gap:

Buckinghamshire County Council

Improving Schools Programme

Autumn Term Network Meeting

Narrowing the Attainment Gap:

securing improved outcomes for vulnerable groups

David Cousins,

Cathy Tracy and Sarah Leonard


Welcome


Outline of the morning

• We will be exploring:– Gifted and talented / more able pupils as a group

vulnerable to underachievement– The link between underachievement and poverty and

what schools can do to narrow the attainment gap– Reviewing school systems to support teachers in

closing the attainment gap– Launching the ISP ‘Excellent Practice’ document


Review of 2011 - 2012

• An average 12 percentage point gain in combined English and mathematics figures

• Significant gains at Key Stage 1 in the percentage of pupils gaining level 2b in reading, writing and mathematics

Key Stage 1 Reading Writing Mathematics

ISP gain 3.0 6.2 5.6

Bucks gain 0.5 1.2 1.2


Review of 2011 - 2012

• Gains in progress measures from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2 in both English and mathematics



How Ofsted inspect

• Numbers of different judgements have varied over time, but they report on:

• The quality of the PROVISION that the school provides• The OUTCOMES for the young people• The LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT• The school’s CAPACITY TO IMPROVE• OVERALL EFFECTIVENESS• Safeguarding and equality of opportunity


The new OFSTED frameworks: a focus ondifferent groups of learners

• An important theme is the increased focus on the outcomes and provision for different groups.

• Groups are defined as including: males and females; different ethnic groups; students with special educational needs and/or disabilities; looked after children; gifted and talented students; those taught in other institutions; those with different levels of prior attainment and any specific groups identified by the school or college.

• This focus on different groups of students is reflected in the evidence gathered by inspectors and the subsequent published inspection reports.


Jan 2012 – more emphasis on groups, including G&T

• One of the top 5 issues (challenge)• Existing data• How well do G&T pupils do? (not just tests)• Actual (not planned) provision in the classroom• Any additional provision (people / resources)• Learning not teaching• High calibre teacher/pupil interaction• Opportunities for children to explain thinking, develop

potential (prolonged research, working with older pupils etc)


Outcomes for students: achievement

• The start point for assessing the achievement of very able students will be the school’s or provider’s own evaluation of how well those students’ are learning and progress they have made.

• No SEF ? No story?• In assessing how well pupils and students achieve and enjoy their

learning, inspectors will take account of the extent to which:– they make progress from their starting points and attain their

learning goals, including qualifications and challenging targets– there are any significant variations in the attainment of

learning goals and progress of different groups of students


Leadership and management

• Leaders and managers are responsible for a range of further aspects which, although relevant to all students, may enable the institution to focus specifically on outcomes and provision for very able students. For example:– setting challenging targets and monitoring the progress of

individuals and groups towards them– taking account of students’ views– utilising partnership opportunities to improve provision and

outcomes.– Perception Surveys – what the students think about it (does

this include non-writers?)


What Ofsted will look at

• Know your data and be prepared to tell the story• Executive summary, bullet points, no more than 2 sides• Case studies (2?)

– e.g. a HA pupil or a “recovery” student – tell the story, what did the school do (additional support, curriculum changes)

– what was the impact? – provide for interview


Outstanding schools:

• Ofsted publishes summaries of the very best schools of each type

• Schools are chosen from those inspected recently• Booklet gives detailed examples of the ‘best practice’

work• Very popular with other schools and the‘case study

schools’ get lots of visitors


Good practice in primary mathematics: evidence from 20 successful schools

• Key Findings:– Practical, hands-on experience– Understanding of place value– Inverse concepts taught together– High-quality teaching of number structure and relationships– Traditional methods (?) but flexibility in thinking and approach– Strong emphasis on problem-solving– Fast and focused intervention– Concentration on just one or two efficient methods– Clear and coherent calculation policies– Good teacher subject knowledge


Engaging able mathematics students: King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys

• Problem-solving– Five main sources – UK Mathematics Trust,

Mathematical Association, nrich website, National Centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics (NCETM), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (USA)

• Practical work and ICT• Questioning and dialogue• Routine practice of techniques• Extra-curricular provision


Possible Actions

• Baseline Assessment (G&T BME handout)

• Quality First Teaching• Challenge• Excellence for All (www.bucksgfl.org.uk/gt)• The WOW factor

• Evaluate the impact, include pupil interviews, to plan the next stage


Activity

• Which group(s) will your school focus on? Why?

• What action might you plan (will this piggy-back on any other initiative?)

• Classroom practice – what could change?


Poverty and underachievement

• One in four children in the UK grows up in poverty– relative poverty– absolute poverty– free school meals



• “...rich, thick kids” do better than “poor, clever” children – Michael Gove reporting to the Commons education committee, 2010

• “One of the biggest groups of under-achievers is the white working class and their outcomes at both KS2 and KS4 are considerably below those achieved by all other major ethnic groups” – Raising achievement of White Working Class Pupils – Lambeth Research Report, 2009



• “Pupils from advantaged managerial and professional backgrounds were more than three times as likely to obtain five+ A* - C GCSE grades that their peers at the other end of the social spectrum – the unskilled manual working class.” – DCSF – Social Mobility: Narrowing Social Class Educational Attainment Gaps, 2006

• “The attainment of white British pupils is polarised by social class to a greater extent that for any other ethnic group: white British pupils from managerial and professional homes are one of the highest attaining groups, while white British pupils from working class homes are the lowest attaining group.” Strand / DCSF, 2008


Poverty and underachievement• British children’s educational attainment is overwhelmingly

linked to parental occupation, income and qualifications.

• Marked differences are apparent from very early childhood. By the age of three, poor children have been assessed to be one year behind richer ones in terms of communication and in some areas 50% of pupils begin primary school without the necessary language and communication skills. At Key Stage 2, 53.5% of pupils eligible for free school meals reach the expected level in English and mathematics (compared with 75.5% of other pupils). Just 4% of these pupils study at university compared with 33% of their peers – The Social Class

Gap for Educational Achievement, 2010



• Research shows that social deprivation has a negative impact on educational attainment across all OECD countries. The UK is one of the nations with the most highly differentiated results among this group - OECD, 2007 / National Equality Panel, 2010

• Whilst there have been some suggestions that underachievement might be linked to ethnicity (the loss of ‘white culture’), there is far greater evidence that social and economic inequalities are a more dominant factor – within all ethnic groups, the lower the social class, the lower the proportion of pupils gaining five A*-C grades at GCSE. There is continued need to consider social class. – Runnymede Trust, 2009



• School based initiatives – including the academies programme – have yet to close the attainment gap for the poorest students. On average, the gap between outcomes for the more disadvantaged pupils and others has grown wider in academies than in comparable maintained schools – National Audit Office, 2010

• Setting children can have an equally negative impact as lower sets often contain much higher numbers of the most disadvantaged pupils. The poorest children perceive this as yet another expectation that they will not achieve – Runnymede Trust, 2009


What are the causes of this link?

• What are the outcomes of poverty that might impact on pupils’ educational achievement? Which of these do you observe in your schools? Which have the profoundest impacts?


What are the barriers to learning?

• Low levels of literacy and language deprivation

• The destabilising impact of poverty on the structures of family life, children’s nutrition, bedtimes, pupils’ increased social and emotional needs

• Curriculum barriers – the ability of the curriculum to reflect the culture of white working class children

• Perceptions that white working class culture is being marginalised

• A lack of parental / community aspiration for children’s education

Raising the achievement of white working class pupils: barriers and school strategies – Demie and Lewis 2010


Curriculum and pedagogy

• Adopting new curricula does not, in itself, produce large improvements in learning outcomes for this group. Quality of teaching makes the biggest difference to learning outcomes, including coaching teachers in strategies which significantly improve learning for children living in poverty:– co-operative learning– guided group work– structured group work– frequent assessment for learning, involving the pupils– learning to learn strategies


Curriculum and pedagogy

• Traditional use of ICT (individualised use of computers) has minimal impact on attainment for children living in poverty. Whole class approaches, such as the use of interactive whiteboards and embedded multi-media, show greater promise - Effective classroom strategies for closing the gap in educational achievement for children and young people living in poverty, including white working-class boys – Sharples, Slavin & Chambers, 2011


Developing language skills

Casual Conversational Language Formal Academic Language

Relies on facial expressions and gestures to relate content

Relies on language structure to relate content

Uses voice inflection and tone to carry meaning

Uses precision of words to convey meaning

Shares information that is familiar and related to interests

Shares new information related to a formal topic

Addresses more concrete and tangible information

Addresses more abstract and general information

Focuses on a current context here and now

Focus is de-contextualised from here and now


Developing language skills• Children require exposure to academic language

because– it is a language that reveals relationships– found in / enables higher order thinking– found in / enables cohesive thinking

• and because it is– used in educational assessment – used in curriculum areas– used in explicit instruction– used daily to access many parts of life


Developing language skills• Academic language develops necessary cognitive

connections within the minds of our students and simultaneously develops their internal structures of knowledge – Marzano, 2004

• The words included in general academic language are like mortar for cementing the building blocks of specific content language together and as a scaffold for concept development – Johnson, 2009

• The more a teacher uses and models academic language with students, the better the students will achieve academic results – Stronge, 2007


• Understanding the differences between specialist and technical vocabulary.

• Specialist words are those which are everyday words which have a particular meaning in context. Mathematics contains many of these which might prove difficult for some children.

• Technical words are those precise words from a precise, given context.

Considering vocabulary which might prove difficult


Considering vocabulary which might prove difficult

• Consider the words you have been given – are they technical or specialist? Are there any other issues which might prevent pupils from securing an understanding of these words?– Specialist– Technical– Homophones– Homonyms


Deprivation and language skills

Number of words in children’s vocabularies – age 3Hart & Risley, 2003

SEC D/E 500 words

SEC C 700 words

SEC A/B 1100 words

Differences in words heard by children by socioeconomic status Hart & Risley, 2003

Words heard per hour

Words heard in a 100 hour

week

Words heard in a 5,200 hour year

Words heard over a 4 year

period

SEC D/E 616 62 000 3 million 13 million

SEC C 1 251 125 000 6 million 26 million

SEC A/B 2 153 215 000 11 million 45 million


Deprivation and language skills

Differences in affirmations and discouragements heard by children each year

Hart & Risley 2003Affirmations Discouragements

SEC D/E 26 000 57 000

SEC C 62 000 36 000

SEC A/B 166 000 26 000


Developing language in school

• Consider all the strategies employed in school which assist in the development of language skills with pupils. Which have proven the most effective? What CPD have teachers been involved in to develop these skills? What has been the role of the literacy subject leader / SENCO or INCO in these developments? To what extent have the developments which have supported EAL pupils engaged others?


Lambeth research report

• Leadership and vision for white working class achievement– Provide a culture of achievement with a positive can do attitude.

Central to their work are high expectations and the provision of intensive support so that pupils meet them. They strongly believe their key priority is leading teaching and learning and they allocate a lot of time to being in the classroom with teachers and pupils


• Use of data– Headteachers monitor details of learning, pupils’ work, marking,

record keeping, teacher assessment, quality of teaching and learning and the progress made by individual pupils and collectively by the whole class. Pupil tracking is rigorous. The data enables senior staff to have the confidence to challenge assumptions about and attitudes to pupils’ performance.

– The schools make detailed analysis of data to enable them to identify the strengths and weaknesses of its performance not only across phase and groups of pupils, ethnic groups, socio-economic indicators, but also class by class, pupil by pupil and question by question, using the full range of raw, contextual and value added data produced by schools, LA, DCSF/Ofsted and FFT.


• Development of an inclusive and relevant curriculum– ‘We make sure that they have different experiences in different

ways, visits, school trips and children bringing in things from home. There has been a tradition of this in Key Stage 1 but we have implemented it throughout the school. We have noticed that some children can become pressurised into keeping up with the curriculum. As a school we have become more flexible, we’ll give them time to learn. There is an emphasis on slowing down and broadening out, quality not quantity.’ (Headteacher interview)

– In schools the curriculum is child-focused, inclusive and creative. This has benefited the white working class pupils as they feel valued and can see themselves and their place in the curriculum.


• Support for language development• Teachers use talk partners, talk frames and encourage language for learning

from the Foundation stage as many of the White British children only have ‘playground, chatting language’. Teachers report that they have poor language structure with an inappropriate use of tenses. Teachers have linked the strategies to promote language for learning that have been successful in literacy with mathematics lessons, ‘a lot of work on mathematics vocabulary in mental maths.’

• Year 6 pupils are talk partners with younger pupils in Reception and are lunchtime playground buddies. Year 5 pupils are Happy Helpers, volunteering to spend one lunchtime per week modelling good spoken language in the Nursery. We focus on all learning styles, practical activities and lots of songs. Some of the White British need this more than EAL pupils because their language skills are very poor. Some EAL pupils have a better facility with language.” (Headteacher interview)


• Targeting support at the white working class– The deputy head looks at children’s books regularly to monitor

how teachers are planning for a range of abilities and tailoring for different needs. We ask, ‘Are we extending those that need challenging?’ She also interviews the children. There are regular pupil progress meetings with the SENCO, class teacher, head and senior managers, ‘we focus in on individuals causing concern; if they are not achieving, why, what can we do? Its about bringing children into our consciousness. (Headteacher interview)


• Liaison and relationships with families – the role of learning mentors and parent support advisors– ‘Children and adults work together. We will target all those

families on free school meals. The rationale is to break the cycle of low aspiration, for adults to learn new skills, to be motivated to go on learning. Then this will have a positive impact on their children.’ There is a good level of parental engagement because we ‘carry them...we are the driving force, we are the first port of call for them when things go wrong. We are a source of support for all our families. Sometimes we have carried families for years, parents rely heavily on our school, it’s because we are the centre of the community’ (Headteacher interview)


Coffee


Effective tracking strategies


Raising aspirations

The majority of schools in this research reported that the white working class families

were the hardest to engage within the life of the school and their children’s learning.

School staff expressed frustration at the mismatch between the high aspirations of the school and

low aspirations of the parents for their children’s learning –

White Working Class Achievement, Lambeth Research Report, 2010


Raising Aspirations

• How are aspirations raised in your schools? Which strategies have proven most effective?


The Extra Mile – how schools succeed in raising aspirations in deprived communities (2008)

• They go out of their way to bring in local heroes, characters, and successes as role models, so that pupils can see that success is possible for people from their walk of life.

• They teach pupils what they need to know about ways of talking, writing and behaving in the wider world, so they have the repertoire to succeed in formal and unfamiliar environments. They educate for equality.


• They provide cultural opportunities beyond the budget of local families so that pupils get a taste of sports, arts and activities from which they are otherwise excluded.

• They are socially attuned. New teachers tour the catchment area before they start to teach, they take time to talk about local concerns with pupils each day, and learn how to meet, greet and converse in ways that are not patronising. They empathise with the local community and local values.

• They define non-negotiable standards of behaviour and a culture of mutual respect, something which plays well with local parents who value the twin traditions of discipline and personal caring.


• Knowing that poverty can induce feelings of emptiness and hopelessness, they work harder than other schools to provide rewards and incentives to pupils. Their notice boards are invariably plastered with honours, rewards, mentions, certificates, prizes. They are always praising positive behaviour, small steps forward and extra effort.

• Teachers assume that they have to earn the pupils’ respect and attention. They work to gain natural – rather than forced – attention and make children associate school with learning that is fun, interesting and action packed. They use interactive teaching techniques, play to topical and local interests, and they are skilled in ‘holding in’ weaker learners.


• The schools do more outreach work than most. Some offer out of hours support because their pupils come to seek the support from sympathetic staff. Most work with families. Some have workers dedicated to the neediest pupils and some target well networked pupils who are opinion leaders in their cohort.

• No-one gets away with not working, not behaving, not co-operating, not trying or not attending. Avoidance and disengagement are seen in the same light as disruptive behaviour: as something to be resolved. Resilience, in fact, is one of the key characteristics they seek to inculcate in children who sometimes lack other support to fall back on. The ‘no excuses’ culture maintains high expectations. Ultimately, it insists on success.


Using the Pupil Premium

• Sutton Trust


The ISP Directory of Excellence


Dates for future meetings

• Thursday 23rd February, 2012» 9.15am – 12.30pm TLC

• Thursday 14th June, 2012» 9.15am – 12.30pm TLC


Lunch

Documents

Improving Schools Programme Autumn Term Network Meeting Narrowing the Attainment Gap: