FIVE ThINGS YOU ShOULD KNOw AbOUT YOUR ChRONICALLY ILL COLLEAGUES

is teaching (and believe me it pains me to say this)? Unless something meaningful is done to increase teacher salaries so that they are actually competitive at every level, including at a leadership level, then little will be done to overcome the initial recruitment and later on the retention issue/s that we face. Do we want the best, the brightest and the most able to enter and stay in the profession? If so, well money ultimately talks.

As Alan Hansen once famously stated ‘you can’t win anything with kids.’ Whist I would argue that if you are good enough you are old enough there is an issue here for schools. Critically the £3000 being thrown at teachers to move to challenging schools is during their fi rst fi ve years in the profession. The reality for any school is that you need a blend of experienced and relatively new staff to transform a school that is in trouble. If disproportionately your staffi ng body is made up of teachers in their fi rst few years of teaching then you have an imbalance and an experience gap.

Equally, it is worth remembering that ECTs have a reduced timetable commitment for two, not one, academic years. This in its own right will present challenges to schools and there will be a need to invest more heavily (understandably and rightly) in the training and development of these early phase teachers. It takes a good three years for a secondary phase teacher to become truly comfortable in their own skin and to iron out the initial professional mistakes that they will inevitably have made in the early phase of their career.

There is also a danger that an imbalanced staffi ng body will see the over-promotion of colleagues too early on in their career. Whilst people have succeeded through being promoted early into their time within the profession there are also those that have not. Promoting staff early tends to work successfully where there is the staffi ng infrastructure in place to allow those early advancers to thrive. Invariably, Maths, Science and Computing teachers are promoted more swiftly than others as a means of retaining them because, guess what, these people work out fairly quickly that they can command a higher salary. This over-promotion can bring with it many unintended consequences for schools, most notably in the form of professionally immature leaders.

Critically, the missing ingredient that appears to be forgotten within this commitment pledge is the need for quality experienced leaders to move to and work in the most challenging of schools in the country. Having worked in and led a challenging school in an Ofsted category I can very safely and confi dently state that the challenges are completely diff erent to working in a lovely leafy school (which I have also worked in as a leader).

The reality is a handful of teachers will not change the culture and dynamic of a school. Yes, they will help by reinforcing a staffi ng body with expertise but ultimately, and contrary to what some argue, school culture is not amorphous. I fi nd this argument both bizarre and refl ective of those holding a very professionally naïve views of school leadership. In schools where leaders know what they want, what they stand for and how a school is to be led, inspired and driven the culture is anything but amorphous. If schools in an Ofsted category are to be transformed then the starting point is to make these schools attractive to leaders who actually know what they are doing and carry the necessary school improvement knowledge, awareness and professional agility to do so.

In some part this comes down to remuneration, especially when the salary of a Headship in a school in less challenging circumstances can often be higher than that off ered in a challenging school. There is a degree to which danger money, as crude as that will sound, will therefore be needed to attract key leaders but then we need to go further and deeper than this. These leaders will need time, the suff ocating hold of accountability and leagues tables to be taken away and the football management approach to leadership removed. It does not take 18 months to truly change a school. Yes, much can be done in this time and children’s life chances can be greatly improved but to really embed your changes takes longer.

Challenging schools need to be given time to improve and to come a little more away from the spotlight of scrutiny. Having led a Double RI school (which is

now an Ofsted Good school) there was not a year in my first four years in post where I was not subjected to some form of external scrutiny and accountability, be it Ofsted monitoring visits, DfE on-site reviews (akin to Ofsted inspections), DfE strategic improvement NLE support or Local Authority SIP support (despite being an Academy), plus an expectation that we were engaging in lots of additional external scrutiny to ensure our saw was sharp. This was despite transforming the school at speed and achieving nationally regarded GCSE and A Level outcomes at the last time of asking in the exam hall.

In category 4 schools the scrutiny is even more intense, with a greater emphasis on tick box approaches to improvement. This becomes wearisome and sadly whilst the tick box seems like it is the right thing to do to improve a school it is often not. For teaching staff they are likely to be subjected to lots of high stake lesson observations which ultimately amount to nothing more than a weighing the pig exercise. I am yet to see any evidence that supports where watching and scrutinising teachers to this level actually benefits teaching, learning and importantly children. It is anything but developmental.

So with this in mind the spotlight of scrutiny needs to firmly shift to one of support. Ofsted needs to consider how it can support, and I genuinely mean support, these schools. Can the timeframes of inspection be pushed back so they are more realistic and allow change not just be initiated, for transformation not just to happen but for proper, deep and sustainable embedded change? Added to this, what can be done to support workload? Teachers in more challenging schools tend, not always, to be led down paths that result in increased workload. For example, tick box approaches to data, marking etc because leaders believe that this is what Ofsted want to see to evidence impact since the last monitoring visit. This becomes a vicious cycle and one that is very hard to break. However, if staff in a challenging school are working twice as hard as the nice school down the road then what is the incentive?

Equally in these more challenging schools behaviour, manners and an adherence to school rules tends to be more of a challenge. These schools need leaders who will prioritise behaviour properly and take a firm, warm and consistent approach to bring about positive change on this front. This then influences the culture, climate and ethos of a school. Teachers swiftly work out, as do parents and children, which schools have the highest expectations of behaviour and which do not. By that I don’t mean what is written on a piece of paper but what is actually lived and breathed. No school can transform itself until behaviour is right. You cannot talk curriculum, teaching, pedagogy nor can you recruit teachers until this battle is won.

Staff need support in managing challenging parents as well as pupils. Sadly challenging schools have their fair share of parents who are educationally disenfranchised. Often the parents who are swift to approach the tabloids at the start of an academic year complaining about a school’s rules are from more challenging schools. More needs to be done to support and protect schools on this front. Parental complaints to Ofsted, which can panic leaders, need to be rationalised a little more. Should complaints about safeguarding be the only ones that are heard and not ones where a school has consistently adhered to its well communicated behaviour policy?

There are also professional limitations to working in more challenging schools. For example, applying to be an ELE, NLE, Ofsted Inspector, to sit on a Head Teachers Board etc are all precluded because you are not part of a Good/ Outstanding school. Some people do not want these professional doors closing. I can understand why. I also question why a member of staff in a transformative school would be any less qualified than a member of staff in an Outstanding school and therefore unable to access some of the professional avenues I have cited. This is a short sighted approach generated by a system that believes excellence only resides in limited quarters. Then there is the concern of being sacked, which tends to be more of a concern in a challenging school as you have a shorter timeframe in which to turn things around than in a Good school where you have the luxury of time.

Finally, what happens to these shortage subject teachers at the end of their fifth year, when their £3,000 tax free payments come to an end? What happens if they all decide to move on? You almost have to hit the rest button and start again, fishing in a pool that isn’t swimming with an endless supply chain of teachers in these fields.

I appreciate that this article will sound potentially negative. I am hugely proud to have worked in an Ofsted category school and helped to transform it to a Good school, though I didn’t need an inspection to tell me our school was very strong. Moving schools and picking a school that is right for you is a hugely personal thing and in the process of finding your school it is also possible to make mistakes and get it wrong on the way.

Whilst £3,000 tax free sounds nice, it is worth carefully considering if £250 per month is enough of a pull factor and importantly, whether or not it is the right pull factor for joining a challenging school.

PEDAGOGY

28. Don’t Ditch The Highlighters

Highlighters aren’t a silver bullet, but is there a way to use them effectively?

30. EAL Questioning Strategies

What should we be doing to support EAL students with questioning in the classroom?

35. The Importance Of Nailing Those Routines

Quick transitions can save you hours over the year. Here’s what to focus on.

PEDAGOGY

DON’T DITCH THE HIGHLIGHTERS!

How a low-utility strategy can support a high-utility study strategy

By Kate Jones

Highlighters have long been the go to revision resource and a staple part of a study toolkit for a lot of students. Despite the popularity of highlighter pens; teachers often advise against their use or at least try to warn students how multi-coloured highlighted notes are a poor proxy for learning. Just because content has been highlighted and underlined, it does not mean the content has been learned.

The purpose of highlighters is to highlight information to be learned. A problem with this (and a signifi cant problem at that) tends to be that students can’t always successfully identify and recognise what information is essential and what isn’t; therefore all notes become brightly coloured and underlined, with the highlighting task itself losing its purpose - when everything is highlighted, nothing is highlighted.

Parents often view highlighted notes as a visible indicator that their child is studying and learning material successfully but highlighted notes can be deceptive. Highlighting doesn’t always pay o , much to the frustration and confusion of students and their parents.

There are many reasons why students enjoy highlighting and become over reliant on this study strategy. Highlighting can make class notes appear bright, colourful and visually very appealing. Highlighting doesn’t require much mental e ort or challenge, it’s easy to do. Highlighted notes don’t tell students what they can and can’t recall, instead it provides a false sense of confi dence and the ‘illusion of knowing.’

A classic example is an actor that will use a highlighter to show the lines on a script they must learn. Once their lines have been highlighted this does not mean the actor has automatically learned their lines; it simply shows the actor what lines they need to learn. The actor will need to read their lines and then eventually test themselves until they can recall lines fl uently and confi dently without the prompt of their script.

The work of John Dunlosky, Professor of Psychology at Kent State University in Ohio, explained how not all study strategies are equal; with research suggesting some are simply more e ective than others . Any revision is better than no revision but the amount of time and energy invested into revision should be invested into e ective and e cient study strategies. Unfortunately, for fans of the highlighter pen the review carried out by Dunlosky and colleagues showed that this strategy was rated as low utility in terms of its e ectiveness. In contrast to highlighting are e ective study strategies, although not always as popular or as widely used, retrieval practice and spaced practice. Retrieval practice involves the act of recalling information from long term memory; this can and should be carried out in lessons but it is also very straightforward for students to do outside of the classroom independently.

Retrieval practice focuses on how to study whereas spaced practice focuses on when to study. Spaced practice involves exactly that, spacing out study sessions. Study should be carried out little and often over a period of time as opposed to massed or last minute practice known as cramming.

Dunlosky does suggest that students can still use their highlighters but this must not be their sole or main method of study. Firstly, students need to be shown how to use highlighters e ectively; how to identify key and relevant information that they need to learn. Secondly, and more importantly, students need to understand that highlighting should only be done at the beginning of the study process. The secret to successful study is what happens next; how the highlighted information is used to support spaced retrieval practice.