CLOSING THE GAP WITH QUALITY FIRST TEACHING

What exactly does Quality First Teaching mean and how should we implement it in our classrooms, adapting it for di erent learners? Zoe Enser explains…

By Zoe Enser

Quality First Teaching is how we make learning accessible and eff ective for all. Put more simply, Great Teaching is a phrase I often encounter when discussing SEND pupils or when reading pupil premium strategy documents for schools.

It is also a phrase which has come in for some criticism recently online; Quality First Teaching is often talked about but what does it actually mean? Why wouldn’t this be our aim? And who on earth doesn’t want to do this? It can easily become an oft-repeated mantra without a clear shared meaning it may bring little impact for those who need it the most.

The evidence suggests that pupils from backgrounds of socio-economic deprivation benefi t most from this, with the 2014 Sutton Trust review on ‘Improving the impact of teachers on pupil achievement in the UK’ fi nding ‘for poor pupils the diff erence between a good teacher and a bad teacher is a whole year’s learning’.

This builds on Slater, Davies and Burgess’s 2011 research which found ‘highly eff ective’ as opposed to ‘average’ teaching could raise pupil outcomes by as much as 10%. It isn’t new information. It stands to reason that having access to great teaching day in, day out is going to make a diff erence to all. But this returns us again to the possible redundancy of the phrase “Quality First Teaching”. The phrase Quality First Teaching is pointless unless we pause to consider what it means and how we channel our eff orts to benefi t pupils from diff erent backgrounds or with diff erent needs.

Professor Robert Coe, in The Great Teaching Toolkit refers to the ‘best bets’ which evidence provides us with in the classroom. Core elements such as creating a focused and purposeful environment, activating thinking hard and maximising the opportunities for learning are elements rooted in evidence. Having the time to get these things right, refl ect on them and refi ne are shown to make a diff erence to the outcomes of our most vulnerable learners.

There is also a wealth of evidence in the EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit which we can focus upon when considering what great teaching looks like and how we can tailor it to the needs of all. However, in order to do that we need to take the most forensic approach possible to understand what this means and what our pupils need.