The report of the Teacher Workload Advisory Group in November 2018 Making Data Work is an important reference point for school leaders in appraising how their school uses data, and for companies that develop and supply data tools for schools. The time associated with data collection and analysis was most frequently cited as “wasteful due to a lack of clarity amongst teachers as to its purpose” and that “an audit culture can lead to feelings of anxiety and burnout in staff”. But we also know that the effective use of IT systems can save time that would otherwise be spent manually handling information. And there is good evidence that schools which make use of data about the quality and impact of their curriculum are more likely to be judged as Outstanding,
So where does the balance lie in using data to support the work of schools?
Using IT to reduce workload
The potential workload demands upon teachers are high in comparison to many other professions. Their core function is teaching lessons, but there are many additional tasks needed to support this, including lesson preparation, marking pupils’ work, and working with the school’s systems and processes. These tasks can be demanding of teachers’ time. IT systems have good scope to offer help with streamlining these tasks – as long as they are well-designed and are used in an effective manner. The use of data in an effective way will be essential to inform and support the judgments made by school leaders and teachers. We know this to be true because it is the case in other walks of life – like health, where diagnostics based on data supports every medical decision that will be made. A nice phrase which has been used to describe this situation is :
“Data is the currency of a diagnostic profession“.
Good examples of the effective use of IT can be seen in many schools, and Multi Academy Trusts where many have centralised the planning of lessons, the preparation of teaching materials, and providing assessment methods which enable comparisons across groups of schools. Whole-Trust and whole-school approaches like this can reduce the workload burdens on individual teachers whilst getting additional value from the effective use of their data.
At school-level, IT systems can also help to systematise how information is used by making available resources which teachers can access across a school network and from home. They can help by collecting information from different departments, and software is available that can be used to aggregate, analyse and report the progress that pupils are making.
Striking a balance
Where things can go wrong will include the anxiety that can lead to the over-collection of tracking data. In this respect, the Ofsted framework states, “Leaders understand the limitations of assessment and do not use it in a way that creates unnecessary burdens for staff or learners.”
The Ofsted framework states that teachers and SLT need to know their schools and students well and in order to make sure they are striving for the best possible outcomes for these students. So there is a tension here to balance the need to use information to develop professional knowledge about how well pupils in the school are performing – with the time and effort needed to collect and process necessary data and information.
It is the case that schools most likely to be judged as Outstanding will be those that know their pupils well and are able to show the positive effects of responding to that knowledge through intervention and improvement. School leaders should encourage staff to be specialists in the pupils that they teach, informed by the termly collection and analysis of how well the pupils is learning, and contextual data like attendance and Attitude to Learning.
A focus on informing teaching and learning
On a day-to-day basis, the process of teaching and learning, including the use of questioning and tests, will provide a range of formative assessment information which will indicate how well a learner is understanding the content of each lesson. The main use of this information will be to guide the teacher in adapting the teaching to address any weaknesses, and ensure that pupils are making progress in assimilating the knowledge, concepts and understanding of the subject. Monitoring how well pupils are learning will be part of the feedback loop which guides further teaching and assures that all pupils make the progress that they should.
In practice a teacher will be observing evidence of what each pupil understands through questioning, homework, tests and everyday interaction. This can be recorded as necessary as notes against each pupil. These notes could include Mastery terms recorded for each unit of work, plus contextual information like attendance, attitude to learning, effort, and behaviour.
This provides an ongoing assessment process that is in harmony with the teaching and learning taking place. A summative assessment point, usually at the end of each term, will add to the information collected through formative assessment.
The validity of using formative assessment as the default way to monitor a pupil’s progress stems from the teacher’s experience of having taught previous groups. They will be able to recognise the performance characteristics of pupils who go on to achieve particular grades at GCSE.
When a pupil’s progress is expressed as a GCSE grade then this will be the most-likely grade attainable at the end of key stage 4 based on the evidence of current progress.
All of the above is probably what good teachers already do. A key to making this process flow will be good planning which expresses the expected learning outcome for each unit of work taught, and which will provide the prompts needed for formative assessment to take place.
The right IT system can save time
An IT system will help to manage this process, for example by presenting the Units of the Scheme of Work, and providing an easy way to record how well pupils are mastering what they are taught – and then generating the analysis and reports. Without an IT system supporting this, it would not be easy to provide this level of functionality using manual approaches or spreadsheets.
Information that can help school leaders with school inspection
Although Ofsted say they will not look at a school’s own data, this doesn’t mean that school leaders should not aim to find out as much as they can about how their school is performing and have the evidence ready to support a conversation about this. For school leaders, statements they make about school and subject effectiveness need to be supported by quantitative information. Without measures there would only be description, as in “We are a good school”. This begs the question: “How do you know?” Information will need to be available to enable conclusions to be drawn about school effectiveness, and that information will be a result of interpreting data about the school.
There is much potential information available in a school to support the work of school leaders. Effective leaders should be specialists in the pupils who come to their school. They will know about local issues, about boy’s attainment, the effect of ethnicity, the impact of the pandemic, how attendance is affecting attainment, etc.
School leaders need to fully examine the data that is generated by the work of the school in order to have a full cause-and-effect understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their school. This will include where subjects might be underperforming, or where particular groups of pupils with a shared characteristic do less well. They need to have evidence of how their strategies and interventions are working to help close the achievement gap. Not knowing this information leads to a bigger question – how do they know their school’s curriculum meets the needs of their pupils?
Good data analysis software will allow school and subject leaders to investigate the performance of subjects, of groups and of individual learners, and will highlight emerging issues before they become embedded. Such software provides essential professional tools to support teacher research into learning effectiveness and In-School Variation, and it will support conversations within departments that will help determine CPD choices.
Research and forecasting
The theme of ‘teachers as researchers’ is much promoted in modern approaches to CPD. Their use of measures will be fundamental to this approach. Subject leaders will usually report predictions of the future attainment of pupils in their subject once per term, providing three agreed points in time each year when school leaders can look across subjects and teaching groups and form a view about how well the school community is doing.
These termly grades can also be used for research purposes by subject leaders, who might be asked to report their analysis of how well the subject is doing compared to the subject nationally, and whether there are particular groups, e.g., boys/girls, high/low prior attainers, Summer Born etc. who might be performing differently to pupils as a whole. The pandemic has placed a long term disruption on the learning of pupils, with significant gaps which, for example, have made Progess 8 an unsafe measure to estimate for a school with no base data. In this situation evidence of current attainment and progress becomes significant.
Owning the school effectiveness story
The sensible collection of data at agreed points in time will be essential to support the smart, self-evaluating school. Such schools will know themselves better than an outside inspection team and will be able to explain what their own research tells them about pupil achievement, and how they have responded to the knowledge they have discovered through analysing their data. It is probably true to say that a school that doesn’t know what judgement will be made of their school by an inspection team probably isn’t going to be rated as Outstanding. Schools which are specialists in the pupils who come to them will be confident when it comes to evaluating school effectiveness. With Ofsted’s focus on Curriculum intent, implementation and impact, a school that can provide evidence of the quality and impact of their curriculum will be able to participate more fully as a partner in the process of school inspection.
Making good choices
From time to time we may read statements on social media and elsewhere which imply that because a school is collecting tracking data too frequently that data itself is a bad thing, and we should avoid it – as well as the professional tools developed to support its use. Of course, the issue isn’t that data is a bad thing, it is the poorly-judged use of data that is at fault. Effective schools will know how important it is to use data sensibly to support teaching, learning and self-evaluation – and to only collect data that will support them in these areas. They should also ensure that the IT products and services are selected with the aim of reducing teacher workload and increasing school effectiveness.
Ultimately, the sensible use of data will reduce teacher-workload because interventions can then be targeted to those subjects or pupils who specifically need them. Good use of data can help schools respond to unforeseen challenges as they unfold, such as the pandemic, and support schools over time with improving the outcomes for young people.
Other articles on these pages describe the value of detailed planning of progress in the design of Schemes of Work, and aim to understand what we mean by ‘progress’
We invite those with a keen interest in these issues to offer their thoughts or comments on any points made in these articles from which we might learn and improve our thinking.
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Making good use of data in schools 