primary education

End of Days

theprimaryhead6 Comments

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Ah, the end of the year. In your diary for the last two days of school there is nothing but empty space, apart from a tiny entry marking out a final school assembly. There is no more data, no more reports, no more planning or marking to do. Yes, this is the wind down you’ve been waiting for: the holiday can almost start here.

But for some reason, the activities that apparently must make up the last days of a primary school year, as pre-determined by some higher power, do not ever result in the relaxing fade out to the academic year that you would hope for.

Trying to find out why the end of the year has to end this way is like trying to find out why the universe was created or why there are wasps or why Bruce Forsyth still commands prime time television space. There is no one who has an answer but we all just seem to accept it; happy that it’s just the way it is.

And so, the last day of the year begins…

Presumably the theory behind ‘toy day’ was that it would allow the children to be preoccupied with the making of their own fun (with no input or resources from the teacher) and this would allow the teacher to a) sleep; b) tidy their cupboard; c) sleep at the back of their tidy cupboard. But it never works out like that does it?

Children are incapable of playing a board game from start to finish; they insist on bringing in their most flimsiest toys so you spend half your time pissing about with sticky-tape and re-shaping bent bits of plastic; or worst of all they actually want you to join in with a game of ‘Doctor Who Uno’. Unfortunately, explaining to a 7 year old that the point of toy day is to minimise teacher/child interactions is harder than explaining grid multiplication: so you inevitably end up playing a game which neither you or them know the rules to and when you try to explain to them how their game is actually meant to be played they quickly lose interest, leave you to go and find the robotic puppy that has just simulated urinating in your book corner, resulting in you packing their game away.

By break time you realise that toy ‘day’ is not working and it may have to turn into toy ‘hour’. Luckily they all brought in their pirated DVD collection and after you have excluded the films that are either still playing in cinemas or may contain scenes of nudity, violent images, explicit sexual swear words and scenes of mild peril, you take a class vote. And as they are only 7 year olds and have no taste in films, ‘The Princess Bride’, ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘The wind in the willows’ are rejected in favour of ‘The Smurfs’ or ‘Alvin & the Chipmunks: the squeakquel’. Still, their choice…put it on and that should be 90 minutes of down-time for you.

Ten minutes in and you realise that this may not be the case as you remember that no child can remain silent during a film especially those that have seen it, who cannot keep complex plot points to themselves. Also, no matter how loud and fast a film is, even 7 year olds get bored by the celluloid equivalent of a pile of excrement in a bag. So your time is spent shouting “be quiet!” and growling “just enjoy the film.” Forty minutes in and when you see that only the owner of the DVD is actually watching you decide to stop the film and hope that tidying up will get you through to lunchtime.

With any luck lunchtime will be extended leaving you with half an afternoon to fill. As they come back into class you try some negotiation: “we’ll play one class game then you can tidy your drawers: if you do that quickly, we’ll play another class game and then maybe, MAYBE, I’ll let you play with your toys again while we finish watching ‘Cats and dogs 2: the revenge of Kitty Galore’” They accept your terms and you play a quick round of ‘heads down, thumbs up’ a game so pointless and inane it makes ‘sleeping lions’ look like an advanced version of chess. Then it’s time for them to tidy their drawers.

For the next thirty minutes the classroom is turned upside down as old and forgotten homeworks, spellings and Tudor worksheets are found, evaluated and binned. Your time is spent shouting things like: “I don’t want anything left-it’s all taken home or put in the bin”. Despite this every child, will at least once, come up to you holding some crumpled half-finished science investigation asking “What about this?” You try and look as if you are seriously considering taking it off their hands to put it in your special file of outstanding achievement ready for the next Ofsted before tentatively asking: “Do you want it?” to which they instantly reply in the negative leaving you to suggest that if they don’t think their parents would want it either, they should put it in the recycling bin.

Once all the drawers are emptied, the recycling bin has been filled three times over, and half the school library books are now piled on your desk you decide to sit them down to give them an end of year talk. You explain how great they have been, how hard they have worked and how much you will genuinely miss them next year. Suddenly there is a lump in your throat as you realise that all these little faces will no longer be looking up at you next year. As you stare at the photos of them that you took at the beginning of the year for your class contract you are reminded of just how much they have grown in their time with you. It has been a great year and it feels strange that a different adult will be at the centre of their school universe next year. Luckily, before you start crying one of them says that this is all lovely but you had promised they could play with their toys again; and so with thirty minutes of the school year left, you agree to let them trash the classroom one more time.

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So many ‘freedoms’ so little time!

theprimaryhead2 Comments
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3 weeks left and a new pay policy to write…what’s the problem?

I have had to make a new rule in my household: no one must tell me how long it is until the summer holidays.  Why? Because if I actually stop and think about all the things that  need to happen before the end of the year I am worried that my head will explode like that bloke from the film ‘Scanners’. Every year I try and think about how I can make Term 6 less crammed and better timetabled: desperately seeking to achieve the utopian vision of the last day of the year ending with everyone happily skipping off, full of energy ready to embrace their summer holiday. But, every year, it gets to the last three weeks and the school is on its knees and I end up thinking: ‘I really must plan term 6 better next year?’

This year is no different except for one teeny-tiny additional thing I need to do before we break up. As well as: sports days, reports, end of year data, heart attack inducing return of SATs papers, Year 6 leaving, the end of year show, deciding where to put teachers next year, planning an inset for the last day that no one will take anything from because they’re too tired, planning an inset for the first day back that no one will take anything from because they’ve been away too long, discos, summer fair, final string of governors, staff leaving dos, trying to keep staff morale up whilst simultaneously insisting that we can’t have golden time every afternoon because you’re tired and finally getting around to tidying my office….there is the ever so slightly important issue of writing a new pay policy.

At a recent Heads meeting I was slightly glad that I wasn’t the only person in the room who:

  1. Hadn’t yet given it a lot of thought.
  2. Didn’t really know what to do about it.
  3. Was secretly hoping we could leave it (not because we’re particularly weak but because the list mentioned above is the minimum amount of stuff that every head is trying wade through right this minute)

Having not received any guidance from the local authority we have been visited by a million private HR companies who have given us a seemingly unlimited number of options of how to use pay as a consequence for performance. A selection of these has been:

  1. Even out the size of incremental increases along the main pay range (it’s a range now not a scale) and split each one in two. Thus giving the illusion of a ‘better than expected’ pay rise for good performance (look you’ve gone up two increments!) whilst actually giving you less in ‘old money’.
  2. Once you’ve determined the sizes of the incremental increases along the main pay scale sorry range, create relative performance measures. So if I had five teachers all working at MPR4 they would be in competition with each other as only the top three performers who had met all their targets would be eligible for a pay rise.
  3. Create a target specific Upper Pay Range system: UPS is not for life but could be up until Christmas if performance is weak. Also, the entire jump from MPR6 to UPS1 would be reset at the end of the year and would only be paid the following year if performance targets are met. (A bit like a bonus…actually a lot like a bonus; basically a bonus.)

Now before you report me to the unions I have to say these were only ‘options’ presented to us as a way of showing us how wide open the ‘freedoms’ of the new pay policy are and some, maybe all, could ‘improve’ performance but could equally create a horrible corporate atmosphere that no one in their right mind would want to be a part of if they also want to be a part of education. But there are some important lessons to take away from it.

If schools are going to drastically change the way in which pay progression is used they must ensure that their appraisal process throughout the year is really effective. It will not be good enough to implement performance related pay and leave it as a trap for the end of year performance review. An appraisal process must be set up to identify and support teachers who are under-performing ‘now’ and could be in danger of not reaching end of year targets.

Of course this should be in place anyway but how swiftly have schools reacted to the early signs of under-performance in the past? How often has a slightly rubbish teacher continued to work and progress along the main pay scale seemingly unaware that the only really consequence of their under-performance is that next year’s teacher has to now work twice as bloody hard? How many schools only offer support in terms of capability when the rock bottom has been reached?

Schools survive with poorer teachers because of the fantastic teachers that insulate them. Don’t get me wrong; the problem here is leadership not teaching. A change in pay policy is not going to scare a teacher into teaching well but it might just make the Head Teacher slightly more pro-active in nipping under performance in the bud.

I don’t know any Head who wants to stop a member of their team from getting paid or even wants to have that conversation! But by putting the idea of levels of performance affecting levels of future pay into all educators’ consciousness it will hopefully develop a more rapidly supportive culture in schools that need it.

And just because I always try to link my end of a blog post with the start of a blog post because that makes me feel that I’m a cleverer writer author guru than I actually am:

So as I try to get to the end of the year without my brain actually melting, I have decided to make sure that when I do find ten minutes to write the school’s pay policy, I will set the review date for Christmas…as that tends to be one of the quieter terms.

Levels are dead…long live the Levels.

theprimaryhead4 Comments

ImageIn a recent local authority meeting for ‘locally maintained Head Teachers’ we were asked by our local leaders to partake in what was essentially a massive brain storm session. Like an excruciating episode of the Apprentice, where a team has got to the end of day one and still hasn’t got a new revolutionary design for a toilet, our leaders were equipping us with post-its and marker pens and putting us into small groups to try and work out, please dear god have an answer for the question: what is good about being a locally maintained school?

As we desperately begun searching for the unique selling point that would prevent them from being told ‘you’re fired’ by central government it became clear that apart from moral, social, philosophical, personal and political reasons (and what good are they in the boardroom?) there aren’t any. In reality this is a quite a good thing because it signifies that local schools have been working together quite happily to improve the quality and consistency for all pupils within the area. The matter of whether you’re a free school, academy, federation, faith school, LA maintained school doesn’t really come into it: when you get professionals trying to improve things for their schools they often recognise the need to collaborate and often don’t let technicalities get in the way. But the more this was discussed and liked by everyone in the room the less it looked like there was a clear ‘model’ for LA schools.

But then the DfE confirmed that they are getting rid of the current system of ‘levels’ used to report children’s attainment and progress and (as Gove wants us all to be free thinking and innovative)…it will not be replaced. This has caused a huge level of debate on twitter and there are some very interesting and contrary thoughts about it. One thought that has not been explored but surely has been considered by Local Authority Leaders and Directors of services is that this could be a chance to save the local authority’s bacon: Over-hauling levels could be the pig’s ear that the LA could spin into its very own silk purse.

Ultimately, what really matters is the progress and the achievement within a particular discipline to a particular expected standard. That is never going to go away. The biggest issue with this is consistency in terms of accuracy of judgement. Anyone who has ever taken part in a staff meeting or inset on ‘benchmarking’ writing levels knows how difficult it is to attain consistency across a single table of teachers let alone a school’s worth. No matter what you agree on by the end of the day, in a year’s time some teachers will still be led by their own personal judgements on what constitutes a true level. Monitoring helps iron out the inconsistencies but it still occurs-especially during transition periods (you know that bit in Term 2 where you see that no one has made progress and some pupils have gone backwards?). And that’s just in a single school: imagine the variation across the country.

Whatever system you choose, you are still going to have this issue. Standardised testing is meant to put a big sticky plaster over this as it levels out the playing field. Now we can clearly measure progress from KS1 to KS2. Not really…we can measure how one adult judged a pupil’s writing against how a different adult judged the same pupil’s writing  (well, two pieces of writing completed within 45 minutes) four years later.

We could have more standardised testing. Yearly SATS that do not rely on personal interpretations of level descriptors but instead, give scores within each element of reading, writing and maths; which in turn track the levels of achievement for each child. This has already been introduced in the Y1 phonics screening and the Y6 SPAG tests so why not stretch across the entire school. Easy. No margin of error and with a pass score everyone can understand.

I don’t really fancy this idea but then I do quite like curriculum level descriptors. They provide a structure of progression that allows us (teachers, pupils and parents) to see what areas of reading, writing and maths need to be developed through quality teaching and learning.

The problem is not with how we assess but when. This is where local authorities could really challenge the status quo and perhaps develop a more robust way of measuring pupil progress and achievement and therefore the performance of its schools.

What about, doing away with end of Key Stage tests? Pasi Sahlberg, an educationalist from Finland (one of the world’s top performing countries in terms of standards of education) said that too often standardised tests were seen as ‘end points’ used to judge the final score at the end of a particular phase in a child’s educational career. Instead they should be seen as a ‘check point’ throughout a longer journey.

So why not assess pupils at certain times in their life as opposed to certain times during the school calendar. Age appropriate assessment could allow us to see if the pupil is achieving as well as their peers of a similar age. This would either mean testing pupils on their birthdays (oh alright the day after, honestly, you Liberals!) or ensuring that we accurately match level descriptors and developments with age expectations rather than end of year expectations. This would allow us to track progress fairly and in relation to every pupil in any school-it would be a far better form of standardisation than getting a cohort of pupils to sit the same test at the same hour on the same date. So don’t throw away your level descriptors just yet but get ready for a new assessment timetable and tell the unions we may need to boycott SATs for the next two years.

It would need a bit of careful thinking, a lot of professional trust and a significant amount of communication between schools. These are all things that a local authority could organise and provide and if applied across a whole city could support consistency as well. It would also move us away from the obsession of reinventing the wheel in terms of finding the next approach to assessment and chasing fads to prove tiny bits of short lasting impact. Responsible assessment followed by appropriate and effective input all sewn up by the language of ‘age’ that everyone understands. By giving schools the ‘freedom of choice’ Michael Gove may have unwittingly provided local authorities with a unique opportunity to start an educational revolution and in doing so, cement their place on the educational landscape.