It’s personal…have we reached peak data?
Education, it sometimes seems, is nothing but churn and every change brings with it talk of new data and software solutions to help us on our way. Have we already reached ‘peak data’ or is the use of data and supporting software solutions continuing to keep pace with the needs of the education community?
State schools have become expert at using data to monitor how their pupils are doing overall and whether groups subject to particular factors – such as gender, ethnicity, FSM – are doing as well as they could and should be. So how are schools doing with the data challenges ushered in by the new National Curriculum (NNC) and changes in Ofsted and government expectations?
The requirement of the NNC is deceptively simple; it sets out the ‘essential knowledge and skills’ every child should have and gives teachers the freedom to shape the curriculum to meet their pupils’ needs. Ofsted wants to see that each school, ‘uses detailed formative and summative assessment to ensure that pupils, teachers and parents know if pupils are achieving the expected standard or if they need to catch up’ and also that the, ‘the assessment system is linked to the school’s curriculum’ – so all schools need to get their data ducks in a row sooner rather than later.
GDPR are regulations come into full force May 25 and may impact, or change, how you look at and manage data in your school.
Already, in many of our schools, teachers no longer stand in front of the class and deliver the same lesson to everyone; instead, semi-autonomous software guides children through the syllabus and the teacher is there to support individuals and small groups as needed, encouraging, explaining concepts and answering questions. Evidence is starting to build which shows that pupils learn more effectively when they are pursuing their own, personalised goals than they do in traditional teaching regimes.
Nowadays many schools already adopt ‘bring your own device’ policies or provide pupils with cheap and easy to set up tablets which collect impressive amounts of data, stored securely in the cloud just calling out to be analysed – and all schools now need to give this approach serious consideration. Colourful and cost-effective apps provide attractive and motivating front-ends for the children to use while the web platform quietly tracks performance against each learner’s goals – goals which have been set by the teacher with a view to moving each individual child closer to ‘mastery’ over the skills required by that part of the curriculum. These programs have been shown to work exceptionally well with subjects such as maths and research is well underway to develop apps which will support ‘more creative’ areas of the curriculum.
In September the government’s Progress 8 (P8)/Attainment 8 (A8) came into force. P8 aims to capture the progress a pupil makes from the end of primary school to the end of secondary school; it’s a value-added measure where pupils’ results are compared to the actual achievements of other pupils with the same prior attainment. The P8 score is calculated for each pupil by comparing their achievement with the average A8 score of all pupils nationally with a similar starting point; it uses assessment results from the end of primary school, meaning that secondary schools even more invested in pupil outcomes at the end of Year 6.
All the major education software houses have been developing solutions which mesh the personalised learning agenda with A8/P8 requirements; the software’s out there to let you track progress and direct and re-direct teaching to achieve the next step so that robust A8/P8 data can be gathered. Learning gaps will have to be identified and addressed as early as possible because no school will want to wait till the end of Y11 to discover that they missed a trick.