‘A
Marked Improvement’ April 2016.EEF and Oxford Uni. review of
marking and what works.
Essentially, they point to a dearth of evidence about what
works but some findings did emerge from the evidence that could aid school
leaders and teachers aiming to create an effective, sustainable and
time-efficient marking policy. These include that:
·
Careless mistakes should be marked differently
to errors resulting from misunderstanding. The latter may be best addressed by
providing hints or questions which lead pupils to underlying principles; the
former by simply marking the mistake as incorrect, without giving the right
answer
·
Awarding grades for every piece of work may reduce the impact of marking, particularly if pupils become preoccupied with grades at the expense of a
consideration of teachers’ formative comments
·
The use
of targets to make marking as specific and actionable as possible is likely to increase
pupil progress
·
Pupils are
unlikely to benefit from marking unless some time is set aside to enable pupils
to consider and respond to marking
·
Some forms of marking, including acknowledgement
marking, are unlikely to enhance pupil progress. A mantra might be that schools
should mark less in terms of the number of pieces of work marked, but mark
better.
How to Turn Around a Failing
School. Centre for High
Performance study.
Please
note point 4. This does seem focused on secondaries and it is drawn from
evidence of how academies have turned schools around. It isn’t actually
recommending these, as is seen in the point to Ofsted.
Learnings for academies The
findings suggest academies should make eight changes in the following order:
1.
Leadership and objectives - appoint new leaders and narrow objectives
2.
Market perception - rebrand school and communicate change
3.
Resources - expand service offering and improve admissions
4.
Student quality - exclude poor quality students, improve admissions and acquire
a local primary school
5.
Structures - centralise activities and improve facilities
6.
Process stability - improve student attendance and behaviour
7.
Process capability - improve teaching capability
8.
Systems - introduce performance development systems
The
report also recommended to Ofsted:
Our
research with non-educational organisations suggests academies can sustain
high-performance if they stabilise leadership, impact society, use alumni and
collaborate with other organisations. However, we found no evidence of these
sustaining behaviours in the ‘outstanding’ academies we studied. Instead, to
meet OfSTED’s assessment criteria and targets, they have developed behaviours
that may have a negative long-term impact on society. They have become
selective, do not teach their local community, do not teach 'White British'
students, exclude poor performing students, focus on Maths and English and
focus on getting students to C-level (not B or A). To help correct this, our
findings suggest Ofsted should modify its criteria to help develop ‘sustaining’
behaviours in ‘outstanding’ schools and introduce school-specific targets
reflecting the type of market it serves.
Teaching assistants report. EEF.
Further work to do but evidence suggests that TAs can improve learning if they are trained and deployed carefully. Given the limited amount of existing evidence, these studies made a substantial contribution to the overall evidence base, changing the overall average impact from zero to one additional months' progresswhen TAs deliver small-group interventions they are effective. The suggest schools consider the following
1.
Have you identified the activities where TAs can support
learning, rather than simply managing tasks?
2.
Have you provided support and training for teachers and
TAs so that they understand how to work together effectively?
3.
How will you ensure that teachers do not reduce their
support or input to the pupils supported by TAs?
4.
Have you considered how you will evaluate the impact of
how you deploy your TAs?
They recommend:
Not using TAs as an informal resource
for low-ability pupils
Using TA to add value to what teachers
do and not replacing teachers with TAs
Using TAs to develop pupils’ independent
learning and self-management skills
Ensuring TAs are sufficiently trained
for their role
Use TAs to deliver one-to-one and
small group support
Adopting evidence-based interventions
to support TAs in their small group work
Ensuring explicit connections are made
between structured interventions and everyday teaching.
