As a data manager in a secondary school, no doubt every bit as frenetic and febrile as yours, everyday I see ways to cut workload – but by the time it comes across my desk it’s often too late to do anything about it. More and more school time seems to be taken up moving…
The government’s decision to create a National Teaching Service, paying higher quality teachers to work in challenging schools is an important step towards giving every child a fairly equal chance. Of course parachuting teachers into schools will not work well in every instance, it will probably take time to develop into an effective arrangement. Presumably…
Research Ed 2015 was the usual head-mangling mix of some of the more dynamic and incisive voices in UK education. But one moment in this years conference stood out for me because it reminded me of the very best part of engaging with research. This moment was coming across a surprising finding I could trust.…
One of best ways we can tell whether British society is getting fairer is the flow of disadvantaged into top universities. I hope it shocks you to consider that UK Universities are blocking access to this information. Alan Milburn of the government’s Social Mobility Commission has belatedly joined the army of voices having to ask…
I don’t know if it’s the same for others but by the time I have published a paper; the hundreds of hours thinking through arguments, polishing the prose, weighing the evidence and defending it against reviewers I have become convinced that this one piece of analysis will save the world from itself, start the revolution…
Fischer Family Trust Education Datalab analysis of Progress 8 has staggering implications. It is crucial we are clear about the impact this new measure will have on our sense of what constitutes a good school. Chart 1 shows Progress 8 measures the subjects children are encouraged to take and that these are correlated to a…
In education research you often hear people proudly proclaim they carried out a very thorough literature review after carrying out their study. This is getting the cart the before the horse and is a reversal of the order in which a program of research should be carried out. The literature review or introduction section of…
Unless we get a different government (and we won’t) Academy Chains and Local Authorities are going to be judged exclusively on their Value Added (that’s right the 1000 something thingy). https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-in-academy-chains-and-las-performance-measures The Governments Value Added has been around for a long time, but let’s face it it’s been about as popular as Ebola. DfE has…
A while back I fell into a debate on twitter about whether OFSTED/Raise Online stats were wrong. It was about something that’s at the heart of interpreting what’s really going on underneath data. It was about how we can have any confidence that results didn’t just happen by luck. I can’t say how many times…
It’s a weird thing how much people’s attention is draw to anything highlighted in red. OFSTED/RAISE have just introduced colour coding to perhaps the most important statistic in school education today, the gap between Pupil Premium and others. Highlighting anything in red in performance reports ought to be handled with a great deal of care…
In all the hubbub about education research and Randomised Control Trials I have seen few signs many fully grasp the real power of this technique – randomisation of who gets the program and who does not. I think closer consideration will excite educationalists at its potential to cut through the fog to give us a…
It’s a rule that any performance indicator with any consequence will eventually become corrupted, its human nature to find shortcuts and loopholes. Previous blogs here highlight how many commenters expect Progress 8 may be gamed, by putting every less academic child into History and Geography in the hope of scraping a grade that counts towards…
It’s Geography, that’s the worst thing about Progress 8, just Geography. One of the schools I work in is more deprived and urban than most, they do well in English, did well in Maths previously so can do it again, same for science and I can see them doing alright with modern foreign Languages, (it’s…
One view of education is to maximise the number of pupils that achieve a level worth a damn to further study and employers, it takes the stance ‘let’s face it, what’s the point of a D in Home Economics, in the real world’. It says lets churn out as many of those who can engage…
My main impression of ResearchEd 2014 was formed by Andrew Old’s talk on how to argue. Everything I thought after it was structured along the lines set out. It seems to me this was the most apposite educational talk I have ever heard, placed as it was in this stage of the debate to that…
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