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Arbor Insight | School Improvement
Category : Blog
We’ve just released our free annual KS2 Performance Summary! This report gives schools and academies an overview of their latest ASP data. Trends in your performance are clearly plotted over the last three years, and benchmarked against the national average, schools in the local authority and schools similar to you. We use Analyse School Performance
We’ve just released our free annual KS2 Performance Summary! This report gives schools and academies an overview of their latest ASP data. Trends in your performance are clearly plotted over the last three years, and benchmarked against the national average, schools in the local authority and schools similar to you.
We use Analyse School Performance data from the Department for Education to build this report. ASP data is not suppressed, so the cohort sizes are more accurate and representative, giving a more in-depth overview of your school’s performance.
Your Performance Summary Report covers school context, overall attainment, attainment, averaged scaled score and progress by subject, with a brief Closing the Gap section which focuses on prior attainment and gender. For a deeper dive into any of the measures present in this report, take a look at our premium reports that can be purchased from all school Insight portals.
Image 1: Attainment by subject: working at a higher standard
You can easily see trends from the last couple of years by looking at the arrows below this year’s outcome. These arrows are colour-coded so you can check if improvements in this measure are consistent with an established trend, or whether they’re a more recent development. Seeing your data presented in this easy-to-understand format can help expedite the questioning of your data. You can ask why 5 times and use socratic questioning to understand why and how your school reached the outcomes it did this year (we’ve written a blog about this – click here to read it!).
Image 2: Closing the gap: focus on gender page
For a more in-depth report focusing on each demographic in your school, you should use our Closing the Gap report bundle that contains 5 reports, each with an individual focus: disadvantaged pupils, SEN pupils, gender, ethnicity and prior attainment. These reports can help you narrow important attainment gaps within your school, as they show you in detail exactly where interventions need to be made.
How did you derive my LA and National averages?
We’ve benchmarked your school on a variety of measures to allow you to analyse your performance in a wider context. We only compared your School to the averages for other primary, secondary, or special schools (depending on your school type), to make the comparisons in the report more meaningful.
What is a school ‘like me’?
We created the schools ‘like you’ measure to give you the most meaningful comparison for your School. First, we filtered by schools of your type (primary, secondary, or special) for the reasons mentioned above. Next we filtered by size, ensuring that your school is compared to schools with a similar number of students. Finally we took your FSM, SEN and EAL data, weighted them based on the size of the attainment gaps at KS2, and combined them into a baseline score to find schools with similar demographic intakes to your School.
For example, if you’re a large rural secondary school with a lot of FSM students, your performance in each area will be benchmarked against other large rural secondary schools with a lot of FSM students. The schools ‘like you’ measure helps you account for your specific circumstances and understand why your performance might be above or below average.
If you’re a current user, you can log in to view your updated dashboards and reports immediately here: https://login.arbor.sc/auth/login
If you don’t already use Arbor Insight, click here to sign up for your free portal & view your performance dashboards & KS2 reports: https://login.arbor.sc/auth/register
Ofsted Inspections | School Improvement
In light of the new Ofsted framework placing weight on personal development through extra-curricular activities, we spoke to Alistair Endersby, a former national debating coach who’s twice brought teams to the World Schools Debating Championships and currently organises the Sixth Form enrichment programme at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. 1. Make it clear activities are
In light of the new Ofsted framework placing weight on personal development through extra-curricular activities, we spoke to Alistair Endersby, a former national debating coach who’s twice brought teams to the World Schools Debating Championships and currently organises the Sixth Form enrichment programme at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury.
Whilst some endeavours such as the school play or a Duke of Edinburgh award will require students to be committed from start to finish, most clubs benefit from an open door policy. If you set up a regular, publicised schedule, then students can drop in whenever they’re free. A successful club such as the politics and debating societies Alistair runs should, in his words, “be open to all comers each time, even if some keen students also take part in extra coaching to prepare them for competitions. The club’s committee are the fixed point of organisation, but the membership should be fluid.”
“If you can also open up your activity to a wider range of year groups then you should.” This allows younger students to develop a sense of responsibility organically by seeing the example of older students, rather than developing didactically under a set of stringent membership rules. “It’s good for the younger kids to see the older years engaging with interesting and serious things outside of the classroom, and you can form vertical links throughout your school by getting the older students in the club to coach the younger students. […] It has to be voluntary, too, to change the way it’s seen and add value to the experience.”
This open, inter-year culture is particularly helpful in secondary schools, allowing younger students to think about where they want to be in their activity and their learning by the time they reach their peers’ age; do they need to start taking music theory to progress in their orchestra? Should they do a sports leadership award if they want to be captain of the football team? Should they arrange work experience in their chosen area?
“It almost allows ‘gifted and talented’ to be self-selecting rather than a set program – what you’re rewarding is interest.”
“An atmosphere of mentorship has practical benefits as well, of course, in that it can free up staff time.” Once you’ve established a committee and a regular activity schedule across a range of disciplines, staff focus should be placed on developing their student committees and leading their activity to self-sustainability.
The everyday logistics of a club can be taken on by trustworthy student committee members, not only developing their general organisational skills but also their professionalism and confidence when speaking to adults. This can mean everything from asking the head of PE whether they can use the gym for practice to asking universities and speakers to visit the school. “Students asking can be more persuasive than teachers asking – especially if the university thinks of you as a target school”.
In the case of Bishop Wordsworth’s; “At the end of assembly when the head asks for notices, there’s no distinction made between student and staff announcements. The committee members have to put their hand up, stand up, and talk, or their club won’t get publicised. Trusting students to make announcements is potentially quite daunting, but very valuable”. It’s all about building up value, until your students are invested enough in the activity to reduce the burden on their teachers.
“Gaining confidence in their abilities is beneficial academically and beyond the curriculum, in terms of their wider confidence and what they can bring to university and the world. Teamwork, leadership, logistics, organisation, persuading people to help you, and negotiating with adults will all leave them more prepared for the future. It’s the kind of thing employers say schools don’t do.”
Having enabled the students themselves to coordinate internal activities, staff will have more time to organise higher level plans for their clubs and societies, that give your students goals to work towards.
“Although inter-school competition sounds like a luxury, it makes the activity bigger and higher status than just your school, and invests time in a few students who are then likely to take on roles running the activity within the school, and passing it on to others.”
“At Bishops the Year 12s who are now entering national contests run the internal Year 10 debating contest, which will make them better equipped to run the whole society once they hit Year 13, because they’ve improved by judging other people’s work. In turn, the Year 10s run a smaller scale public speaking contest for Year 8s.”
Competitions shouldn’t only be thought of as something for the students to put in their CV or Personal Statement, but as something that will actively challenge students, improving confidence, teamwork, and outcomes. If you usually only run casual internal competitions, these can justify the cost of entering regional or national contests by acting as a basis for who is entered. In turn, the prize of being taken to a more prestigious event can increase the popularity of internal activities to both enter and spectate.
“For instance, just a debate workshop would have a pretty low turnout, but showcasing your contest entrants and trialling them openly appeals to the spectating students’ competitive spirits, and trains the viewers at the same time by letting them watch the best the school has to offer”.
If your committee has been able to take on internal responsibilities, the inter-school competition can then be the focus of staff time put into the club. “You can give your contest entrants a bit of elite experience, stretch them beyond the training they would just have within the school, and add status to the activity to in turn inspire younger students”.
The last thing we asked Alistair was what he would say to a teacher or school leader who doesn’t believe they have the time to fully develop their extra-curricular program.
“One of my core beliefs and values in teaching lies in what you do outside the classroom. It’s worth the school committing to and investing in, for both their students and their teachers. It’s possible to build in a way that it becomes self-sustaining. That’s not necessarily a job to give a brand new teacher, but if one in their second or third year, gaining in professional confidence, can be given the time to properly set up over the course of a year, then the students that get involved in that activity will feel invested in by their school.”
If you want to read more about the new Ofsted judgements and ideas for how you can prepare for them, click here.
School Improvement | School Operations
This Autumn term, we organised 54 Insight Training sessions that were attended by teachers and members of Senior Leadership Teams from schools across the country. As well as looking at how Arbor’s Insight reports can help you to benchmark your schools results and streamline your operations, the sessions also demonstrated how you can use your
This Autumn term, we organised 54 Insight Training sessions that were attended by teachers and members of Senior Leadership Teams from schools across the country. As well as looking at how Arbor’s Insight reports can help you to benchmark your schools results and streamline your operations, the sessions also demonstrated how you can use your performance data and Arbor Insight portal to support and inform your annual school improvement cycle.
Each year, before you make any decisions based purely on your headline measures, you should be asking more questions about your data. This is to make sure that your decisions are not based on any bias or previous assumptions that you might not have even realised were affecting your improvement strategies. Your Arbor Insight reports help you do this by telling you:
But you still might not know:
Until you’ve answered those two why questions, you can’t figure out how to improve. We have two approaches to share to help with this.
The first is the Socratic approach. This approach requires you to think about your data from various angles to uncover any hidden assumptions you might have before taking action. You should ask:
Questions that clarify
“Do boys underperform in reading in all year groups?”
Questions that probe assumptions
“Do our pupils really enter school with low attainment?”
Questions that probe reasons and evidence
“Is there a reason to doubt the evidence?”
Questions about viewpoints and perspectives
“Should we look for another reason for this?”
Questions that probe implications and consequences
“How does this affect SEN pupils?”
Questions about questions
“Why do you think I asked this question?”
Categorising them like this encourages you to ask a wider range of questions and uncover the specific problem.
The second approach is asking“why” 5 times:
As those of you who teach or have younger children will know, one of their favourite, and sometimes most frustrating, games to play is the constant asking of “why?”. In fact, this single, repetitive question is a really useful way to dig deeper into the context behind your results and again, challenge your assumptions.
As a rule of thumb, 5 “why”s will usually get you to a root cause:
“Only 70% percent of children are working at the expected standard in writing”
WHY?
“Too many girls don’t make the expected standard”
“Progress for girls is slow across KS2”
“They start off poorly, with slower progress in lower KS2 than upper KS2”
“Expectations are too low in lower KS2”
“Poor teacher knowledge of what could be achieved”
In this case, “poor teacher knowledge of what could be achieved” is the root cause. You’ll know when you get to the root cause because it’s usually something specific and tangible. Unlike vague statements like “progress is slow” or “expectations are low”, it’s something you can actually address.
To log in and see your free ASP dashboard and reports for Phonics, KS1, KS2, and KS4, click here. Our Insight training sessions are over for the year, but if you’d like to host one for your area or find out how else Arbor can help your school or MAT, you can get in touch here.
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