Teaching Expertise

Six keys to effective support teams

What makes Behaviour and Education Support Teams (BESTs) effective?

Behaviour and Education Support Teams (BESTs) are multi-agency teams, which bring together a range of professionals, working to support schools, families and children, who present or are at risk of developing emotional, behavioural and/or attendance problems.

The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has examined key operational issues, gathering data on the impact and effectiveness of the teams*. BESTs were seen as having a positive impact on: 

  • children and young people in four main areas of attainment, attendance, behaviour and wellbeing
  • parents and carers through improved access to services and better parenting skills
  • school staff through increased understanding and new strategies for managing and supporting children with behaviour and emotional difficulties; access to specialist support.

The report identifies six predominant themes as being key to effectiveness.

1. Multi-agency composition of teams The inclusion of staff with varying professional backgrounds and specialisms was seen as a key factor with the benefits of this multi-agency approach being:

  • ability to take a holistic approach to educational, health and social needs of children and families
  • collaborative pooling of skills and exchange of expertise around casework and interventions
  • opportunities for professional development.

Several of the BESTs in the case-study sample had an extended brief, including professionals from youth or play work backgrounds.

2. Suitable accommodation The benefits of having a distinct base or centre (school-based or otherwise) from which to operate being:

  • facilitating team cohesion in the early stages of operation
  • enabling the BEST to establish its identity with schools, other local services and indeed internally.

School site locations were seen to have key benefits of establishing close working relationships and facilitating access for staff, pupils and families. However, workspace and facilities were often more satisfactory than those available in schools.

3. Accessibility Whether physically based on site or through the significant amounts of time spent in schools, the BEST approach was seen to have increased ease of access to services for schools and families through:

  • quicker and less bureaucratic referrals
  • more convenient and ‘comfortable’ meetings in schools or family homes.

4.Open communication Clear, frequent and open communication between schools and BESTs was regarded as essential and strategies highlighted as facilitating this were:

  • regular planning and review meetings
  • specified key contact person in school providing a link for referrals and liaison.

During the setting-up of BESTs, an initial ‘launch’ to schools, establishing the role and remit of teams helped enable smoother relationships as work developed.

5. Thinking multi-agency A willingness to ‘think multi-agency’ was associated with communication within the BEST teams. This was helped by:

  • regular meetings (on both a formal and informal basis)
  • willingness of team members to share information and ideas
  • openness to a truly multi-agency ethos.

This linked to practitioners seeing themselves as part of a unified team with a lack of hierarchy or ‘preciousness’ about roles. This required a readiness to blur professional boundaries at times and step outside the margins of traditional roles and specialisms.

6. Holistic approach to children’s needs
Addressing the health, domestic and social welfare concerns of children and families was seen to provide the foundation on which work to improve attendance, behaviour and attainment could be built.

Where the work of BESTs included this family-level intervention, they were seen to provide a crucial link between home and school, enabling both parties to become aware of and better understand the ‘whole picture’ of the child’s circumstances.

The effectiveness of a holistic approach to children’s needs included attention to issues at parental level. BEST team members holding social worker or family worker roles primarily carried out this type of work. Other members such as mental or medical health practitioners were brought into the case as appropriate.

The way forward

In terms of cost-effectiveness, interviewees were not able to present measurable evidence, but BESTs were regarded as value for money based on impacts produced so far for the following:

  • possible long-term gains for society (eg reduction in offending; better employment prospects for young people)
  • advantages of the multi-agency approach (eg streamlined referral systems).

With the end of dedicated funding for BESTs in 2006, interviewees suggested that schools might consider buying in the services of the BEST team. However, school staff felt that current budget constraints made this an unlikely scenario.

Another option would be for schools to carry on the type of services offered by BESTs themselves.

* Evaluation of Behaviour and Support Teams Authors: Karen Halsey, Caroline Gulliver, Annie Johnson, Kerry Martin, and Kay Kinder – National Foundation for Educational Research.

Copies of the full report (RR706) are available online at: www.dfes.gov.uk/best.

A qualification for life skills development

Do your pupils struggle to reap the benefits of GCSEs? Would your school benefit from courses which reward your students’ personal effectiveness and social skills? Bedminster Down School in Bristol feels that it did

Marius Frank, Headteacher, Bedminster Down School, Bristol

School context

Bedminster Down is an 11–16 co-ed community school with more than 1,000 students on roll, serving predominantly white working-class areas on the south-west side of Bristol. Although broadly average in terms of free school meals, three out of four wards in the catchment area fall in the bottom 1% in the country in terms of education deprivation. The historical patterns of staying in education post-16 and post-18 are also among the lowest nationally. The social impact on the rising generations is significant. Feeder schools struggle to make progress at national rates, from a low baseline. On entry, the percentage of students arriving with Level 4 in English and maths is commonly 10% below the national average. Poor literacy is a major barrier. For example, out of 185 students in the 2007 exam cohort, 120 entered the school with a reading age that was two or more years behind their chronological age. Fischer Family Trust (FFT) analysis of the year group reported just two able girls. Across the South Bristol communities, one of the most significant underachieving groups is middle-ability girls. Until recently, headline GCSE five or more A*–C grade results have oscillated in the low to mid 20%s, with the percentage for five or more A*–C grades including English and maths significantly lower even than this. However, despite these challenges, the school has never been in special measures, given notice to improve, deemed to be failing or have significant weaknesses. ‘Raising expectations – valuing achievement’ has been the strapline that has focused the energy of generations of teachers at the school, and is as relevant today as it was more than a decade ago. Over the past four years, Bedminster Down has won back the confidence of the community it serves, and is now oversubscribed.

Bedminster Down School responded well to the national strategies and imperatives aimed at raising standards – from assessment for learning (AfL) and behaviours for learning (B4L) to the range of extended practice encouraged through the Excellence in Cities programmes – but headline GCSE results were stubbornly stuck in the mid-20s. It was also fair to say that teachers were working far harder than the students! We needed a spark to ignite our broadly GCSE-based curriculum.

We had rejected the dash for GNVQs simply to raise standards, feeling that our pupils would benefit more from as broad and as balanced an education as we could possibly provide (until the majority left formal education at 16 to begin work). However, this left us exposed, near the foot of the attainment league tables, with Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) as frequent visitors. We needed to raise standards and achievement quickly.

Up until that point, we had used the Award Scheme Development and Accreditation Network (ASDAN) in a conventional way within the school curriculum. Some of the weakest learners followed the Bronze and Silver programmes as part of a ‘pre-vocational’ option. We were pleased with the engaging nature of the ASDAN course, and the challenge-based impact of a ‘can-do’ curriculum. But, although these awards have built self-esteem, grown self-worth and self-confidence, and helped the students to develop an invaluable skillset for the world of work, they did not show up as points on the league-table scoreboard.

Why use CoPE?

Do we value what we measure, or do we measure what we value?

This phrase, coined by Professor Bart McGettrick of the School of Education at Glasgow University, summed up our ethical dilemma. GCSEs appeared to ‘fail’ well over half our pupils, but counted for something. The ASDAN Awards had the potential to impact on the develop­ment of a young person’s life skills in a deep and direct way, but ‘counted’ for nothing. That was until the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) approved the ASDAN Certificate of Personal Effectiveness (CoPE) qualification (the first pilot studies for which were completed in 2005). We seized the opp­or­tunity to take up this new qualification.

Introducing CoPE
The ASDAN CoPE qualification is not easy to introduce. It cannot be taken off the shelf, deployed across the whole school, then left for two years to impact on outcomes.

Firstly, the standards associated with each of the six skill domains have to be understood and assimilated thoroughly by teachers, students and any other adult involved in delivery, monitoring or support. The six skill areas are:

  • research
  • oral presentation
  • discussion
  • working with others
  • problem-solving
  • improving your own learning and performance.

Attempting to absorb, and immediately deliver, all six at once can be an extreme challenge in itself.
Then there is the mandatory paperwork, the plan-do-review trinity at the heart of good ASDAN practice. Some complain about the amount of paperwork associated with the qualification, but the way to approach it was to view the mandatory sheets as a kind of ‘thinking scaffolding’ that could be used to help guide students through high-quality planning, thinking and reflection.

But CoPE is an amazingly flexible qualification: for example, you could use it as a standalone option, to accredit personal, social and health education (PSHE), or make it a part of your vocational programme. We decided to use the qualification in two ways.

  • Firstly, it was introduced as part of an accelerated progress initiative, targeted at a group of borderline C grade students in Year 11. A total of 45 pupils were selected:
  • the ‘shoulds’ – students targeted for achieving five or more A*-C grades but, who for a variety of mainly social and attitudinal problems, were not on track
  • the ‘coulds’ – genuine borderline students targeted to achieve the bare five C grades, but on a bad day might miss them
  • the ‘maybes’ – a group of students sometimes overlooked, and who may even be overperforming, but only capable of four C grades at best, who would benefit from the opportunity of scoring an additional C+ grade.

We created capacity in the curriculum by withdrawing the identified students from French GCSE at Christmas in Year 11, and forming two CoPE teaching groups from then until exam leave in May. It was a pragmatic decision, based on forecast GCSE grades, timetabling capacity and costs (it would have been better to have withdrawn students in smaller groups from a wider range of options, but this would have been prohibitively expensive). One member of staff coordinated the programme, but delivery was left to supply and cover teachers known to the students and the school.

Through workforce remodelling, we appointed a personal development curriculum (PDC) coordinator at head of faculty level – which was instead of a PSHE manager post, used by many schools. Their core duties were similar to that of a head of year in terms of team leadership and management – as well as mapping topics and areas of interest to cover the CoPE framework, and also to meet statutory responsibilities in sex, drugs, citizenship,
RE and ICT delivery.

Achieving credits for the accelerated progress initiative
At first glance, delivering 120 guided learning hours in six months seemed an impossible task. But when we realised that, as part of the ASDAN accreditation framework, learning experiences that otherwise would be missed actually ‘counted’, we soon saw how this would be achievable.

An outstanding example of this is work experience. We are proud of our record for guiding every student in Year 10 on to a work placement. A record of the prepara­tion, activities and reflections was kept in a logbook prepared by our local Con­nexions service. ASDAN validated a completed logbook (with clear inherent plan-do-review structured activity associated with 25 hours of work-related learning) as three out of 12 credits straight into the CoPE qualification! The students responded to this very positively, and it acted as a catalyst for many of them to engage with the qualification, even at such a late stage in Year 11.

We then put in place a strategy that, on reflection, had the single-most significant impact on the future performance of the school: we looked to GCSE coursework as a means of securing evidence for key skill development and accreditation within the CoPE qualification.

Due to the nature of our catchment area, much of the coursework elements tended to be carried out under controlled condi­tions in the classroom. The six identifiable skillsets in CoPE that we needed to evid­ence and assess were mapped across the faculties by the leadership team.

A good example of this was French. Even though the students had been withdrawn from French GCSE, they had completed their coursework under ‘teacher-guided’ condi­tions (the distinction between teacher-guided and teacher-led is import­ant, as it frames whether a student is working at Level 2 or Level 1). This assignment was an extended piece of writing about ‘How fit and healthy I am’, but researched and written in French. This was used as the source material for students to give an oral presentation (mainly in French) to Level 2 standards, for inclusion into the CoPE portfolio of evid­ence. The evidence included completion of mandatory plan-do-review recording sheets (by student and witnessing tutor), the coursework, cue cards prepared to help with the talk (simply reading it out was not permissible), artefacts and images brought in to help communicate, and a tape of the presen­tation, and so another credit was achieved.

Other faculties played their part – see the box below.

Examples of how faculties incorporated CoPE

  • Humanities felt that a focus on ‘research’ and ‘discussion’ would help the students gain more from their revision and completion of coursework. For example, an investigative study of Bristol Docks, utilising a mixture of internet browsing, face-to-face interviews, pedestrian and traffic counts proved an excellent vehicle for also evidencing the development and growth of research skills.
  • ‘Improving own learning and performance’ was assigned to PE and expressive arts, who also looked for opportunities to accredit ‘working with others’ through sports, dance, drama and musical activity attached to GCSE courses.
  • ‘Problem-solving’ fitted neatly into science and design technology (DT), especially the design realisation phase of the extended coursework element.

So, with a team of supporting tutors working on the plan-do-review sheets to go with the coursework that was accumulating, the CoPE portfolios were completed. The tutors were trained by ASDAN, and supported by regular visits over the six-months period. This was part of a city-wide support plan commissioned by the local authority, so that every school in Bristol benefited from direct support as well as from the chance to share learning with other schools. As expertise grows, the CoPE leaders within the schools take on the training and staff development role to spread best practice.

Role of personal development curriculum
But we did not want the CoPE qualifi­cation to simply be a short-term achievement solution, so our second strategy was to round up all those lessons that exist in the Key Stage 4 curriculum for statutory reasons (RE, ICT, PSHE, careers, active citizenship, and so on) and ‘brand’ them into what we called the ‘personal development curriculum’ (PDC).

We were able to allocate six lessons out of a 60-period fortnight to the personal development curriculum. A team of six specialists (in the identified subjects RE, ICT, PSHE, careers, active citizenship) was rec­ruited, and the students rotated around the team during the course of a year, con­ven­iently enabling six challenges in Year 10, and a further six in Year 11. The ‘10-hour challenges’ were carefully chosen to give a broad and balanced learning experience, mapping into the 12 possible areas of interest within the CoPE framework (see the box below), but also meeting statutory requirements for sex education, citizenship and RE, for example.

CoPE challenges: 12 areas of interest

  • Communication
  • Community and citizenship
  • Sport and leisure
  • Independent living
  • The environment
  • Vocational preparation
  • Health and fitness
  • Work-related learning and enterprise
  • Science and technology
  • International links
  • Expressive arts
  • Beliefs and ethic

The delivery of the subjects was subtly different: for example, instead of ‘learning about contraception’ and ‘teaching about contraception’, the challenge was to ‘improve your research and communica­tion skills by preparing an information pamphlet on a contraceptive of your choice for students a year younger than you’. When you unleash learning, you may have to be ready for the consequences: for example, some of the first draft cartoons needed to be toned down somewhat, and as for the ‘pop-up’ pamphlet…!

In addition to pupils accumulating evidence through the PDC route, faculties continued to embed personal skill development as part of the coursework experience. There was a staff training and development advantage to this strategy: subject teachers were not required to absorb the entirety of the CoPE standards framework in one go. Instead, they had a chance to study, absorb and implement a teaching and learning programme to address just one of the skill domains. It is a massive conceptual challenge to pick up and run with the whole CoPE framework, unless you have been delivering ASDAN programmes in the past, so this gradual approach helped to build staff confidence and competence with delivering this new qualification.

Initial problems
It was not all plain sailing. This was a late inter­vention strategy. Not all the pupils knuckled down, time was wasted, and opportunities missed. As a result, only 26 out of the 45 actually completed their portfolios for assessment. And ‘complete’ they had to be! ASDAN’s moderation meetings are rigorous and fair, but if a section in the portfolio is incomplete, the qualification cannot and will not be awarded. Also, it does take time for teachers to learn the standards and guide students to produce work that meets the standards. In fact, three folders submitted for early moderation did not get through. However, the post-moderation comments from ASDAN’s assessors were extremely helpful, ensuring that our challenges were finely retuned, to pass the relevant standards on next submission – as the example in this box illustrates.

Meeting the level 2 standard for working with others

The plan-do-review documents helped guide the students into working collaboratively, with its questions such as ‘What is the shared task?’, ‘What needs to be done, and who will do it, by when?’, ‘What are you going to do?’, and so on. However, although some discussion might have occurred, the process of working with others was very poorly evidenced. An easy trap to fall into is to submit the final PowerPoint presentation as an outcome of collaboration: but the journey, and the personal growth of the students on that journey needed to be there too. Schemes of work were rapidly changed: after every group discussion, students were encouraged to keep rough notes on agreed actions; then chairpersons and notekeepers were elected (even for a five-minute starter or plenary), and students were encouraged to reflect on their role as a chair or secretary. Another method of capturing the process was to keep a log of activity: What did you do? What did you learn? What will you do next lesson? Regional managers from ASDAN also visited the school, helped with standardising work, and helped teachers to think deeply about what makes for an appropriate challenge, for which appropriate skill area.

Benefits
Did it work? At first, we were unsure. There appeared to be some pleasing attitudinal spin-offs. One such example was ‘Natalie’, your average disengaged Year 11 student with a quick tongue and an interesting manner with some staff. In the first interviews, when asked what she did in the evenings (as we searched for activities that could be accredited), she simply said ‘nuffick!’ Eventually, we discovered that, for the past three years, she had been helping out at her local Guides and Brownies Group (… ‘sumfink to do, innit?!’…). She became engaged and motivated when she was given credit for this community work, and this engagement spread into the other subjects. Natalie achieved five A*–C grades, when, eight months previously, there appeared no hope.

There are usually at least three local ASDAN moderation meetings in a school year so CoPE students felt very motivated and upbeat when they gained a GCSE equivalent before their friends had.

Results day in August 2006 was a delight. On GCSE grades alone, we touched 32% five A*-C (good for us!). But when another nine students were added to the stats because of the extra CoPE qualification – and in some cases achieving an Adult Literacy and Adult Numeracy (ALAN) basic skills Level 2 qualification too – our stats soared to 37%. What was particularly pleasing was the fact that nearly every member of staff felt ‘ownership’ of this boost, as coursework from nearly every subject contributed to the success of the CoPE outcomes.

In 2007, 50 students completed a Level 2 CoPE qualification, along with a similar number who managed all or part of the ALAN qualification too (as alternative accreditation supplements to their GCSE diet). The 2007 cohort was significantly weaker than the previous year. However, we still attained 41% five A*–C grades, which was comfortably the best results in the school’s history. We also achieved 27% of students gaining five or more A*–C grades including English and maths, which was equivalent to our FFT D indicator (equivalent to making progress with top quartile schools). In the new era of National Challenge, and the pressure being exerted to achieve the 30% benchmark irrespective of the starting point of your students, we were delighted to get so close to the target a year earlier than anticipated.

Engaging learners
It would be grossly unfair to suggest that all school improvement was due to CoPE (quality teaching and learning, rigor­ous tracking, mentoring, coaching, monitoring and support also featured significantly), but the ASDAN can-do curriculum certainly had a weighty impact.

The students were being given credit for what they could do, rather than being graded on what they couldn’t do. This kept them engaged in learning right up to and beyond the exam season. It was a remark­able and warming sight to see many Year 11s, after their formal exams had been completed in late June, coming to work in the library to finish off or tidy up their CoPE folders.
Another indicator of engagement was our five A*–C including English and maths results in 2007. We are again anticipating even better results in 2008, with hopefully 100 CoPE qualifications completed, and headline stats reaching the stellar 50% mark (stellar for us, that is!).

The brightest students in a school community can also benefit hugely from the CoPE experience too. CoPE Level 2 challenges can be used as gifted and talented activities in Key Stage 3. The CoPE Level 3 qualification is worth 70 UCAS points, and really does encourage the growth of high-level independent and transferable learning skills, and could be used to give breadth and enrichment at Key Stage 4.These are opportunities that we are actively considering, to stretch and challenge our most able students.

Preparing for PLTS agenda
 The ASDAN CoPE qualification is preparing the school community for the personal learning and thinking skills (PLTS) agenda at the heart of the latest round of curriculum reform. PLTS are normally associated with the new diploma learning lines, but there is an expectation that every student at Key Stage 4 should in reality be benefiting from embedded and assessed PLTS. Through a remarkable bit of educational serendipity, there is an almost total mapping of the six PLTS domains into the CoPE accreditation framework. Simply put, you are delivering PLTS if you are delivering CoPE!

Taking stock A great deal of thought and planning needs to take place if CoPE is to be used across the whole school, with different teams of teachers helping to deliver aspects from within their subject areas.

CoPE cannot be taught from the front of the class. It has to be a conversation, a dialogue between teacher and learner. Once the generality of a challenge is presented to the class, individual students should then crystallise their own plan in their own way (this has to be the case to satisfy the Level 2 standards, but can be more relaxed if the ‘teacher-led’ Level 1 standard is the desired outcome). The teacher becomes the critical friend, rather than the delivery agent. In this way, the curriculum becomes co-constructed, rather than imposed or fixed. Some teachers can find this highly disturbing at first – but eventually, with experience, they can feel liberated from content-based restrictions and grading criteria.

ASDAN insists that student work is presented from each centre at ‘standardisation meetings’ throughout the year, before folders are submitted for final moderation. As well as securing quality assurance, this process also promoted sharing of good practice, which is one of the strengths of the ASDAN philosophy.

If CoPE is to be used across an entire cohort, a great deal of logistical planning is required to support the teachers delivering this programme of study. Because the CoPE qualification is awarded on the basis of evidence, it has to be accumulated, and stored, which creates resource implica­tions. Every student will need personal folders, and the CoPE team will need a centralised bank of filing cabinets to store completed work in an organised and easy-to-find way.

If coursework activity from a variety of faculties is used to evidence skill development, copying every single piece across the entire cohort could be extremely timeconsuming and expensive. We get around this problem by storing the actual coursework within each of the faculties (standard practice) and passing the supporting plan-do-review sheets and additional evidence to the CoPE team. If a student’s work is called for moderation by ASDAN, the work is recovered from the relevant faculties. Any work that we have to send to other exam boards, we copy beforehand just in case that student’s work is called for moderation by CoPE as well.

CoPE began at Bedminster Down nearly three years ago. We have made great progress, but we are still learning. Our most recent moderation event has thrown up a series of issues that need to be addressed. For example, more ‘process evidence’ is needed, rather than simply fixating on the outcome (diaries or logs of learning, draft work and reasons for change, selection of information after first attempts to research a topic, and so on).

We realise that colleagues in the CoPE team need time to meet, discuss and inter­nally moderate samples of work, which can be problematic when considering the number of meetings in a school week, and that most of them are already attached to faculties. There must also be time allocated to induct new members of staff into the challenge-based way of working.

Critical self-evaluation such as this plays a vital role in improving the quality and effectiveness of the curriculum. Teachers and our support staff involved in CoPE are becoming more and more creative in the way assignments and extended projects are being constructed. We are looking to draw in more and more learning from outside the school day into the accreditation framework (such as Saturday jobs, helping infirm relatives or neighbours, contributing to charity events, helping at local youth centres, football clubs).

There is no doubt that CoPE is helping us help our students perform beyond expec­ta­tions. We have learned many lessons along the way – the first box below gives advice on how to go about introducing CoPE, while the second box gives our top tips on how to develop this qualification to bring about improvements in student achievement.

Introducing ASDAN CoPE

  • Start with a small test cohort, and a small cross-faculty team of teachers
  • Ensure that staff have been trained by ASDAN lead professionals
  • Make sure there is enough curriculum time to complete the challenges involved
  • Look to existing school activities as sources for accreditation
  • Attend local standardisation meetings organised by ASDAN – meet other local professionals, and share activities, resources and approaches
  • Learn the standards, learn how to support and guide without directly leading students, and plan activities carefully, so that the students meet the standards as defined in the manuals
  • Use ASDAN regional managers or trained assessors to constantly check that you, and the students, are on track
  • Work out systems and procedures for collating and storing evidence (dedicated administrative support is vital if the cohort grows bigger than simply standalone option groups)
Growing CoPE

  • Ensure strategic leadership is in place, and agree a training and implementation plan (ask for help from ASDAN regional managers – someone somewhere may have done it already)
  • Look at your current formal curriculum – are there formal projects or coursework activities that can be used for more than one purpose (GCSE and CoPE, for example)?
  • Seek informal curriculum opportunities that may fulfil dual purposes (such as a Sports Specialist College running primary school sports events, giving students opportunities for community service, and helping with redesignation)
  • Ensure that adequate administra­tive support is used, as well as storage space for the folders (unless you choose the e-portfolio version of CoPE: but that’s another story!)
  • Extend your CoPE team – train your librarian and learning support assistants (LSAs) as CoPE moderators as well as your teachers, so that they can guide students too

Marius Frank, Headteacher, Bedminster Down School, Bristol

Raising higher education tuition fees: a serious mistake in the making

I should have been a carpenter, not a headteacher. I would of course have been awful at the job, unable to use a chisel or saw without doing myself a serious injury. However, that is what my family history had prepared me for. My grandfather was a ship’s carpenter, working on the light ships for Trinity House. Unlike me, he was a master craftsman, able to work minor miracles with his carvings in wood. The only reason that I did not follow him into a trade I was spectacularly unsuited for was through the happy accident of having parents who believed in the transforming power of education.

From an early age my mother decided that I was going to go to university – not an easy aspiration for the family to realise in lots of ways. I can still recall the discussion among the family as to how we were going to pay for my visits to the universities that had invited me for an interview. When I told my father that the list of interviews included places such as Newcastle (a considerable way from the family home in Liverpool) he got up and walked out of the house. ‘Oh well,’ I thought, ‘that’s the end of that’. Instead, he came back an hour later with £100 in his hands, thanks to a sympathetic and very understanding bank manager. I don’t care what anyone says about bankers, from that day onwards the Liverpool branch of NatWest has had a special place in my heart.

It might have been difficult initially, but once I made it to Sheffield University to read English Literature I entered what I suspect will come to be seen as a world of untold privilege. The state met my tuition fees and also provided a grant for me to live on. Even more priceless, by paying for my education they enabled me to break the rules of class and social position that for centuries would have dictated my future. These rules stated that you knew your place and did the same job that your family had always done, whether that meant working in the factory, going down the mine or, yes, working as a carpenter. The possession of a degree in English literature was something that used to be unknown for someone from my background and it gave my life a completely different trajectory.

A bleaker future
Why so much sentiment about three years at Sheffield University? I suppose I am looking back in anguish at a set of experiences that seem likely to be denied to my children’s generation. Whereas my family anguished about a £100 loan to pay for travel to a set of interviews, the next generation of students are set to pick up a tab which could grow to £60,000 or more. Rather than setting up young people for life, the cost of a university degree looks set to be a millstone around the necks of young people that will effectively last until they are drawing their pension.

It is hard to know where to start in explaining what is wrong with the current proposals to allow universities to charge up to £9,000 a year for tuition fees. Let me pluck three obvious objections from the many that come so readily to mind.

Firstly, the proposal shows no concept of how many ordinary working people regard debt. In my family the prospect of taking on such a huge loan, even when adjusted for prices in the 1970s, would have made higher education unthinkable, either for myself or for my brother and sister. I learnt at my mother’s knee that borrowing money was just a way to store up trouble for the future. Along with alcohol and fast women, it was consigned to the list of topics about which I received dark and not very coded warnings at regular intervals as I grew up.

Whatever the complicated measures that have been put in place to make university education ‘progressive’ and to reduce the amount paid by those from poorer backgrounds, just the prospect of taking on such a huge loan will be enough to put many off. I think back to the pain involved in borrowing £100 to get to university interviews – the prospect of myself or my parents borrowing thousands more would have been completely unthinkable.

Secondly, the concept of high fees is often justified by the platitude that it provides an opportunity for young people to ‘invest in their future’, as if taking a degree was a step that only provided benefits to the individual concerned. I would like to think that when the state paid for my degree 30 years ago, it was not only doing me a favour, it was also making an investment in its own future. By providing me with the educational tools to pursue what I have always regarded as a genuine vocation in teaching, they were also doing something that I hope has made a difference to the students that I have worked with.

Breaking a contract
My experience only provides one narrow example. Can we really say that entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, nurses and social workers are using their degrees solely for their own benefit? In lots of different ways the nation derives huge benefit from the skills and experiences that higher education has enabled them to develop. In the past that shared benefit was recognised by the state making its own contribution to the cost of a degree. Now we appear to be saying that young people should pay all of the cost, while society still enjoys some of the potential benefit. An unspoken contract, based upon the mutual gain that the individual and the state derive from education, is in the process of being broken.

Lastly, these new arrangements create an uncomfortable feeling of ‘do as I say, not as I did’. Those who have benefited massively from the free higher education provided by the state are now turning around to the next generation and in effect saying ‘this was a wonderful experience for me, but we have decided that you should be treated differently’.

At a stroke, those behind the new proposals appear to have decided to chop down the educational ladder that they and many others climbed up. While this cannot justify the rioting on the streets that we recently witnessed on our television screens, it leaves a feeling of unease and injustice that does not fit with any moral framework that I can think of.

As a headteacher of a school with a sixth form of 350, I am already receiving guidance on how to ‘promote’ the new system of fees to my students, along with advice that it is my duty to ‘sell’ the new deal, since it is the least worst of the different alternatives that were put forward. I must admit to feeling an ethical dilemma over this.

Of course it is right to continue to encourage students to aspire to higher education. In our school we are very proud of establishing an ethos within which students are ‘expected’ to progress on to university, encouraging them to aim high because it is part of the culture within the school. We have found that for those who are the first in their family to access higher education this culture has been crucial. Students progress and aspire because it is what they see their peers doing, not just because of special programmes or focused interventions.

A system of division
I have grave concerns that our new system of high fees will radically undermine this culture. Quite reasonably, students will ask themselves if it is worth progressing to university and as a result entering into a lifetime of debt. Peer pressure to succeed and progress may well be replaced by a system that divides students into two groups: those who already have a lot and are able to progress and those who have less and so are unable to use education to change their life chances.

Can I really ‘promote’ this system to my students as the best solution available in the circumstances? I think that I can emphasise the positive elements of the scheme, such as the fact that it only requires repayments when income reaches more than £21,000 and writes off the debt 30 years after graduation. I can also share with my students information about the way in which having a degree significantly boosts a person’s lifetime earning potential. I can even tell them about the difference that having a degree made to my life and aspirations. However, what I cannot and will not do is tell my students that I agree with a system of fees that appears so profoundly misguided.

It is fair to ask the question what would I do instead? Noone is disputing that the nation is facing a huge deficit as the result of the financial crisis. Doesn’t this mean that we all need to make sacrifices, including those who aspire to go on to university? My answer would be that life is about choices. If as a nation we believe in the power of education, particularly the power of education to break the shackles of social class and poverty, then we have to put our money where our mouth is.

Benefiting the nation
Surely it is reasonable to suggest that one of our national priorities should be that we spend some of our wealth investing in a higher education system which benefits the entire nation? What we cannot do is preach about the transformational power of education and then effectively mortgage the future of our children and the generations that follow them. If that is not a betrayal, I am struggling to think what is.

Words cannot express what an awful carpenter I would have been. Even now I shudder to think of the Ikea flatpacks that would fail to fit together if they were exposed to my handiwork. Just the idea of me fixing something or carrying out some DIY is enough to reduce my wife and children to roars of hysterical laughter. How wonderful that generations of DIY enthusiasts have been saved from what I might have done. Even more wonderful is the fact that thanks to education my life has taken a different turn, and that I am instead able to take on a job which I love. However, I worry that I will come to be seen as one of the lucky ones, someone who took his chance before the money ran out.

When I started my headship 12 years ago the slogan was ‘education, education, education.’ Suddenly it feels like an awfully long time ago. In late 2010 the talk is of austerity, deficit reduction and cutbacks. I hope that there is still time to think again about tuition fees, before as a nation we make a terrible mistake that we may never be able to explain to our children.

Tuition fees

  • The independent Browne review of student finance conducted during the autumn of 2010 recommended that universities should be able to charge students what they like for tuition. The government has rejected this, with Nick Clegg describing himself as ‘uneasy’ about removing all limits on tuition fees.
  • At the time of going to press, university tuition fees were capped at £3,290. The government had not yet voted on whether to raise the cap (this vote was due to take place on 8 December).
  •  The government is, however, proposing to raise the cap to £9,000 for some courses, with most courses costing £6,000.
  • Under the new proposals, graduates will start to repay the cost of their degrees when they start to earn £21,000.
  • Other matters relating to changes in higher education will be considered in early 2011 when ministers are expected to publish a white paper on the futureof universities.


Dr Peter Kent is headteacher of Lawrence Sheriff School Rugby and a national leader of education

Strategic thinking for more able pupils

How can you help G&T pupils develop strategies for thinking about their work before rushing in? Peter Levin offers some solutions.

Many educationalists turn their noses up at the suggestion that school pupils should engage in thinking ‘strategically’. To them, this means ‘playing the system’, setting out to get the highest possible grades with the least effort – a reprehensible endeavour because it implies that the pupil is not motivated to seek learning for its own sake. Or, to put it another way, because it demonstrates that the pupil is playing his or her own game, not the one the educationalist or teacher wants them to play.

In other contexts, of course, getting most benefit for least effort is regarded as entirely praiseworthy. And if you have the ability to understand a system well enough to play it successfully, arguably you possess one of those valuable skills for life that are much prized nowadays. In my view, it’s time that ‘strategic thinking’ was reclaimed for education. Indeed, we ought to be teaching pupils to think strategically, in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of situations, and congratulating them when they succeed in it. And it’s something that more able pupils are very adept at picking up.

Defining strategic thinking

There is no one ‘right’ definition of ‘strategic thinking’, but its various forms are easy enough to recognise. The strategic thinker takes an overview as well as looking at details, asks how things fit together and looks for patterns and connections, and is proactive rather than reactive. He or she looks before they leap, and plans ahead rather than taking each day as it comes.

Do some of your G&T pupils jump too quickly into tasks, and consequently get them wrong, perhaps because they’re too keen to get on with displaying their knowledge? If that’s what they do, they probably haven’t been taught to think carefully about what they’re being asked to do. Contrast them with pupils who have been taught the strategic approach.
Faced with a new task, they don’t rush in. Instead they ask questions:

  • What am I actually expected to do here?
  • How does this task resemble or differ from others I’ve tackled in the past?
  • What different ways are there of interpreting this question?
  • What is the significance of the particular words used?

Perhaps some of your G&T pupils don’t rush in but display the ‘opposite’ behaviour: they struggle to get started and maybe engage in lots of displacement activities to put off making choices or committing themselves to anything. Again, the likelihood is that they haven’t been taught a strategic approach. No one has offered them a way of identifying a starting point.

The need, instead, to ask useful ‘beginning’ questions:

  • What do I actually know?
  • What are the facts here, as distinct from the opinions?
  • What information would I need to have in order to answer the question?

Then there are the pupils who infuriate their teachers by being casual in the classroom and handing in slapdash coursework, but then doing very well in unseen exams. Often they are bored out of their minds by the nitty-gritty day-to-day stuff but fired up when they can see the big picture and how details and small components fit into the whole.

A related category are those whose minds ‘race’. These often annoy their teachers by their untidy handwriting and poor spelling, but these are caused not by carelessness but by the fact that as a word goes onto the page the writer’s mind is ten or a dozen words ahead. For them, a strategic approach to writing would involve separating ‘writing as thinking’ from ‘writing as presentation’. They could be told: ‘Map your ideas out on a piece of rough paper first, then make a neat draft’.

A strategy for teachers

Most teachers will have a strategy for the courses they are teaching, even if it’s only a curriculum dictated from on high.

But how many, I wonder, start by revealing their strategy to their pupils – for example, by saying:

  • this is the ground we have to cover
  • this I think is the logical order to do it in
  • I think it would be a good idea to have review/ consolidation weeks here, here and here.

How many start by supplying their pupils with past exam papers, which are really helpful ways of providing overviews of courses? The norm is for the teacher to ‘drip-feed’ material lesson by lesson, a technique which keeps power in the hands of the teacher – only he or she knows what’s coming next – but is guaranteed to drive many G&T pupils up the wall. If teachers conceal their strategies, pupils will hardly be helped to pick up the idea that thinking strategically is a good thing – both useful and fun.

There is, of course, one ‘playing the system’ strategy that teachers employ that they are quite happy to tell their pupils about: spotting what questions are likely to come up in this year’s exams. Understandably teachers are very pleased with themselves when they get it right, and their G&T pupils will be quick to ask why, if it’s OK for their teachers to play the system, it isn’t OK for them too.

Giving G&T pupils mixed messages is a sure-fire way of losing their trust and alienating them.

Examples of how to think strategically

Here are some examples of how you can equip students to think strategically. What they have in common is that they all involve demonstrating how to think at a ‘meta-level’ – that is, how to think about thinking.

Ways of looking at the world

Whatever your subject, it will involve a particular way of looking at the world. If you are a natural scientist you will see the world in terms of phenomena; if you are a sociologist or historian you may well see the world in terms of themes; if you are an economist you might see the world in terms of processes of production, distribution and exchange; if your subject is English literature your world is made up of the body of writings, within which you will discern certain schools or genres. However you see the world, it will help your pupils immensely if you make your perception explicit to them, rather than take it for granted and expect them to do so too.

Methodology

Every subject has its own tools, its own questions, for ‘interrogating’ the world as it sees it. Make these explicit to your pupils, and try to bring out the differences between them.

Take a locality near your school and spell out the different questions that would be asked by – say – a botanist, chemist, economist, geographer, lawyer, sociologist about it, and the different methodologies they would employ to answer those questions. Spell out the techniques that would be used for analysis, and show how they complement one another (or not), and rather than just pass critical judgments make explicit the criteria for evaluation that you are using.

Causation and explanation

What do we mean when we say that A caused B? Does the term ‘explanation’ mean something different to physicists and historians? When can we say we have a satisfactory explanation of a phenomenon or event? What, if anything, do a physicist’s, an economist’s and a lawyer’s concept of a ‘law’ have in common. Many G&T pupils will be engaged and provoked to think by these and similar questions.

The general and the particular

It is a characteristic of academics and consequently of academic thinking that they can shuttle very rapidly between two levels, the level of ‘detail’ and the level of ‘principle’, the general and the particular. They come across a particular empirical observation and immediately ask how it fits into the big picture, and what its wider – general – implications are. Their approach to gaining an understanding of an event, say, is to first place it in its context, against its background. Offered a new theory, they work from the general to the particular, asking what particular observations could be made that would test its validity. This habit of shuttling to and fro between the general and the particular, of working from theory to observation and back again, of shifting focus between principle and detail, is a way of ‘making sense’. It is a very useful one for aspiring university students to get into.

Reading

Give your pupils a demonstration of how to read a book or an article. Show them what strikes you as significant, and why, and what you pass over on a first reading. Show them how you relate what you read to what you already know, and how you read critically, between the lines rather than taking the words on the page at face value. Students who arrive at university having learned to read questioningly, and to regard reading as a ‘treasure hunt’ rather than as a means of absorbing every word of every item on their reading lists, will have a flying start.

If your subject is a quantitative one, you can similarly give your pupils a demonstration of how to ‘read’ a table of figures, a graph, a diagram or an equation. Just as with a piece of writing, there are skills of inferring and questioning that you can illuminate and pass on to your pupils.

Language

Every subject has its own specialised language, its ‘academic-speak’. When it comes to learning this language, university students find it enormously helpful to treat learning it in the same way as they would learning a foreign language such as Spanish or German. This works even with quantitative subjects such as maths, statistics, economics and accountancy. If your pupils have already had the experience of learning a foreign language, they will probably recollect that when they started, if someone asked them a question in Spanish (say), they would translate the question into English, find the answer in English, and translate the answer into Spanish. Then, one day, someone asked them a question in Spanish and they immediately gave the answer in Spanish, without going through the round-the-houses translation process.

If they have had that experience, they can be told that that is the level of fluency they need to have with the particular academic-speak they are grappling with. With that understanding, and that experience at school behind them, they will find learning at university that much easier.

Dr Peter Levin is an educational developer at the London School of Economics, specialising in providing one-to-one study skills support for students. He is the author of Write Great Essays! and other books in the Student-Friendly Guides series, published by the Open University Press.

Coaching the teachers

Coaching and mentoring activities should play a role in the development of all teaching professionals, according to the TDA (Training and Development Agency for Schools). Although the two terms seem to be used interchangeably in the official literature, do they really serve the same purpose and if they have a strategic function to perform in school, what exactly is it? Who is the coach/mentor and who is the ‘client’? Finally, but perhaps most importantly, do pupils really benefit?

Buried in the TDA’s Professional Standards for Teachers, from QTS through ‘core standards’ and ‘post threshold’, are three short but clear references to the importance of coaching as a tool for contributing to the professional development of colleagues. We find that to attain QTS, teachers should demonstrate that they can ‘act upon advice… and be open to coaching and mentoring’ (Q9). The same sentiment is included among the core standards every teacher is expected to meet at the end of induction where teachers are urged to ‘act upon advice and feedback and be open to coaching and mentoring’ (C9). Finally, the post threshold teacher is expected to ‘contribute to the professional development of colleagues through coaching and mentoring, demonstrating effective practice and providing advice and feedback’ (P10).

Beyond ‘experts passing on wisdom’

While the standards framework is progressive, reflecting teachers’ increasing effectiveness in their roles as their professional attributes, knowledge, understanding and skills grow, the emphasis is very much on more experienced teachers acting as role models for teaching and learning. But the idea that coaching and mentoring is all about ‘experts’ passing on their wisdom as exemplary models of their craft to their less experienced colleagues is a rather simplistic analysis of the issues involved, according to Edward Gildea, ex-secondary head and educational consultant with Cambridge Education and ASCL (Association of School and College Leaders).

The tendency to blur the distinction between coaching and mentoring is not helpful, according to Gildea, who prefers to see the two activities on a continuum: ‘Mentoring lies at the “directive” end of the spectrum. It does exactly what it says: it directs the client in a traditional, instructive way. As an approach it is limited because it assumes that the coach has all the answers and the client’s job is to passively receive the information. Coaching, in contrast, is “the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of another” (Downey, 2003). Coaching requires the creation of a dynamic relationship between coach and client that is based on the belief that we have an innate capacity to learn. An effective non-directive coach seeks to access that instinct and act as a catalyst, enabling the client to learn for him or herself.’

This is not to say that the directive approach is rejected out of hand. There are times when it’s a very useful tool, ie when the coach really does know the answer to a specific question and the client is at a loss to know what to do, but it is a delicate balance. As Gildea emphasises: ‘Mentoring can be very useful, especially with younger teachers, but only for as long as the suggestions made by the mentor are perceived and welcomed by the client as being relevant and helpful. It’s critical to retain the vital characteristics of the non-directive model – ownership, responsibility, learning, high performance. The directive technique can quickly regress from making suggestions to attempting to control the subject. An essential part of non-directive coaching is to acknowledge that the client has experience, imagination, intuition and insight.’

Indeed, Gildea would argue that it is this last attribute which holds the key to successful coaching – a belief that is underpinned by latest neurological studies on the subject. He cites recent breakthroughs in brain research which can now explain how behavioural change actually takes place (see box, below).

The neuroscience behind behavioural change

Scientists at Northwestern University’s Institute for Neuroscience have established that during moments of insight, complex sets of new brain connections are created. These connections have not only the power to enhance our mental resources, but also the potential to overcome the brain’s resistance to change. Change will only result, however, if the insight is ‘hardwired’ – which demands repeated attention and a high degree of attachment to the idea. This is why, for coaching to be successful, the client needs to have a strong sense of ownership. (Rock and Schwartz, 2006)

To effect a transformation in someone’s mental ‘map’, they require some kind of event or experience which allows them as individuals to provoke themselves into changing their attitudes.

Transforming ‘good’ into ‘great’

Although mentoring can perform a vital role in school, enabling experienced (and usually, but not always) older staff to help their colleagues develop their professional skills, it cannot substitute for coaching and does not fulfil the same function. While mentoring can be both formal and informal, it tends, as a rule, to take place intra- departmentally and requires neither specialist training, funding nor organisation to be effective.

Coaching, meanwhile, represents a major commitment on the part of senior management and requires all of the above. ‘When we look at ways of supporting teachers in rising to the combined challenge of meeting the social and emotional demands of their students while also satisfying the academic requirements of the curriculum, an established and properly resourced coaching programme can play an important part,’ says Gildea. ‘Teaching can be a tough environment and teachers can lose their way, their energy and their morale. We need to look after our colleagues and offer them tailored support which is focused on personal development and specific need.

‘Coaching can be applied peer to peer and cross-departmentally. It can help transform good teachers into great teachers as well as retain staff within the profession who may be demoralised and drained by their experiences. Coaching can enable them to re-capture their initial enthusiasm and regain some job satisfaction,‘ he adds.

Despite its value and its inclusion in key documentation, including the latest recommendations by the National College of School Leadership in their guidance Learning-centred Leadership: Towards Personalised Learning-centred Leadership, Gildea has encountered very few secondary establishments that have embraced the concept seriously enough to train their own cohort of coaches and fund an ongoing scheme.

Supporting vulnerable staff: a case study

One such school is CTC Kingshurst Academy in Solihull, West Midlands. With some 1,600 students between the ages of 11 and 18, Kingshurst is a popular, over-subscribed secondary school which draws students from a very large number of primary schools in Solihull and beyond. Its students come from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds, with more students than average experiencing aspects of disadvantage. The sixth form is large and welcomes many new students who join at Year 12, when they can study for the International Baccalaureate (IB) in addition to vocational courses. Tim Boylan, vice principal, explains the background:
‘Coaching was set up at Kingshurst to help colleagues who were struggling in the classroom. We had a programme that identified good practice as well as not so good practice, but needed a mechanism to support vulnerable staff on a more intensive level.

‘Staff have been very receptive to the programme, often themselves recognising a need for support and so embracing the scheme with open arms. There have been a number of staff who have particularly benefited and who have perhaps remained in the profession because of this intervention.

‘Relations with students have improved because planning and effectiveness in the classroom have improved, and the performance of the students has progressed commensurately. I think that the levels of stress that these particular staff are under has eased because they are better able to fulfil their professional role and are thus happier in their jobs.’

Dealing with lack of confidence
The coaching process is overseen by teaching and learning manager Paul Harris, who sees it as the logical outcome of the school’s auditing system which has, for six years, been monitoring standards of teaching and learning across the curriculum on a regular basis:

‘As we got better at auditing, we increasingly began to standardise what constituted “satisfactory” as opposed to “unsatisfactory” performance in the classroom.

‘After the first few years, we realised that there was a growing need to follow up classroom observations in a more constructive and structured way. We acknowledged that we were not doing enough to support those teachers who were falling short in performance terms. For standards of learning to be as good as they can be and for students to progress, teachers need to feel supported and know that there are support systems in place to help them.

‘In many cases, when there is a specific issue around lesson planning or organisation, the “solution” can be identified and the problem resolved with the assistance of one of our team of assistant principals. Coaching comes into its own when the problem involves multiple issues and the individual has lost confidence in their ability to teach on a daily basis.’

Cristina Garcia, Kingshurst’s head of MFL, was one of the first coaches to be selected and trained after funding was approved by the board of governors in 2008. Motivated by a desire to help and an irrepressible enthusiasm for her chosen profession, Cristina found the training a revelation in itself: ‘Our one-day course was absolutely vital and taught us some invaluable techniques and strategies to use in our new role. We all thought we knew what was involved, what coaching meant and what we would be required to do, but looking back, we would have been ill-equipped to deal with what lay ahead without specialist skills and an in-depth understanding of the task.

‘I remember thinking, “Wow, that was really difficult,” after one particularly demanding role play situation. We learnt the power of silence, how to listen and ask the right questions and, most importantly, how to be patient with our subjects. Sometimes it can take a very long time to make an initial breakthrough and begin the process of change.’

Gaining the trust of ‘clients’
Despite the utmost discretion and confidentiality, there is still an element of stigma and fear attached to the referral process which is difficult to eliminate altogether. Sometimes ‘clients’ can be reluctant or even resistant, but this, Cristina emphasises, is only to be expected: ‘People only come to us when they are at a low ebb. If you’re lacking in self-belief and have lost confidence in your professional abilities and your capacity to control a situation and command the respect of your pupils and your colleagues, you are not likely to be in a positive frame of mind.

‘By the same token however, some referrals are manifestly relieved to have been offered a helping hand and some welcome support at a moment in their career when they feel undermined, unable to communicate effectively with their students and locked into a vicious circle.

‘We start from the premise that Kingshurst only employs the best teachers and that we are there to help them get back to where they were originally. Each individual knows why they are there, what their targets are and the objective of the coaching exercise.

‘As coaches, our first task is to gain the trust of our “clients”, reassure them that they have our complete confidence and that we believe in them and in their ability to get there.’

‘A no-brainer’
Sessions take place once a week and can last for anything up to an hour at a time. These are supplemented with classroom observations by the coach to check on progress. The system operates on a one client per coach basis and coaching may continue over a period of months and even terms. So far some 18 teachers have benefited from the service which, as fellow coach Sharon Clift (a teacher of French and Spanish) points out, represents a huge collateral benefit for the school:

‘Each teacher impacts on hundreds of pupils’ experiences over the period of a school week. Every teacher that is helped by the scheme means a more effective presence in the classroom which in turn and in time converts to improved student performance and better exam results. It’s a no-brainer.’

On a macro level, if the scheme has helped prevent even one teacher from leaving the profession by enabling them to turn their career around, then it more than justifies its existence financially as well as morally and ethically.

The first step is always to encourage the subject to look outside the ‘box’ and take a more objective view of the ‘problem’: ‘It’s sometimes difficult for people to change perspective. We often hear comments like “But this is how I’ve always done it”; nevertheless, it’s so crucial not to revert to the default position of offering advice in terms of “Well, if I were you, I would do it like this…” says Sharon. ‘Nothing is likely to make someone feel even more entrenched, alienated and isolated than being told what to do and how to do it. Our aim is to encourage reflection. You can’t tell someone how to do their job; they have to find their own style and the methods that work best for them.’

At Kingshurst the coaches volunteered for the honorarium positions and were selected for suitability by senior management using a range of criteria. In addition to being excellent classroom practitioners, factors such as profile, reputation and integrity were taken into consideration. Perhaps the disciplines of the incumbent team suggest something about their credentials, for they are all from subject groups which perhaps demand an exceptionally high degree of classroom interaction and student communication: PE, music and languages. Teachers are always referred to someone outside their own subject group and attention is also paid to the matching process in terms of personality and style.

The emotional dimension
Although the key indicators behind most referrals from the audit team involve lack of student progress in exams and/or classroom participation, in combination with issues around discipline and control, 80% of cases are most definitely not about failing teachers, according to both Sharon and Cristina: ‘A lack of motivation can often be a cumulative matter. Things might start to go wrong almost imperceptibly – a bad day, a lack of planning or simply a particularly difficult student. Once someone starts to lose their professional self-assurance in front of their class, however, things can quickly spiral downwards into anxiety and stress,’ adds Sharon.

‘Coaching is about getting “clients” to see and acknowledge the positive and to be open to new ways of doing things. Often we find that they have become very fearful of experimenting and that’s when occasionally we take a more “directive” approach and make a suggestion which we think has a high degree of potential.

‘Sometimes it’s the smallest thing, but it breaks the deadlock and kickstarts the process. It might be a useful technique for getting pupils’ attention at the beginning of a lesson, for example, or laying ground rules with pupils about speaking in class or even adopting a more commanding mode of delivery, but once a “client” realises that they can make a difference and be effective again, one success leads to another quite quickly.’

Testimony to the success of the scheme is the support of the governors and the fact that Kingshurst’s coaching team has doubled in number since its inception.
It is perhaps this emotional dimension that ultimately differentiates coaching from mentoring. Teachers can easily become quite defensive when they feel that management is trying to change the way they teach or challenge their performance – defensiveness which makes change and development virtually impossible. The techniques employed by successful coaches seek to overcome this mindset first and help teachers on a more holistic journey towards improved performance.

Carrie Saint Freedman is a freelance journalist. For further information on coaching see Effective Coaching: Lessons from the Coach’s Coach by Myles Downey (2003) and ‘The neuroscience of leadership’ webinar by David Rock and Dr Jeffrey Schwartz at www.strategy-business.com/webinars

Using ICT to enhance learning and teaching for able pupils in mathematics

When technology first arrived in schools in the 1980s it started off in maths departments with spreadsheets and Logo. It was seen as a natural marriage. Later on, as there were more developments in ICT to support different areas of the curriculum, maths fell behind. For a long time it was word processing and multimedia which dominated the curriculum but with interactive whiteboards it has become easier to show examples and make maths dynamic.

Adrian Oldknow (emeritus professor at the University of Chichester) believes that technology lets learners approach mathematics in ways that are just not possible with the traditional tools of compasses, pens and paper. ‘Start with very basic activities. Do the same activities using technology and you very quickly appreciate that you get further into the mathematics and can unlock children’s inquisitiveness for maths in a way that you just can’t do with a traditional textbook approach. Teachers put in false ceilings, not deliberately, but because it is as far as teachers think learners can reach in mathematics. With technology, ceilings get blown away because children themselves start to ask the interesting questions and want to find out. In my view it really puts maths in the power of the learners, rather than it being the domain of the teachers.’

Graphic calculators
Jon Skinner is a great enthusiast of using technology in maths and recently introduced handheld graphic calculators as a teaching tool in his classroom. ‘The technology allowed the students to feel that they were working independently. More importantly, presenting data in different ways helps students to develop their relational understanding and enhances their overall understanding of mathematical concepts.’ Jon is one of a group of maths teachers who has been inspired by T3, an international organisation that offers free courses and materials. T3 events bring together teachers, trainers, researchers and curriculum developers to exchange ideas about use of ICT in the classroom.

Jon teaches at Hele’s School in Plymouth where a previously used class set of graphing calculators had got left in the cupboard, overtaken by other things going on at the time. ‘Then a physics teacher showed us the new TI-Nspire and I slowly started to use them for my own calculations. We borrowed a class set and used them for two terms. They have changed maths teaching. The pupils are not sitting down in the class while we say, “Let’s do this example, oh you’ve got the concept.’ They can actually experience mathematics. It’s more kinaesthetic, more tactile.’

Continuing professional development
Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is an essential part of developing the use of technology in schools. If we compare the private sector with education, we begin to see why technological developments are not always well embedded in schools and colleges. When a company adopts a new technology, they set aside almost as much money for the professional development of the employees as they spend on the product itself. Headteachers need to develop that mentality, and set aside money for ensuring their staff understand what is available and how to use it.

Andy Kemp, head of mathematics at Taunton School, agrees that CPD is a vital ingredient: ‘I handed out the graphing calculator to staff six months or so before introducing it to the students as I wanted to give them time to familiarise themselves with it: I felt this would remove the pressure to be instantly fluent. We were also given some training by the company who provided the resources. Some staff engaged really well. One example was a teacher in his 60s. Within just six months of using the technology he was a convert. This is a man who taught without technology for most of his career.’

Instant feedback
Conventional methods where the teacher takes books away to mark might mean a three-day gap before pupils find out if they were right. With technology, they can have instant feedback, so pupils recognise where they went wrong and why. Sometimes it gives them the chance to complete the task again so they can truly learn from their own mistakes. Some gifted pupils who are reluctant to put their hand up seem to do better with maths and be more productive when the answers are shared with a computer rather than their classmates.

Andy Kemp feels that interactive whiteboards have improved confidence. ‘As soon as their answers are on paper it is permanent, so they want to be sure the answer is absolutely correct, whereas whiteboards take away that permanency.’ Technology introduces the idea of a work in progress, something which can be edited. ‘Learning should be creative and, for that to happen, students need to feel comfortable in their environment, to explore their work and incorporate trial and error. Using a handheld graphing calculator, one of my Y8 mathematics students spotted a relationship in Pascal’s Triangle that I had never even noticed before. The device gave this student the confidence to explore the maths and consequently he made a discovery for himself.’

References and resources

Sal McKeown is an educational consultant and freelance writer