Gifted and Talented Archives - Teaching Expertise

School Governor

The work of Ofsted comes under scrutiny from the Commons Education Select Committee

Nick Holt looks at the future for extended services in the new education landscape

In a new report, Fulfilling potential, the business role in education, the UK’s largest employers’ body, the CBI, welcomed the coalition government’s reforms for expanding the number of academies and enabling new schools to be set up, which it considers should lead to greater innovation in the classroom

The new Department for Education demonstrates the unfamiliar look of coalition politics with Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather taking on the role of Minister of State for Children and Families under the new Conservative Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove

A recent Ofsted report has highlighted the role of governors in evaluating CPD. David Gordon examines the report and other sources of information that will be valuable to governors in this task

The long-awaited report of the Ministerial Working Group on School Governance comments on the performance of governing bodies and makes recommendations for change. David Gordon examines its findings

A new report has found that well deployed teaching assistants help raise a school’s attainment. David Gordon looks at the details

Outstanding e-safety provision requires clear leadership vision and whole-school involvement. David Gordon looks at new recommendations from Ofsted

What do the four main parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green) have to say about education?

As Bike to School week approaches, David Gordon looks at what governors can do to make sure their school is ‘bike friendly’

Two recent Ofsted reports highlight the characteristics of schools that have excelled against the odds. David Gordon examines the reports and looks at what governors can do to help their schools achieve and sustain excellence

As the government warns schools to start planning for a period of austerity, David Gordon rounds up essential information to help your school prepare for the future

As Ofsted urges schools to make sustainability a top priority in their improvement plans, David Gordon looks at what governors can do to help their school go green

School business managers may sometimes be called upon to deal with staff behaviour that is causing problems – this week we look at how to deal effectively with this thorny issue

David Gordon looks at the problem of fraudulent admissions applications and provides a set of common ruses to look out for

School governors have been told that they can expect to be at the forefront of the government’s latest drive to improve behaviour in schools

This issue we take a look at ways of bringing governors into the fold when it comes to CPD and improving professional skills

Modular changes to A-Levels and the introduction of diplomas are just a few changes that have come to the secondary curriculum since September 2008. David Marriott offers a related guide for governors

Joan Sallis opposes the removal of ‘untrained volunteers’, such as parents and members of the community, from governing bodies – or the attempt to ‘professionalise’ them

Do we really need governors? Roger Smith considers the governing role of this seemingly random assortment of stakeholders

A no-nonsense whole school approach to behaviour can be led from the top, says deputy headteacher David Morley, who here shares tips on how

There is value in building a working link between school governors and school business managers says Crispin Andrews, who strongly advises bringing them into the senior leadership team

It is important for gifted and talented (G&T) coordinators and leading teachers to garner the support of governors. G&T Update offers suggestions as to how and why governors can be an ally to those working with G&T

How can a new team of governors work together to make sure that their efforts produce the most effective results possible? Joan Sallis believes a good team of governors needs to be managed from the start

Author: Edited by David Gordon

School Governor Update delivers news, professional tips and advice for school governors. The perfect companion for members of the school governing body and school leadership team to keep updated on issues most relevant to governors, with a strong editorial focus and digestible in-depth case studies

As part of Primary Leadership Focus, Jane Golightly considers the important role that governors play in a primary school, and affirms the importance of a good school-governor partnership

How can the process for meeting the government’s Financial Management Standard be made more manageable for school governors? Lindsey Wharmby offers some tips

Many schools have rethought their exclusion policies since the sixth day exclusion law was introduced in September 2007. Eileen Field explains the options now surrounding school exclusion

Joan Sallis looks back at the successes and obstacles she experienced during a year as a primary school governor, and considers the one ahead

Do you know your way around educational employment law? Does your school’s pay and remuneration package meet or exceed minimum standards? Tamara Ludlow gives a legal overview of essential information for both leadership teams and staff

We’ve been collecting your stories about the inspiring and encouraging experiences you’ve had at work during 2008. Here is a collection of the leadership and management themed responses you sent to the question, What has been your most positive experience at work this year?

What are your responsibilities and obligations towards pupils at your school who are disabled? Mark Blois discusses the relevant legislation and explains what you need to know and do

Michael Segal looks at a legal case where the parents’ religious beliefs demanded that their children have home schooling

Schools that are properly prepared for employment tribunal hearings can minimise cost and maximise their likelihood of success, writes Tamara Ludlow

Does your governing body help your school remain accountable, and therefore more efficient? Stephen Adamson looks at how this should be done

In a move away from strict liability in terms of accidents at school, the courts have said that they are sometimes nobody’s fault. Kris Lines explains

With the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) due to launch at the end of 2009, Chris Webb-Jenkins takes a look at the practical implications of the complete overhaul of our vetting and barring system

A headteacher and a governor from Havering report on their experiences of amalgamating an infant school with the neighbouring junior school

Should we be encouraging school business managers and bursars to progress into headship? Ruth Bradbury, who speaks on financial management at schools, voices her thoughts on the subject, as do three School Financial Management readers

Mark Chaplin shares insight into how primary headteachers can design a questionnaire for parents that will help them carry out effective self-evaluation at their primary school

Your teaching staff must have the health and physical capacity to teach, but in assessing this you must make sure you comply with disability discrimination rules, says Yvonne Spencer

Whose opinion takes precedence in a dispute over provision, asks Michael Segal – parent or local authority?

Are students and student voice involved in strategic decision making at your school? ‘Learning conversations’ at Rivington and Blackrod High School, near Bolton, means that they are, explains Ingrid Cox

Is this the last year for SATs? Sam Derby discusses a possible end to SATs, and looks at the opinion that the exams are “too stressful” for young pupils read more

If you work with children or vulnerable adults, there are difficult decisions regarding when to disclose sensitive information. Chris Webb-Jenkins examines the impact of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 on this issue

Admissions authorities and statutory appeal panels can avoid potential litigation from parents by using tactical decision making, says Yvonne Spencer read more

Governors have a great chance to improve pupils opportunities for taking part in physical activity, with the government’s school sport strategy read more

Michael Segal explores a school’s legal position in implementing a reinstatement order, and how far they are obliged to enforce it

If a child makes a vague allegation is it OK to ask questions? How should an allegation against a member of staff be treated? Jenni Whitehead discusses some of the concerns facing managers when coping with these issues

Chris Webb-Jenkins walks you through the new vetting and barring regime, which comes into effect in autumn 2008

Gifted & Talented Update

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Gifted & Talented Update newsletter keeps you up to date with the latest national and regional G&T initiatives, in addition to giving you the opportunity to learn from examples of good G&T practice and read guidance from your peers working with gifted and talented students

Published 10 times a year Gifted & Talented Update is a unique resource written for G&T Coordinators and leading teachers to support you in your role. It provides readers with all that is new, recommended, interesting, controversial and useful for professionals with an interest in the management and development of G&T provision.

If you are a G&T coordinator or a leading teacher, it is essential that you keep up to date with new initiatives and guidance. You are responsible for taking forward your school, or cluster of schools, in providing high quality education for gifted and talented children and young people, this is where Gifted & Talented Update can help.

This easy to digest publication will support you by allowing you to:

Share the experience of your peers through case studies and interviews that highlight examples of best practice

Keep up to date with the latest research and policy developments – we bring you the facts and report on the latest professional research and best practice in schools

Learn from the experience of G&T specialists and researchers – read their top tips and suggestions for real improvements you can make in your school

Share ideas from your region, school and classroom – we give you the opportunity to share your own knowledge, experiences and self-evaluation techniques with other professionals

Keep in touch with the work of other G&T coordinators – many articles are written by teachers who have real experience of the work involved

Find out about valuable resources and websites.

Here is what a few of our subscribers have to say:

“An up to date, informative and inspiring read full of practical and thought provoking articles.”Janet Gaskell, Teacher Adviser, Lancashire LA

“The research is cutting edge and we have used many of the ideas in it to good effect for our children’s learning.” David Hennessey, Headteacher, SS Peter and Paul RC Primary School

“Filled with interesting case studies and ideas which I have used or adapted in my own school. It has been particularly helpful for stimulating ideas for stretching G&T students.” Liz Eves, G&T Coordinator, Broadwater School

To experience for yourself the benefits a subscription to Gifted & Talented Update can bring, why not subscribe now risk free? Your subscription can be cancelled at any time, simply return the invoice you recieve to us marked ‘cancel’ and a full refund is given on all un-mailed issues.

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Making personalised learning a reality

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The Personalisation by Pieces (PbyP) system, a personalised learning scheme to give learners control over their own progression, is being used by forty schools around the UK. Its designer, former deputy head Dan Buckley, shares some of its achievements

For the past 18 years, I have been attempting to find ways of allowing learners to gain more control over their own progression. In 1993, as head of a science and technology faculty in an average-sized secondary school, I worked out ways to share assessment criteria with students and their parents. This had a dramatic impact on the departmental results, raising them from 35% A*-C up to 67% A*-C.
As a deputy head in 2000, I extended this model to a framework that supported children across all subjects; and finally, in 2004, the model helped children in my school to achieve among the highest value-added scores nationally. This earned me an audience with David Miliband to look at how a similar system could be rolled out more widely.

Miliband suggested that to replicate nationally the results I had achieved in my own school would require a system that could be adopted gradually, regardless of the starting point of the school. Over the past three years I have been breaking the process itself into ‘pieces’, so that a school can take on as much as they are able and then grow the project piece by piece at a pace that is appropriate for them.

I released the system for sale in April last year and since then it has been described as an ‘outstanding feature’ in two Ofsted reports, as ‘better than Bebo’ by the children, and ‘the future of skills assessment’ by teachers. It has also been included in exemplar practice by BECTA, QCA, Microsoft, Futurelab and even the national BETT awards.

What is the PbyP learning cycle?

There is a lot of discussion about lifelong learning, but what actually are the aspects of learning that help us to continually improve throughout our lives? And what kind of experiences should we be giving children to improve their chances of being lifelong learners? I identified a learning cycle that describes learning from pre-school to adult, and have described it as follows:

Setting yourself challenges: personal goals and targets are often inspired by other people because they are easier if you know what success will look like. This could be learning to walk, through to your professional development targets.
Enlisting the help of others: mentors of all kinds can encourage you to go for it or support you when you have taken on too much. They can also help you when you need someone to push you and give you some motivation.
Making use of opportunities: whatever target you have set yourself, you need to have the opportunities available so you can practise and succeed.
Collecting evidence: people instinctively make sure someone takes a photo when they do a bungee jump – it isn’t just for the benefit of exam boards that we like to store evidence of our achievements. But we object if the evidence-gathering becomes more important or time-consuming than the achievement.
Assessment: this ranges from telling someone about it and getting a ‘well done’, right up to a formal qualification. It involves others in your learning, to confirm, praise and balance your achievements
Starting the cycle again: having achieved or not achieved your targets, you can decide to try again or try something different.

School should provide learners of all ages with opportunities and structures that help to strengthen this learning muscle. PbyP takes each stage of the cycle and builds up tools around it to help the child be successful.

The cycle, part 1: Setting targets

PbyP takes competencies that are traditionally quite hard to measure and breaks them up into nine target statements. For example, the skill of ‘presenting to an audience’ could have a level 1 statement such as ‘Stand up and do a show-and-tell to the people in your class’. A level 9 statement might be ‘present to 1,000 of your peers and be evaluated as excellent by more than 50% of them’.

Both these statements and the seven between them are designed to be understood by the target audience. For this reason they are not – nor could ever be – a full description of all the skills involved in ‘presenting to an audience’. However, they do allow the learner to engage with the first step in a ‘skills ladder’ that will take them all the way up to level 9 if they wish and are able. We have broken up the new Personal Learning and Thinking Skills from the QCA into 24 ladders, so at any time there are 24 targets for children to choose from, each representing their own personal next steps.

These skills ladders could be printed out and posted on the walls, printed into children’s planners or part of a paper-based portfolio, and this is indeed how a few of the 40 PbyP schools have adopted the first ‘piece’. But the process becomes much more powerful when ICT is used. Using the web-based version of PbyP, a child can not only access all the targets from any location and any device, they can also be inspired by the achievements of others. This is because behind every target is an ever-increasing collection of work from other learners on the system, who have successfully met this target.

The cycle, part 2: Assessing evidence

Children currently in PbyP are submitting an average of three pieces of evidence a week towards their targets, even during the holidays, so where is it all going? The philosophy behind PbyP is around empowering learners to be in control of learning, so the logical place to send the work is to other learners in PbyP who have already achieved this particular target.

Eighty per cent of the work currently submitted by primary-age children is assessed in this way, as is 65% of the work of secondary-age students. The accuracy of such peer assessment has astounded everyone, as has the speed with which children respond and the considered responses they give.

Those not assessed by other children (mostly because there are no children who have yet achieved the higher levels to enable them to assess in this way) have been caught by our rather oversensitive internal security systems and are awaiting verification from their teacher that they have done nothing wrong. Remarkably, we have had only five cases of children actually doing anything wrong, including copying, since we started. The expectation was that this figure would be much higher – which probably shows that the OECD research revealing that UK teachers had the lowest level of trust in their pupils in the 21 countries investigated is sadly truer than we appreciated when designing the system.

How does this improve learning?

Once learning is unleashed it is difficult to predict the ways in which children take it. In the Marches Secondary School they have used PbyP as a homework replacement, so that KS4 children can self-direct their learning but teachers can check that they are making progress. In Pearl Hyde Community Primary School, children have used it to gain accreditation for independently managing the school pond.

In reality, each of the 40 schools has approached using PbyP in different ways and each is demonstrating progression. The use has varied from groups as small as five students working with a teacher, through to whole-school implementations. It has resulted in increased work rates, and even holiday working from groups that are low-achieving and poorly motivated, as well as some outstanding co-development with students that are gifted and talented.

Conclusive evidence has yet to become available because the system is too young; but in 39 of the 40 schools, use, accuracy and quality of work has improved since implementation and continues to do so.

Anecdotal evidence from schools is that parental involvement in learning is increasing, and the proportion of evidence sourced by children from clubs and events outside school is growing. All of this points to greater engagement and involvement in learning, which I have every confidence will show up in increased examination performance. Schools that are examination-driven will be hard to convince of the benefits of 21st-century learning skills, and in such schools it is true that PbyP submission and peer assessment tend to happen much more in the time after and before school rather than in school hours. However, as James Blomfield, ICT coordinator at Capel-le-Ferne Primary School in Folkestone, Kent, commented: ‘I’ve never seen them ask for extra homework before.’

The role of teachers in PbyP

A profession that cuts its links with research is bound to start developing practice that actually runs counter to what it is trying to achieve. The research evidence confirms my belief that teachers must be role models for genuine learning. Children need to see teachers reflecting on their practice, setting themselves targets, getting feedback and improving. If, as in Finland, teachers were required to engage with small-scale action research each year, this would serve to model these behaviours and would provide easier connection between students and teachers when having learning conversations.

It is unfortunate that one of the by-products of a highly structured National Curriculum is the decrease in innovation by teachers, which in turn makes the slightly more chaotic requirements of personalised learning harder for schools to implement. Therefore, one of the key requirements of personalisation is to provide greater structure for teachers through frameworks that provide them with clear scope for personal innovation, simultaneously providing clear monitoring methods both for them to reflect on their own successes and for senior managers to check that individuals are making progress. Teachers using PbyP have already begun to report increased excitement and personal innovation.

Getting a school started with PbyP

Most schools have at least one teacher who both feels passionately about providing children with lifelong competencies and has a desire to personally innovate and reflect on their own practice. Give PbyP to such teachers – and anything from five children to work with – and watch the development piece by piece.

We have seen the same patterns of adoption occurring in every phase of education, with all abilities and all age ranges, in every institution that has started using PbyP. With the launch of the competency-based new secondary curriculum, the introduction of diplomas and the review of the primary curriculum, we should see the importance of competencies tracking grow nationally. It will be fascinating to watch the impact in PbyP as competencies begin to take on their rightful status as the core purpose of lifelong education.

Case Study: The Five Islands School, Isles of Scilly

The Five Islands School is a voluntarily-controlled CofE all-age school that is spread across five separate buildings on four islands. Headteacher Andrew Penman wanted to provide an afternoon each week that could be used to deliver skills-based learning. Rather than do this through a taught course such as ‘thinking skills’ or the RSA ‘Opening Minds’, he wanted to offer a wide range of opportunities that would make the most of the fact that the school has children from pre-school to age 16. He decided to use PbyP as the framework around which to build all these activities.

Initially, he surveyed staff and students to see what kind of activities people would be able to offer. This uncovered a whole range of hidden talents and interests in the staff, as well as bringing in suggestions for using local expertise from the community.

Liz Turner, a teacher at the school, then covered the logistics such as how many children each activity would accommodate, rooms needed, etc; and, most importantly, what skills the activity could potentially deliver. Teachers were given printed versions of the skills ladders and asked to indicate which specific targets they felt their activity would meet.

Liz gave every teacher a PowerPoint that had a structure on it but did not restrict their ideas. The basic structure was:

Week 1 – share the ladder statement(s) that you are hoping to deliver with the children.
Week 3 – review progress against the statements, using an example of evidence collected by one of the children
Week 6 – final reflection on whether or not the activity really did allow children to evidence these statements.

Activities that could not be linked to a ladder statement were not pursued.

Setting it up

PbyP was launched with staff in a staff meeting. Liz and fellow-teacher Ben Probert signed their names as managers of the system, and all other staff were encouraged to put their email addresses into PbyP so they could be alerted if a child in their tutor group needed support.

The school brought me in so that, together with Liz and Ben, we were able to launch PbyP with all the children from age eight to 16 (the KS1 and pre-school versions of PbyP weren’t available at this stage). This involved finding times when children could have access to a computer, either as pairs or one each, giving them usernames and passwords, and asking them to download the step-by-step learner guide at www.pbyp.co.uk/PC_guides.html.

Year 5 to Year 11 students took around 15 minutes to familiarise themselves with the system, allowing tutor times to be used in some cases.

Liz produced a booklet for children giving information about each course, what age range and skill levels it was suitable for, what skill statements it hoped to meet and which teacher or pupils would be giving it. She then decided to ask Year 11 to be the first to choose their courses, followed by Year 10, and so on, explaining that this project would be running for many years and everyone would eventually get the benefit of the full choice the Year 11s had had this time.

Having signed up lists for each activity, these were typed up and circulated to the staff who would be doing the course, in time for the first activities to start the following September.

Rewarding results began to emerge immediately. Having signed students up in the summer term ready for the September start, we were surprised to find that considerable quantities of work were submitted in the summer holidays. The children were using home and leisure experiences to evidence progression in core competencies. By September, almost all the students had not only submitted work but also assessed the work of others – and most work had been done after school, between 5pm and 9pm.

Growing competencies

After six months, the use profile has begun to change in a number of key ways. Firstly, submission of work has increasingly moved into lesson times, indicating either that the status of competencies has moved to a position where it is encouraged in curriculum time, or that students have found more sophisticated ways of being subversive! Secondly, the types of files used have begun to move away from being merely documents, towards more use of multimedia to evidence work. Finally, the amount of work submitted each week has continued to grow, dispelling the ‘honeymoon period’ concerns that accompany any ICT-related project.

A Qualification For Life Skills Development

// by Admin

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 behaviors for learning (B4L) to the range of extended practice encouraged through the Excellence in Cities programs – 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 programs 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 program. 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 program, but delivery was left to supply and cover teachers known to the students and the school.

Through workforce remodeling, 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 realized 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, utilizing 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 realization 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 program 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 programs 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 note keepers 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 standardizing 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 crystallize 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 center at ‘standardization 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 program 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 centralized bank of filing cabinets to store completed work in an organized 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 time consuming 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 realize 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 neighbors, contributing to charity events, helping at local youth centers, 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 standardization meetings organized 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 re-designation)
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

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

// by Admin

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

Keeping G&T education relevant to 21st century skills

// by Admin

Deborah Eyre suggests how we can prepare G&T children for the many new career and employment options in today’s society

We are all aware that the pace of change in society generally is accelerating and the future will be very different from the present. The catalysts for change are many, but include: continuing technological change; the impact of globalisation; changes to ways of working; the impact of demographic trends; changing lifestyles; and economic prosperity.

It’s very difficult (some might say impossible) to predict the future, but by examining ways in which change is happening now, it is possible for pundits to make some forecasts. Generally, it is agreed that in order to function well, people will need to acquire new knowledge and skills and also to embrace different attitudes and ways of working so that they can adapt to change.

Since one of the functions of education is to help to prepare children and young people for working life, education must also change in its expectations and its methodologies. England is not unique in needing to consider the alignment between its education system and 21st-century skills needs: this is a requirement for all countries.

‘To create a talent pool of more, better-qualified employees, governments will need to make policy decisions to invest in education and vocational and technical training. This will need to be done in the context of bringing educational curriculums and training and development programs more closely in line with the country’s economic requirements.’ Manpower Inc (2007)

In this country, Leitch (2006) encapsulates our response to this agenda thus:

‘In the 21st century, our natural resource is our people – and their potential is both untapped and vast. Skills will unlock that potential. The prize for our country will be enormous – higher productivity, the creation of wealth and social justice.’ (p1)

Skills agenda

So the objective of the ‘skills’ agenda in schools and colleges, is to increase the number of those attaining world-class levels of skill and, at the same time, to expand the range of skills that are both developed and valued; this in turn, leading to increases in economic prosperity. In the pursuit of a better overall skill level is the expectation that literacy and numeracy standards will improve and that no child shall fail to perform at an adequate level – a raising of minimum thresholds of achievement. However, this is only first base on the skills agenda.

Significantly for gifted education, this agenda also includes a focus on the volume of those achieving higher levels of attainment – world-class levels of skill – as the overall skill level of the population is seen as determining gross domestic product (GDP).

In 2003 the DfES reported that: ‘Research shows that 80 per cent of the 1.7 million new jobs which are expected to be created by the end of the decade will be in occupations which normally recruit those with higher education qualifications.’

This is a startling statistic. It implies that every school will have significant numbers of students going forward to higher education and that those students will study both traditional and non-traditional HE courses. It also implies that non-university vocational training will be pitched at a high level. So, at the very least, in the current ‘register-based’ G&T approach, we might expect that every student on the register should go on to study for a degree (or undertake a specialist training programme which is degree equivalent). Anything less is failure.

More generally, how do schools and colleges secure this uplift in world-class skills? It is not just a case of expanding the curriculum offer to encompass vocational diplomas, although they have an important place in widening the domains in which students can excel. It also means helping more children and young people to reach the standards that were previously seen as the territory of the few (those recognised as gifted and talented), and helping them to achieve this ‘exceptional performance’ across the full range of qualifications. Just as good diet, strong training regimes and sports psychology has helped many athletes to smash Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile record, so with a good educational diet, effective work-habits and self-belief, many more students will be able to achieve world-class skill levels in both academic and vocational areas.

Of course the question is how, in practice, to achieve this outcome and without doubt personalisation is the key. Last month I wrote about providing the ‘G&T road system’ so that individuals can construct their own unique learning journey. A further challenge is to extend that road system beyond traditional territory and out to new domains.

For those of you who are shaping policy in gifted and talented education in your school I ask the following questions:

Does your G&T policy ensure that the ‘G&T road system’ exists in all subjects including vocational ones?
How do you monitor whether increasing numbers of students are achieving the top levels in all areas?
Is your current G&T register fit for purpose?

I began by suggesting that change is occurring rapidly and threatening to take education by surprise: as G&T coordinator, you need to stay ahead of the game!

References

DfES (2003) The Future of Higher Education. London: The Stationary Office
Leitch (2006) Leitch Review of Skills: Prosperity for All in the Global Economy – World Class Skills, London: The Stationary Office
Manpower Inc (2007) Confronting the Talent Crunch, Milwaukee: USA