Supporting Improving Primary Schools

The Role of Schools and LEAs in Raising Standards

Paul Lincoln, Geoff Southworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135698263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawn from the experience of the Essex Primary School Improvement programme, this book shows how primary schools in the county have improved their standards subsequent to OFSTED inspection. It explores the role of the LEA in supporting schools and their efforts to improve. It also looks at the collaborative relationship that LEAs and schools can form, and the implications for school leadership and for students. The book also sheds light on issues of consultancy, information and data handling, and evaluating school improvement.

Part 1
Overview and Main Findings

Chapter 1
Overview of the EPSI Programme

Paul Lincoln and Geoff Southworth

Introduction

In this chapter we will set out the background and rationale for the Essex Primary School Improvement (EPSI) programme. The chapter is divided into five sections. In the first section we discuss the context in which the programme was conceived, planned and implemented. In the second, we outline the content of the programme, setting out the programme aims and how the project was organized. Included in this section is a review of the research questions we sought to address during the life of the programme as well as at its conclusion. Following on from this in the third section we describe the LEA focus and, in the fourth section, the anticipated benefits. In the last section we briefly review whether the programme actually helped us to address the research questions and whether the expected benefits accrued.

The Context

The national context continues to change. From 1988 through to 1997, Conservative governments introduced legislation and put in place a set of arrangements that established schools as separate units, largely managing their own affairs and competing against each other for clients. It introduced accountability by establishing the National Curriculum, a system of regular inspections undertaken to a standard framework, and the publication of league tables based on test and examination results. Their view was that these processes in themselves would make public the performance of individual schools, and thereby bring about school improvement. From May 1997, a Labour government with priorities of ‘education, education, education’ has continued the drive to raise standards of achievement with a regime of plans and target-setting at national, LEA and school levels. LEAs have been given a clearer role as an operational arm of central government to monitor performance and intervene in ‘inverse proportion to success’.

School improvement, therefore, is a major priority in education. Though pupils’ learning has always been a priority for educators, the current emphasis upon school improvement, in contrast to the notion of school development, suggests a more specific and outcome-orientated concern. Currently there is broad agreement that school improvement means the raising of pupils’ achievements, enhancing the quality of pupils’ learning, developing the quality of teaching and increasing the effectiveness of schools. Understood in these terms, school improvement includes a strong focus on pupils’ learning outcomes, as well as on the processes of teaching and learning.

While we now have some reasonably clear ideas about the characteristics associated with more effective schools, the picture is less clear about how schools actually get to be like that. Two of the more influential factors in improving schools are the quality of teaching and the leadership provided by senior staff. It is also clear that establishing the organizational conditions that support innovation and development is important (Ainscow, Hopkins, Southworth and West, 1994a). Evidence from a number of studies demonstrates the importance of creating and sustaining ‘moving’ schools (e.g. Fullan, 1993; Fullan and Hargreaves, 1992; Hopkins, Ainscow and West, 1994; Nias, Southworth and Campbell, 1992; Rosenholtz, 1989). In moving schools a number of important workplace characteristics enable staff to manage successfully their improvement efforts and to learn with and from one another. Moving schools also appear able to draw upon external help and advice.

Yet, generally, much of our knowledge and understanding of how schools improve has not been systematically developed or updated in terms of the contemporary scene. Previous studies of school effectiveness and improvement have tended to work with those schools that already have the motivation and capacity to improve. Much of the emphasis now is on how to improve poorly performing schools with little or no capacity to move forward. The strategies required for these schools are likely to be very different. If our understanding of school improvement is somewhat unclear, it is further clouded by uncertainty about how recent changes in education have altered the nature and character of school improvement.

In addition, with a few exceptions such as ‘Schools Matter’ (Mortimore et al., 1988), much of what we know about school effectiveness and improvement is based on secondary school experience. At a point in time when the major challenge around raising achievement levels focuses on primary schools, there is little research on primary school improvement to inform and/or challenge policy and practice. It is important to understand how primary schools improve, because they are significantly different from secondary schools. Indeed, developing the quality of teaching in primary schools, with their commitment to class teaching, may be a quite different matter to enhancing the teaching of subject specialists in secondary schools.

Outline of the Programme

Such questions and concerns prompted the EPSI programme. The EPSI programme was initiated in September 1995, after many months of discussion, preparation and planning within the LEA, and between the LEA and colleagues at the University of Cambridge School of Education (UCSE).

The EPSI programme was a three-year-long initiative. It started in September 1995 and ended in the summer of 1998. The programme was designed as a collaborative venture involving staff from 22 primary and junior schools, the LEA’s school development advisers (SDAs), senior educational psychologists, team leaders from the special needs support service, and lecturers from UCSE. All who were involved supported and simultaneously researched the process of primary school improvement. During the first year, LEA staff completed a programme led by UCSE lecturers focusing on research on school improvement, which provided a forum for team building. For each school, two LEA staff known as the ‘programme pair’ provided external support throughout the project. The pairs were clustered by geographical areas to enable broader teams to work together to provide support to one another and, sometimes, to encourage closer working between two or more schools.

The programme aims were to:

1. enable schools to develop strategies for improving the quality of teaching and learning provided for all pupils;
2. increase the LEA’s capacity to support schools as they seek to improve the quality of education that they provide;
3. increase understanding of the processes and outcomes of school improvement.

For each of these aims, targets and success indicators were identified (see Appendix 1), and project data were related to each of the targets. The data were used to inform schools’ future development, document the process of school improvement and explore the relative effectiveness of different measures in describing the process and outcomes. We defined school improvement in terms of pupils’ learning outcomes. Using the data formatively therefore involved staff in schools in considering what the data suggested about effective strategies for improving pupils’ learning. Schools were required to identify a ‘focus’ area, related to one or more key issues identified in their inspection reports, which addressed aspects of teaching and learning to pursue as their main improvement target. All 22 participating schools were recently inspected prior to participating in the programme, and the programme focused on Key Stage 2. Therefore, the schools that participated were either primary (JMI) or junior schools.

The programme established a Pupil Data Working Party to coordinate the collation of data. The working party comprised staff from the LEA, UCSE and a seconded headteacher. The working party was responsible for developing a strategy to encourage teachers individually and collectively to focus on pupil progress and act on the information on outcomes. In addition, the working party considered ways of evaluating the impact of the programme on the pupils, and of developing a longer-term strategy for evaluating school improvement. School staff, the programme teams from the LEA, and the university lecturers carried out data collection.

A Steering Group, which met regularly, managed the EPSI programme. The steering group included the Director of Education, the Principal Adviser (School Development), the Principal Educational Psychologist, the Senior Manager of Special Needs Support staff, Principal Inspector and two staff from UCSE. All members of the steering group were involved in analysing the summative data from the programme. These data included:

• the perceptions of staff in school, school governors and the programme teams as to the value and pertinence of the programme to them;
• staff and programme teams’ views on whether the schools they worked in or with had improved;
• pupil learning outcome data, collected in January 1998, which were contrasted with the same types of data collected at the start of the programme;
• teacher assessment data; and
• pupil perceptions.

As has been made clear elsewhere (see Sebba and Loose, 1997; Southworth, 1997), a number of different types of data were collected and analysed so that the processes and outcomes of the schools’ improvement efforts could be examined through a number of lines of enquiry and from a range of different perspectives (LEA, school staff, pupils, governors, university lecturers/researchers). In other words, the EPSI programme had many sources of evidence that could be used to examine and judge school improvement, and used multiple perspectives on the outcomes of these schools’ improvement efforts, the LEA’s support for the schools, and the quality of the insights the research strand of the programme had to offer.

From the outset, EPSI was a research and development programme. At a time when the value of much educational research is being strongly and rightly criticized because of its lack of impact on teacher practice, we believed that the model we adopted would help us to create an effective bridge between research and practice.

The programme deliberately aimed to develop:

• schools, by helping staff to enhance pupils’ achievements;
• a data-driven approach to school improvement, which included action planning, establishing a clear focus, and target setting;
• teachers as researchers through their collection and analysis of Key Stage 2 pupil data; and
• LEA staff in terms of their understanding of what is currently known about the processes of school improvement, primary phase issues and using outcomes measures.

A vigorous debate was encouraged throughout the programme within the steering group, the teams of LEA staff, and the schools themselves, which brought about continuous learning.

The focus upon primary schools and, in particular, Key Stage 2 pupils, arose from a lack of interest in this phase of education in recent years. Though interest has been growing in baseline assessment and value added in Key Stage 1 and in the secondary sector, little work appears to be focused on Key Stage 2, yet it is here that recent inspection reports have identified some causes for concern.

The programme enabled us to investigate the following issues and questions as they related to the schools:

1. What use do the schools make of pupil and school data?
   Each school has collected starting point or programme entry data which include: pupil perceptions, reading data, pupils’ writing data, a school conditions rating scale, as well as the OFSTED inspection report and the school’s action plan.
2. Whether and how such data lead to enhanced enquiry and reflection among the teaching staff?
   Are staff, individually and collectively, looking more carefully at pupils’ progress, achievement and learning gains? If they are, what are the consequences of this evidence-based enquiry and action research? If they are not, what are the reasons and/or explanations for this inaction?
3. What are the characteristics of the schools’ action plans?
   How well developed and sophisticated are the schools’ approaches to action planning, target setting, the framing of success criteria, the implementing of classroom developments, and the monitoring and reviewing of progress?
4. What emphasis is placed upon improving pedagogy?
   How do class teachers and senior staff interpret their evidencebased analyses of pupils’ learning? Are connections made between what the pupils appear to be achieving and the pedagogic actions of teachers? In other words, are discussions about pupils’ learning related to teachers’ classroom practices? What monitoring of teaching is taking place in these schools?
5. Has the OFSTED inspection motivated staff in these schools?
   What has been the teachers’ response to the OFSTED inspection report and the main findings? How do the teachers describe its influence upon themselves and the school’s development?
6. What other significant features emerge?
   While we could anticipate some issues, we needed to leave scope for other issues to emerge. Although from the outset we could label some of these features, the precise nature of how they may play out in the schools was unpredictable. There may be some important school ‘givens’ that may need to be explored. These givens are characteristics previously established and rooted in the school, which may enable, or impede, the success of an individual school’s improvement plan (e.g. experience and qualifications of staff; existing school policies, in particular, whole-school policies for teaching and learning, or policies for monitoring/use of subject coordinators; use of time; inter-staff communications, e.g. meetings, working groups; a school’s previous experience in managing change; stability of staff group/turnover of teachers; the existence and presence of a ‘culture of achievement’ in the school).

By using these six focuses, we intended to develop a start-point picture of each school, to record and track what happened inside each of these schools, to gauge the pace a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Overview and Main Findings
• Part 2: School Insights
• Part 3: LEA Insights
• Part 4: Wider Issues and Conclusions
• Appendix 1: Programme Aims, Targets and Success Criteria
• Appendix 2: Common Measures Agreed Across All EPSI Programme Schools
• Appendix 3: Pupil Perception Interview
• Appendix 4: EPSI Workshop Programmes
• Appendix 5: The IQEA Six School Conditions
• Notes On Contributors
• References