Pretty much every school has some form of tracking system. But why? What are tracking systems for? 🧵 We can trace back the history of these systems to a single requirement: to generate data to satisfy the needs of external agencies. We wanted numbers that went up and turned green so the Ofsted inspector or LA advisor would go away and leave us alone.

Recently I've been tweeting, blogging, and talking about 'age-related expectations'. What it means and what we - and Ofsted - think it means. Here's a thread I posted in January:

https://twitter.com/jpembroke/status/1620177907086946305?s=20

and here's a link to my blog post sigplus.co.uk/2023/03/age-re…

I’m about to watch this super-subversive TV show about British wildlife presented by some leftie troublemaker named David. Uh oh. David just referred to deforestation. Could be trouble here.

A statistically significant result ≠ educationally significant. It just suggests that the difference (eg from national) did not happen by chance (although it may have done). What caused it is anyone’s guess: demographics, mobility, age. Not necessarily ‘school standards’. There are factors in the school’s control and there are factors outside of the school’s control. A school’s results is a measure of all these things and it is impossible to isolate the bit that points to the school effect on pupils’ learning.

It amazes me that schools, despite knowing that pupils with SEND - with different needs and barriers to learning - make progress in different ways at different rates, still adopt systems hardwired with a blanket expected rate of progress that assumes they’ll all ‘catch up’. Or approaches that assume that pupils working below will progress through a particular year’s curriculum at at least the same rate as their peers who are accessing the age-intended curriculum.

Dear Government. Building on the #COVID alert level, I propose the following: calculate difference between each individual’s alert level and average alert level for their vulnerability group. Aggregate to constituency level. Areas with positive scores can reopen. We can call this measure Covid Alert Constituency Value Added or CVACVA for short.

Reducing data collection and workload. My 3 top tips:
1) Stop tracking learning objectives
2) Reduce parent reports to A5, or even better postcard size
3) Limit data for governors to a single side of A4 When I say ‘stop tracking learning objectives’ I don’t mean stop having learning objectives (they’re in the curriculum!); I mean, stop requiring teachers to record and RAG rate all their assessments against endless tick lists of learning objectives on paper, excel or system.