Month: September 2018

In July, the Department for Education (DfE) announced that classroom teachers would receive a 3.5% rise from 1 September 2018. While schools will need to fund the first 1% of this rise, the government announced that £187m (in 2018/19) and £321m (in 2019/20) would be given to schools to fund the other 2.5% through a teachers’ pay grant.

To help school leaders and those governing to plan for the new teachers’ pay grant, the government has released a short guide (external link).  At this stage, the guide outlines how the pay grant is calculated for each school and how schools can expect to receive the funding. The DfE outlines that further information will be available in October, with payments being made later in the autumn.

The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) Accountability Commission has just published its final report on Improving School Accountability (external link). The review focuses on school performance measures and the role of Ofsted.

The commission aimed to address perceived flaws in the current accountability system. This includes: incentivising schools to act in their own interests rather than that of the wider community; narrowing the curriculum and encouraging teaching to the test; putting teachers and school leaders off working in challenging settings; and driving good people from the profession.

The report makes these recommendations:

• Comparative performance data (based on a three-year average) should be used to inform Ofsted judgements.
• The Department for Education (DfE) should use ‘requires improvement’ as the trigger for funded school improvement support.
• Ofsted’s role should be reformed, with a focus on identifying failure and diagnosing reasons behind a school’s struggles.
• ‘Outstanding’ schools should be subject to regular inspection.
• The ‘Outstanding’ judgement should be replaced by a robust system for identifying excellent practice.
• Ofsted should commission research into the format and nature of inspection required.
• National accreditation arrangements should be developed for peer review programmes.
• Alternative national standards for head teachers should be developed.
• The DfE’s careers progression strategy should incorporate support for recently appointed head teachers.

This report comes when Ofsted is planning the rollout of its new inspection framework, which it will implement from September 2019. With fears expressed that Ofsted is planning large-scale changes without giving teachers and system leaders’ time to reflect on or embed the changes, NAHT argue that Ofsted is at a “cross-road” and should carefully consider the findings of the accountability commission before launching a new system of inspection.  

The report says little on the role of governing boards in the accountability system. However, governing boards have an important role to play in ensuring that schools react to the pressures of accountability in an ethical manner, remain mindful of the needs of the whole community and resist any pressure to narrow the curriculum.

The Department for Education (DfE) has released new data management functionality within Analyse School Performance (ASP). ASP is the Department for Education’s (DfE’s) replacement data service for RAISEonline. ASP provides school leaders with a detailed breakdown of how schools, and different pupil groups (with a particular emphasis on disadvantaged pupils), have performed in key stage 1 and 2 (for primary schools), key stage 4 (for secondary schools) and key stage 5 (for 16-19 providers). ASP is a free to access service which requires users to login through the DfE’s sign-in portal. Those governing are entitled to login details and should speak to the individual who sends data returns at the school (in the first instance) who can help them set up an account.

The changes to ASP this week allows school named users to create a custom view by removing one or more pupils from their phonics, KS1, KS2 or KS4 data to carry out “what if” scenarios. School users are able to toggle between their default and custom views for most headline reports (a list of reports and data items which cannot be updated by data management are shown on the Data management homepage). Data management is available for the most recent year’s data held in ASP (i.e. 2017) and will be updated as and when new data becomes available.