Closing the Gap - PerspectivesOct 2014

Why all of this focus?

A reminder

IIF: focus on the West Midlands | 3

KS2 FSM compared to non-FSM pupils

IIF: focus on the West Midlands | 4

KS4 FSM compared to non-FSM pupils

So what have we learned?

• Locally – Triad work with schoolsNo magic bullet or blinding revelation…Has included some useful intervention work but…

All about focus

• Locally – CTG Project

• Nationally – The evidence base from the Education Endowment Fund

Well Endowed Quiz – Impact on Educational OutcomesMeta-analysis Cost-benefit analysis

1. After school clubs2. Developing Aspiration3. Behaviour Interventions4. Collaborative Learning5. Digital technology6. Early Years Input7. Feedback8. Homework Primary… and

secondary9. Meta-cognition10. Mentoring

11. Peer Tutoring12. Performance related Pay13. Repeating a year14. Setting15. Teaching Assistants

Well Endowed Quiz – Impact on Educational OutcomesMeta-analysis Cost-benefit (months) analysis

1. After school clubs +2 H2. Developing Aspiration 0 L3. Behaviour Intervention+4 M 4. Collaborative Learning +5 VL5. Digital technology +4 H6. Early Years Input +6 H7. Feedback +8 L8. Homework Primary +1 VL… and

secondary +5 VL9. Meta-cognition +8 L10. Mentoring +1 M

11. Peer Tutoring +6 L12. Performance related Pay 0 L13. Repeating a year -4 VH14. Setting -1 VL15. Teaching Assistants +1 H

Herefordshire Closing the Gap Project

What we hoped to achieve?

• To know where our underachieving pupils are and what barriers to learning they are encountering

• To improve the achievement of all pupils not making expected progress including those who may not have been identified as belonging to a ‘vulnerable’ group.

• To improve other outcomes for children and young people identified by schools as not thriving

• To refine our needs analysis which supports commissioning of services

• To work collaboratively with schools to close the achievement gap for individual schools and for Herefordshire as a whole (incl. sharing of effective practice)

• To bring a new dimension to the school improvement risk analysis

CTG Project Headlines

• 72 of 80 primary schools agreed to engage• 54 primary schools have actually returned

• 12 of 15 secondary schools agreed to engage• 8 secondary schools have actually returned or

partially returned

KS1 Cohort (just entered KS2)

So what happened ?

YEAR 1 PILOT COHORT WITH A RAPO INDICATOR - SUMMER 2014

Risk of Poor Outcome RAG Rating

Achieved Level 2 or above in

Reading, Writing and Maths

Failed to Achieve a Level 2 or above in Reading, Writing

and Maths

No KS2 score received Total

Red 12 71 1 84 Amber 68 46 2 116 Green 156 19 175 Total 236 136 3 375

62.9% 36.3%

And L2B?

YEAR 1 PILOT COHORT WITH A RAPO INDICATOR - SUMMER 2014

Risk of Poor Outcome RAG Rating

Achieved Level 2B or above in

Reading, Writing and Maths

Failed to Achieve a Level 2B or above

in Reading, Writing and Maths

No KS2 score received Total

Red 3 80 1 84 Amber 22 92 2 116 Green 87 88 175 Total 112 260 3 375

29.9% 69.3%

Next stages

•Remaining returns and try for full engagement•Get really detailed information for red/amber pupils•Work on EY health visitor data – start early•Track all underachieving children•Team around the school

Eradicating the gap (Dave Hollomby – Wirral)

Why the gaps aren’t closing

Attainment gaps exists at all stages of education, and worsen as children move through their education.

The chart shows the percentage of children from each group whose attainment was in the top half at each key stage.

The places of FSM children in the top half are increasingly taken by non-FSM children.N.B. You are invited to visualise where the two lines would meet if projected backwards, below the age of 5. It suggests that if we were able to measure attainment at age 0 to 1, there wouldn’t be much, if any, of a gap to speak of.

Phonics test

KS1 Average

Level

KS2 Average

Level

5+ A*-C inc. English and

maths

Non-FSM: children not eligible for free school meals

FSM: children eligible for free school meals Data: Wirral

How targets are set

Schools use the assessment scores from a previous stage of education (‘prior attainment’) and essentially add something on. The exact method varies, but the principle is the same.

Pupils with high prior attainment get high targets set for them (green arrow).

Pupils with low prior attainment get lower targets set for them (red arrow).

Statement of Intent

We believe that disadvantaged children are not intrinsically intellectually inferior to better-off children – they are born with the same spread of natural ability/potential/whatever-you-prefer-to-call-it as better-off children.

Therefore disadvantaged children are entitled to the same educational outcomes as better-off children.

And consequently this demands that the education system has equal expectations of disadvantaged children in terms of those outcomes – not a narrowed gap but an eradicated gap.

And so we are logically compelled to set equal targets for both groups. We just have to convince all of our schools.

Targets are an explicit statement of a school’s expectations of a child’s academic potential.

Targets that are systematically lower for disadvantaged children are a statement, albeit an inadvertent one, that the school has lower expectations for the attainment of poorer children than better off children.

The only way forward is to have equal ambition for both groups and set targets that demonstrate this.

Wirral Local Authority invited secondary schools with significant numbers of disadvantaged children to join a project designed to test the ideas outlined in the previous slides. Three schools agreed.

The minimum requirements were:

1) Schools were to set targets for their Year 7 disadvantaged children that were, on average, equal to those they set for other children.

2) Schools were to submit teacher assessment data termly to the local authority for analysis.

No other actions were required. In particular, schools were free to use whatever interventions they thought best to support children who were falling behind.

The ideas behind the project can be summarised as:

1) We still have attainment gaps because schools are actually setting targets to generate them.

2) Successful intervention depends not only on what the intervention is, but on when it happens. Even when intervention does happen for disadvantaged children it is often too late.

In particular, as stated earlier, many disadvantaged children are not receiving appropriate early intervention because the lower targets set for them generate reduced expectations for their performance – the children appear to be doing fine, for their target, when in reality they are not.

The RADY Project: An experiment to see if the hypothesis about target-setting is correct

This is the aggregated data for the schools involved in the RADY pilot.

1) There is no difference in the targets set for FSM and non-FSM children

2) The autumn, spring and summer projections are the percentages of pupils ‘forecast’ to attain A*-C in both English and maths at GCSE (based on teacher assessments.)

3) The gap between FSM and non-FSM projections is narrowing.

4) Based on the recent history of the schools involved (the last three years) we might have expected a gap of over 20%. By the summer term the forecast gap was down to 6%.

OTHER THAN SETTING EQUALITY TARGETS, NO NEW ACTIONS WERE UNDERTAKEN BY THE SCHOOLS INVOLVED.

The evidenceResults from the first year of the RADY Project

All percentages refer to the proportion of pupils forecast to attain A*-C in both English and maths

Poor Areas – High Achievement: Characteristics of school leaders include: (from Anna Wright)

• Confront mindsets, structures, policies and practice that perpetuate inequalities ‘othering’

• Substantial investment in CPD on what works• Maintain a systematic school-wide focus on instruction in reading and

mathematics and high expectations, with continuous progress monitoring, adjusting instruction on the basis of student progress

• Hold professionals to account for progress• Respecting students’ linguistic and cultural heritage, encouraging

them to build on their knowledge• Make explicit the underlying assumptions of the middle class culture

that children need to know to be successful• Develop multiple support systems for students with varying needs• Are in tune with the communities that they serve