Welcome to the CUREE Newsletter
This spring equinox marks the half way point in the first academic year under the new government. It has felt to me like the world of education has been collectively holding its breath . So are we yet any clearer about what the future holds? The answer is probably ‘a bit’ at the big picture level but what about the practical details which guide school leaders’ and others’ decisions? Most school heads will know about their budgets for next year and, for some, the reality of their direct budgets is not as bad as they feared. For others the funding challenge is requiring some radical re-thinking. Everywhere local authorities have taken a big hit and many are virtually shutting down their support services. In some areas, LAs and schools have been jointly developing collaborative structures for CPD and other school improvement activity.
The very high profile given to academies and free schools is in keeping with the idea that making more of a market in education will lead to quality improvement but how the market (or ‘magic’ as it used to be called) does this is not specified. Of course, politics is about values (and ideology) but the rest of us, I suspect, need some evidence and a more practical link between intervention and improvement. We worry that the inter-school collaborations, which we know are very effective engines of school improvement, will be hard to maintain in the new, competitive ‘market environment’.
The government’s Teaching School initiative might, eventually, be part of the answer but not for a while. In any case, what the enthusiasm for Teaching School status shows is there’s a widespread appetite for being involved in initial and continuing teacher development. Interestingly our new evidence about developing effective curriculum experiences suggests the possibility of killing two birds with one stone here. We now have strong evidence that curriculum development and CPD go hand in hand. Schools that are highly effective curriculum innovators align the two so that, for classroom teachers, both feel like doing the ‘day job’ better and, for school leaders; the combination is an important lever for delivering the school improvement plan. This is just one key finding from our final synthesis of 3 year’s evidence from a large scale, multi-disciplinary research project. In practical terms, we found schools wrapping a mix of carefully structured CPD events and ongoing coaching and enquiry around, team based developments of curriculum context, tools and frameworks.
So it makes sense to look out for the opportunities to embed effective CPD in day to day practice in the arrangements your school makes to implement or review past curriculum initiatives (the Rose Review, the Creative Curriculum, the new Secondary Curriculum) or plan for responding to the current curriculum review. We are doing our bit to make this manageable - so join a range of CUREE colleagues to explore what this might mean in practical terms in connecting challenge in the curriculum, developing curriculum experiences for well being or participation and engagement for developing CPD skills and capacity via our new series of workshops.
Philippa Cordingley Chief Executive
Routes to Success
Many schools would like to map the evidence about the success of initiatives onto their school development plans, but having relevant and useable research at your fingertips is hard. We are delighted that we have been able to do this for a number of clients. The head at Oathall Community Secondary School, Jill Wilson, wanted a “research routemap” that would give her staff the research and evidence that they needed in an accessible format. We worked with Jill and colleagues to identify school priorities where research tools could help drive progress. This routemap is the result.
Staff really appreciated that it saved them time in searching for valuable research resources and felt that these really “hit the right spot”. The staff said the resources were accessible and easy for busy teachers to use. They also liked the structure as it helped them to see the connections and overlaps between the development priorities. Click here for more details of the routemap and how you might commission one for your school.
Pupil Learning: which factors have the greatest effect?
As schools are promised more freedoms yet are working within challenging budget constraints, it is more important than ever that teachers and school leaders know not only which teaching and learning strategies ‘work’ but which ‘work best’. Of greater value still however, is understanding the underlying principles about why some innovations are more successful than others.
A recent study by John Hattie looked at over 52,637 studies to identify the factors that had the greatest effect on pupil learning. He developed a model of ‘visible teaching and learning’ to explain what he found. Click here to read more about Hattie’s model and what it might mean for your school or classroom. You can also register for a short and engaging PowerPoint which can be used to explore the model with other staff in your school.
Choosing with Confidence
Join CUREE’s summer and autumn workshops to access best evidence from around the world to steer the choices you make about teaching, and curriculum priorities. This series of interactive sessions, designed for middle and senior leaders, will give you the tools you need to select strategies that will work together to make a real difference to achievement. Our practitioner friendly, research based tools and resources will sustain professional learning as you focus on moving practice “to good and to great” back in school.
Other workshops will be added to the programme over time and we can also offer versions of the workshops designed for a classroom teacher audience (normally delivered in-school or for school clusters). Click here for more details.
In other news…
Is your school a Sing Up school?
Many schools across the country have been involved in the Sing-Up programme. CUREE have just completed a large-scale evaluation which looked at the impact of the programme on pupils’ learning. Click here to read a summary of the learning benefits of Sing-Up along with implications for schools.
The next generation – how to enhance school based initial teacher training
The recent white paper emphasised the intended shift in Initial Teacher Training to school based delivery. The evidence shows that a significant differentiator in the success of initial teacher training is the quality of the mentoring provision that a new teacher receives in their school context. CUREE has lots of recent experience of equipping school based mentors to support the training of new teachers. Click here for more.
CUREE in the press
CPD in education benefits hugely from strong foundations in the underpinning research. Starting in April CUREE will be writing a series of articles for CPD Update magazine that explore some of the latest research in ways that you can engage with and enhance your practice. The first in the series covers “CPD and curriculum development : natural bedfellows” – click here to see a summary of the article.