What is Closing the Gap: Test and Learn?
What resources and support will be available?
What interventions are being trialled?
‘All schools will be allocated to an intervention’ – what does this mean?
What assessments will be there for our pupils to complete?
What evaluation activities will we need to take part in?
How will I need to support the intervention and staff delivering it?
Being in a treatment group or control group – what does this mean for my school?
Which year groups will I trial the intervention with?
If you have a question which is not covered here please forward it to CUREE: bart.crisp@curee.co.uk or call 0247 652 4036 and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
What is Closing the Gap: Test and Learn?
The Closing the Gap: Test and Learn scheme is the first ever attempt to use randomised trials to test multiple interventions simultaneously and at scale to close gaps. This will mean that the project will help reveal what works reliably in many contexts whilst helping us to work together to close gaps for vulnerable learners. It involves school leaders and practitioners working in partnerships through Teaching Schools on behalf of all schools and teachers.
Why should I take part?
The benefits include:
- the opportunity for a target group of your pupils to experience an intervention which has been identified as having potential to improve learning and outcomes for the most vulnerable children and young people
- training and resources to develop your staff’s capacity to use the intervention with target pupils during the trial and more widely across the school in the future
- training and resources to develop your staff’s capacity to collect and analyse high quality impact data and use other rigorous enquiry processes for practice and school development purposes
- access to tools and resources after the trial period
- the opportunity to learn with and from other schools tackling similar issues and trialling the same or different approaches
- access to good quality diagnostic information about your vulnerable pupils from the assessments being used
- the opportunity to contribute to the national professional knowledge base about what works to close the gap
What resources and support will be available?
Funding for the project is being allocated to Teaching Schools who know best the situation on the ground. They will be able to make local decisions about how best to allocate the funds in the light of the interventions chosen as the resource implications vary for the different interventions. To give a rough sense of the cost of preparing for an intervention in the most modest way possible ( you will be able to use the intervention more broadly with other year groups and after the intervention0 we have included information in the table below. This is only an approximate guide as training costs for interventions vary across the country. There will also be top up funds to support schools allocated to AFA because it is a much larger scale, longer term and whole school intervention. The costs of assessments will also be met separately.
In order to make their work for vulnerable pupils more joined up and sustainable, schools may choose to tap into other funding streams (such as the Pupil Premium) to support their closing the gap activities. So we have expressed the costs as Pupil Premium Unit equivalents
In order to help schools participate in the trial they will be offered training through the Teaching School they are working with. They will also need to access intervention-specific training rom the intervention porviders. All school will also be given a range of practical, step-by-step tools and resources for any intervention they are using and will be able to access tool for other interventions after they have acted as a control group. Some of these are aimed at practitioners directly working with young people as they scaffold the intervention process, others will enable the school leaders to embed and make strategic use of the interventions in their settings.
What interventions are being trialled?
Following extensive consultation with schools, the Teaching School R& D Advisory Body (with guidance from education research specialists at CUREE and Durham University) have selected the following interventions for the trials:
- 1st Class @ Number
- Inference training
- Achievement for All
- Growth mindsets
- Numicon
- Response to Intervention (RTI)
- Research Lesson Study (RLS)
First Class at Number is delivered by trained teaching assistants to small groups of children who have fallen behind at mathematics. Teaching assistants work from detailed lesson plans, adapting them according to information gained from structured assessments. They help children to think and talk about their mathematics. First Class at Number has a Post Office theme: children use letters, parcels, postcards and house numbers to support their mathematics and write postcards to tell their class teachers about their achievements. Teaching assistants are supported by a link teacher, who may be the Numbers Count teacher or another teacher chosen by the school. The resources for the lessons are all provided in a sturdy box and the school will only need to find a few items of mathematics equipment such as some cubes and coins.
Research Lesson Study
Lesson Study is a structured professional development process in which teachers systematically examine their practice and work together to improve it. Teachers work collaboratively on a small number of "study lessons", in a plan-teach-observe-critique cycle. Teachers select an overarching goal and related research question that they want to explore to provide focus and direction to this work. For Test and Learn it would be possible to consider specifying particular lesson foci catered for teaching approaches e.g. differentiation, content, year group, ability group, or improving the quality/depth of teaching.
NB: Schools assigned to the RLS intervention will either participate in early, evaluated R & D work in the first year or as an treatment or control group school in the second year.
Inference training
Inference training helps students make meaning as they read. This involves learning vocabulary, using their background knowledge, making inferences and building up meaning. It helps weak readers to get the full message from the text, making reading more enjoyable for them. In each session students: consider their prior knowledge; define and elaborate on words; ask questions; fill in a missing sentence; create images of their reading; and summarise and predict. Teachers need to choose a variety of texts for the sessions which are engaging for pupils, and at an appropriate level of difficulty.
Achievement for All
AfA is a whole school improvement framework focused on the 20% of vulnerable and SEND learners. It works through 4 dimensions: Leadership of Achievement for All, Teaching & Learning, Parental Engagement and Wider Outcomes. Schools identify and champion who is an SLT member & target year groups.
Schools are supported with initial needs analysis, action planning and evaluation through training, a structured conversation with parents and fortnightly visits from an Achievement Coach and a School Handbook.
The coach and School Champion develop a programme which meets the school’s needs building on existing successes. Initially AfA focuses on 2 target groups of pupils but then the practice is expanded to the whole school.
N.B: Schools assigned to the AfA intervention will be involved in the research project for 2 years either as an intervention school for 2 years or as a control group school in the first year and an intervention school in the second year.
Growth Mindsets
Approaches to teaching and learning aimed at creating ‘growth mindsets’ have developed from the research by Carol Dweck, which shows that teacher and student beliefs about intelligence impact on learning. Where students believed intelligence was innate they were less likely to persist in the face of challenge, where they believed ability on a task could be improved, they saw difficulty as a natural part of learning and persevered with tasks. Strategies for developing growth mindsets include:
- asking open-ended questions to solve a problem
- using specific feedback to identify what the student has accomplished
- encouraging students to take a risk
- teachers modelling persistence themselves
- emphasising the learning to be gained from mistakes and when things don’t go well.
Numicon
The Numicon approach is built on the work of Catherine Stern, using multi disciplinary/ multi-sensory, using apparatus and focusing on Action, Imagery and Conversation. The programme of activities with Numicon Shapes and rods helps children understand number relationships, spot patterns and make generalisations. The Numicon Shapes and rods help teachers and children to communicate their ideas. Children are encouraged to work together on activities which emphasise applying understanding to solve problems. It is helpful to all pupils and particularly beneficial to those with short term learning problems e.g. Down’s syndrome.
Response to Intervention
Response to Intervention (RTI) is a multi-tier approach to the early identification and support of students with learning and behaviour needs. The RTI process begins with high-quality instruction and universal screening of all children in the general education classroom. Struggling learners are provided with interventions at increasing levels of intensity to accelerate their rate of learning. A variety of staff are engaged in the process, including classroom and specialist teachers. Progress is closely monitored and decisions about the intensity and duration of interventions are based on individual student response to instruction.
‘All schools will be allocated to an intervention’ – what does this mean?
You will be asked to say which of the interventions you are willing to try, and to express an order of preference among those. We will do our best to give as many schools as possible their first choice. However, you do need to understand that we can’t promise this. Whilst we would like to give every school their first preference this is not possible in a situation where there has to be randomisation to create a fair test, or where there are big disparities in the popularity of interventions. So you must be willing to try two or more of the interventions from the list of interventions; the more the better.
You will be offered an intervention only if you have said you are willing to try it and if you are randomly selected to receive the intervention rather be a participant in the control group. If you are identified as an intervention school, being involved in the programme means being committed to undertaking whichever intervention you are allocated to from your list of preferences.
What assessments will be there for our pupils to complete?
All participating schools will need to administer specified assessments to specified groups of pupils in September 2013, July 2014 and July 2015. The identification of the target pupils depends, of course, on the particular intervention. So does the nature of the assessments which will also be specified. Schools involved in each research project will need to administer the assessments to the pupils during the testing window. Whilst the tests will be both pupil and school ‘friendly’, staff will need to allocate time to make sure that this they are completed according to the guidelines. These are likely to be on line assessments for the majority of pupils. He assessments will be of high quality adn will provide you with detailed additional diagnostic information about your vulnerable pupils
NB: The costs of standardised assessments for all the participating pupils will be covered.
What evaluation activities will we need to take part in?
To gain in-depth information about how the interventions work in school, some additional evidence will need to be collected during the 2 year trial period for treatment groups. This might involve, for example, lesson observation by external researchers or teachers within the school, completion of questionnaires (by pupils or teachers), keeping of diaries or logs of activity. Schools taking part in the trials will need to agree to collect this data and to reflect on it and report it in their school report.
How will I need to support the intervention and staff delivering it?
The training and resources for implementing the interventions have been designed to develop staff capacity to use the intervention to close the gap for their pupils. This will require a commitment from participating schools, for example to release staff for training, ensure staff plan and teach intervention lessons etc. It is through these commitments that you will gain the full benefits from the intervention. So schools taking part in the trials will need to agree to support training and implementation of the intervention.
Being in a treatment group or control group – what does this mean for my school?
If you are assigned to a treatment group, you will carry out the specified (one of your chosen) intervention in 2013-2014 academic year. If you are allocated to a control group, you are guaranteed to be able to carry out an intervention in the following (2014-2015) academic year. This means that you will be able to make use of all the evidence collected during the first year of the project to select an intervention that is likely to be most effective in addressing the needs of your pupils and work in your context.
All schools must agree that if they are allocated to the control group they will not implement the specified intervention during the research period. This of course does not mean that they won’t continue to meet the needs of their pupils using existing interventions.
Which year groups will I trial the interventions with?
So that the trials test interventions to Close Gaps for the full age range of learners it may be necessary for the year group to be specified to schools as part of the allocation process. Once schools have expressed their preferences, it will be possible to see how these cluster and then if necessary let intervention schools know the year group they will need to trial the intervention in.