A few years ago, we built an extension on the back of our house. It was a big project and at one point we had to move our family of five to live with my parents for what we thought might be a fortnight and ended up being three months. With Adele (my wife) having spent hours watching Grand Designs and my natural assumption that I had the skills and knowledge to be able to take on such a task, we decided to manage the project ourselves, with most of the work carried out by a builder friend.
It was an exciting yet stressful time, which inevitably took considerably longer than planned and cost more than we could afford. The stress of trying to manage the project and help with the manual labour at weekends and evenings was compounded by preparation at school for an Ofsted inspection. Simon de Senlis Primary had been (rightly) judged as ‘Requiring Improvement’ 18 months previously, shortly after I was appointed as head, and we knew we would be re-inspected at some point in the summer term. While all logical thinking assured us that the outcome would almost certainly be positive, there is always an element of doubt and a great deal was riding on it. I felt that our staff and community really needed the public stamp of approval to recognise all the improvements that had taken place.
Built to last?
Although it was difficult, there were some therapeutic benefits to living this dual managerial role of school leader and site manager. Seeing our dreams become a reality was both exciting and rewarding; lifting blocks and sweeping up in the evening offered enforced escape from the all-consuming world of ‘Ofsted readiness’; and watching different tradesmen at work provided a welcome and refreshing new perspective to life.
One memorable observation was of the confidence exuded by the many tradesmen as they carried out their different roles. The bricklayers knew that with a 4:1 mix of sand to cement, one inch of mortar would be enough to hold the blocks and bricks together securely; the carpenters knew that two-inch screws would keep the doorframes firmly in place; and the electrician slept well at night, knowing that once he had tested the circuits and tightened the final screws, his work was done.
I was so envious of this certainty that the job was ‘done’. Why is it that tradesmen can drive home confident that their work for the day has been completed, while teachers up and down the country spend their lives worrying about whether their different approaches are working, continually trying new initiatives to make learning stick?
Over the six months or so that the project took, I must have watched between 25 and 30 workers come and go, all playing their separate roles. It amazed me how clearly defined their methods were; how there was no real debate or discussion about which approach would be better than another. Don’t get me wrong, they still moaned a lot about how tired they were and blamed the previous workman for anything that went wrong – but in their eyes, there was no sense of ‘Did we get it right today?’ as they packed up their tools at the end of the day.
An inspector calls…
And then Ofsted came and everyone put on their best clothes and shoes and did their thing. We stayed late at school for two days, working harder than ever, and abandoned our families to make sure that we could answer any conceivable question or possible line of enquiry. Meanwhile, at home, the building inspector came to visit but there was no sense of panic among the builders, or concern that if things went the wrong way this could be part of a career-defining disaster. After all, they had invited him along in the first place to check their work. The building inspector duly arrived with his tape measure and checked that the roof insulation was of the right thickness and the windows were set at the right depth, then got back in his car and drove off. A relief for me, but otherwise just another normal day applying processes that everyone knows work when building a house.
Back at school, I smiled and waved off the inspection team from the carpark. If an inspection has gone well, the walk from the farewell handshake with the inspectors down to the staffroom to share the feedback with your staff is a lovely moment to savour. Nice things were said and written; we opened the bubbly and celebrated and enjoyed all the stories that inspections always bring, reflecting proudly on the journey over the last two years.
What became clear to me in this brief dual life as headteacher and building site manager was that while we have worked out how to build houses that can stand for centuries, we still lack a shared understanding and confidence of ‘what works’ in our schools. And while many people you meet make loud and confident claims about what great learning looks like, they are often wrong. Why is it so difficult? We have been teaching children in formal state education for well over 100 years now. Surely we must have worked out the right approaches to use in schools, so that we can get on and do the right things?
At the heart of this conundrum lies one of the biggest challenges for all of us involved in education: learning is invisible. Since we cannot see it happening, we rely on signs we associate with good learning to make judgements about when and where it is taking place, or visible ‘proxies for learning’ that are easy to check or measure. They can be outputs – such as assessments, tests and work in books – or inputs, such as planning, certain teaching approaches and types of learning activities. These proxies for learning can become the basis of expectation and accountability in schools and often find their way into checklists, minimum expectation documents and lesson observation sheets for leaders or managers to check.
At the surface level, this sounds reasonably sensible. Leaders should check that the right things are happening in the classroom, just as site managers and building inspectors should check that the right screws are being used in the right way and the concrete in the foundations is the specified depth. But research conducted in recent years has made us question the validity of many classroom inputs as reliable proxies for learning. Learning styles, lengthy written comments for marking, use of mobile technology in the classroom and threeway differentiation in each lesson are all examples of things which have been encouraged or insisted upon in schools, even though their effectiveness is disputed by research.
We must take more care to draw useful and reliable inferences from the outputs of assessment, and more critical evaluation should take place of different inputs if we are to move towards a better understanding of ‘what works’ in schools, However, this important evaluative and analytic type of school improvement activity is not yet common practice – partly due to the operational challenges that come with running buildings that house hundreds of children, but also due to the chaotic and volatile nature of our education system and the unhealthy relationship with accountability that has been normalised across our schools.
Tom Rees is the executive headteacher of Simon de Senlis Primary School and education director at Northampton Primary Academy Trust. This article is based on an edited extract from his book, Wholesome Leadership, published by John Catt; for more information, visit tomrees.org.uk or follow @TomRees_77
