1. Closing the Gap - Perspectives Oct 2014

2. Why all of this focus? A reminder

3. IIF: focus on the West Midlands | 3 KS2 FSM compared to non-FSM pupils

4. IIF: focus on the West Midlands | 4 KS4 FSM compared to non-FSM pupils

5. So what have we learned? Locally – Triad work with schools No 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

6. Well Endowed Quiz – Impact on Educational Outcomes Meta-analysis Cost-benefit analysis 1.After school clubs 2.Developing Aspiration 3.Behaviour Interventions 4.Collaborative Learning 5.Digital technology 6.Early Years Input 7.Feedback 8.Homework Primary… and secondary 9.Meta-cognition 10.Mentoring 11. Peer Tutoring 12. Performance related Pay 13. Repeating a year 14. Setting 15. Teaching Assistants

7. Well Endowed Quiz – Impact on Educational Outcomes Meta-analysis Cost-benefit (months) analysis 1.After school clubs +2 H 2.Developing Aspiration 0 L 3.Behaviour Intervention+4 M 4.Collaborative Learning +5 VL 5.Digital technology +4 H 6.Early Years Input +6 H 7.Feedback +8 L 8.Homework Primary +1 VL… and secondary +5 VL 9.Meta-cognition +8 L 10.Mentoring +1 M 11. Peer Tutoring +6 L 12. Performance related Pay 0 L 13. Repeating a year -4 VH 14. Setting -1 VL 15. Teaching Assistants +1 H

9. Herefordshire Closing the Gap Project

10. 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

11. 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

12. KS1 Cohort (just entered KS2)

13. So what happened ?

14. And L2B?

15. 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

16. Eradicating the gap (Dave Hollomby – Wirral) Why the gaps aren’t closing

17. 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

18. 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).

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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

22. 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 evidence Results 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

23. 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