Best Practice

Data, workload & accountability: Embracing ‘managed ambiguity’

Schools should rethink their approaches to monitoring and evaluation and move away from meaningless and highly processed data in order to ease the work and accountability load. Chris Read looks at principles of how data should be used...

Do current approaches to accountability help trustees, governors and school leaders?

I recently heard a maths teacher talking about “value for time”. This struck me as a really useful way to think about the things we ask teachers to do.

One of those big time bandits in schools is the setting, assessing and monitoring of internal, teacher-marked assessments which are used to work out whether individual pupils and groups of pupils are on or above target to make “expected progress”, and by implication, whether they have been taught well enough.

Trustees and governors use these as a proxy for school quality, and to try and get advanced notice on how well the school is likely to perform in external published exams in the summer.

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