There are many claims about what schools should be and how they can be improved. Most are well intentioned, if not always well informed. As a school leader, I find myself swimming in a sea of 'oughts', and drowning in intuitively appealing claims and counter-claims. Where is the life jacket? In Seymour B. Sarason's seminal … Continue reading The Untestable Abstractions of School Improvement
Category: School improvement
Stop trying to improve your school’s exam results
Since the introduction of school league tables in 1992, the exam results 'achieved' by a school has grown in significance tremendously. It is now one of the main, perhaps the main, preoccupation of most secondary schools. The objective of 'improving results' is embedded in the psyche of school leaders, politicians and parents: it is the … Continue reading Stop trying to improve your school’s exam results
Metamorphic problems
We introduced a five-minute movement time between lessons this year. It works really well. Every transition (between lessons, start of the day, end of breaks) is five minutes long. Given the layout and size of our school, this is enough time to walk purposefully to the next lesson, get lined up, enter the classroom, get … Continue reading Metamorphic problems
You are not special
“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1999) You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake It is easy to come to … Continue reading You are not special
The Market for Schools
There has been an interesting exchange of views this week on Twitter following a post from Professor Becky Allen (@profbeckyallen) titled The Ungameable Game (which would be a good name for a Queen song by the way). In the blog, Professor Allen playfully suggests a system for school performance measures which is, by design, ungameable. … Continue reading The Market for Schools
Elvis Impersonators and the Disadvantage Gap
20 ft. high on Blackpool promenade Fake royalty second hand sequin facade Limited face paint and dyed black quiff Overweight and out of date Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier, the Manic Street Preachers I once read a letter to The Times which made me laugh so much that I carried it around in my wallet for … Continue reading Elvis Impersonators and the Disadvantage Gap
Token gestures
I made a rare visit to Waitrose this morning having received some discount vouchers in the post. There were a range of vouchers for specific products and a general money-off coupon for spending more than a certain amount. It was sufficient to motivate me to be more extravagant than I normally would be on a … Continue reading Token gestures
Self(ish) Improvement
What if our primary demand of teachers was that they improve the school, not improve themselves? Our obsession with teacher-effectiveness means that the responsibility for school improvement is often placed on the shoulders of teachers. Only this morning, a high profile head teacher has illustrated this point by proclaiming that a condition of working in … Continue reading Self(ish) Improvement
What was down the rabbit hole?
"You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." Morpheus, The Matrix (1999) In 2015, I swallowed a red pill and accepted the uncomfortable … Continue reading What was down the rabbit hole?
Exclusive!
"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." John F. Kennedy I had cause to research school vision statements recently. We were refreshing ours and I wanted to get a sense of what other schools were saying about how they wanted their schools to be. Our … Continue reading Exclusive!
Matthew Evans 