Do you know how your pupils feel about themselves and school?

Do you know how your pupils feel about themselves and school?

The GL Assessment PASS is a great tool for achieving this.*

Every pupil undertakes the assessment. They complete it online and the results are compiled and returned. It has built into it ways to identify pupils not taking the test seriously and these can be followed up. It shows you who's happiest (on the test) and who is not. This is by overall and by categories. There are surprises at both ends.

Those children who come out at the 'bottom' can be supported further. Those who you're surprised to see at the 'top' can be looked at again. And how about those in the middle? How does PASS compare to attainment? What happens as pupils pass through the school? There's so much to gain from it.

PASS is great, but costs. Of course, you could try making your own surveys in Google Forms.

Overall, we need to gain pupils perceptions of themselves and the school. It's so important. Just find a way to get the information and act on it!

*We have not been asked or paid by GL Assessment to write this post. We do use GL Assessments at our school. This is, as always, the view and opinion of two full-time assistant heads about something we use in the classroom.

Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI)

Back in 2016 when we began our Assistant Head journey, we became aware of the IDACI for the first time. 

On the Ofsted 'Inspection data summary report' (IDSR), there is a section in 'School level trends' called 'the school deprivation indicator based on the 2015 Index of Income Deprivation Affecting Children'. So, where does this information come from?

I had to ask my brother! He works for the local authority.

We started with this:

The Indices of Deprivation are prepared using the Lower Super Output Area (LSOA) geography which has the dual benefits of consistent size throughout England, and being stable over time so that changes in deprivation levels can be measured.

There are 32,844 LSOAs in England. Deprivation scores are calculated for each LSOA and they are then ranked from 1 (most deprived) to 32,844 (least deprived).

 

The 'Indices of Deprivation 2015 explorer' map is useful. 

 

 

For our school, we found that it is "32,140 out of 32,844 LSOAs in England; where 1 is the most deprived LSOA. This is amongst the 10% least deprived neighbourhoods in the country."

 

The data behind your LSOA can be found here.

 

And, there's the 'English indices of deprivation 2015' for all the data.

Not the most vital piece of information on your ISDR, but useful knowing where it has come from.

Room Names

We've recently changed our room names.

We had the usual: Meeting Room, ICT Suite, Music Room and so on.

We felt that those names, and others (Drama Room and Gallery), possibly limited the potential uses of the rooms by some members of staff. The ICT Suite was empty or being used for computing lessons, the Meeting Room was only used for meetings and so on. In attempt to make them more usable, we looked for some more generic names.

Various ideas we put forward. Random names, famous people, rivers, countries and more. We went with the names of parts of our town, local villages and cities (you know, like a posh hotel does). I recently visited a school where they'd done similar (pictured below - can you see their theme?).

It's taken over a year to really get going. Need to overcome the 'old names', make people see their worth and get the new names being used. It's worth it. Now, it's just a room, that can be used, but may be used most of the time for music, competing or a space for the Learning Mentor...

Print Your Own Diary

If your school is like ours, every member of staff gets a diary. They need a diary to help them keep track of their day-to-day work.

Where does yours come from? A local shop? Local education supplier? Elsewhere?

Previously, ours came from our stationery supplier. Last year, we started designing and having our own printed.

They look better: each has the school logo, colours etc on and the member of staff's name printed. Small thing, but it makes it mine!

We've chosen some key policies to have in the front of them - every member of staff now has those in their 'Diary/Handbook'. We have added key dates and information to the front pages too. Printing them ourselves also allows us to populate them with our 'school dates' and lay out the 'week to view' pages in a way that is useful to us.

Cheaper? Oh, no! Certainly costs more. Worth it? Yes! 

Raising Motivation and Engagement in the Classroom

Over the past 12 months, we've looked to add something we've called ‘Sparkle’ into our junior school curriculum. ‘Sparkle’ is exactly that - something different, innovative, bright, interactive, technological, risky, cool and so on…

As part of this, we came up with the term ACE ( Audience, Context &Enrichment). The whole purpose being; to give children an audience for their work, a reason/purpose for their work and to do so in a fun and engaging environment. Should children just complete work for the sake of it, to learn and because they're told to? Well, that's one option. But, how about helping them to enjoy learning, finding out about audiences, complete tasks within a set context and with enrichment…

Like all schools, we have those who will work whatever the task, teacher, day of the week, weather and so on (even they need Sparkle). But, this is so important for the ‘Why?’, ‘Do I have to?’, ‘Boring!’ pupils.

What have we done?
Year Three: DT - Designed sandwiches and then visited Subway to make and eat sandwiches.
Year Four: Cave Painting - Enclosed room, lights off and the walls covered withpaper. The pupils had a go at creating cave art in the style to Stoneagedwellers.
Year Five: Non-Chronological reports about Pokemon and then used these tocreate a Pokemon Go style activity.
Year Six: Before making fairground rides in DT, the pupils visited Legoland(for, lots of fun) to generate ideas.
Year Six: Wrote about countries of the world and then displayed these outside with a large world map for all parents to see when collecting their children.
Year Five: Produced writing for iTunes publication.
Year Five: Had questions asked tosomeone in Sierra Leone as part of 100wc.net.
Year Four: Tweeted authors.
Year Three: Invited parents in during the day to help the children make toothpaste and share their learning.
Year Four - Learned how to and made Roman Oil Lamps as part of history/art. Then, in English, wrote and filmed instructions for how to make the oil lamps. Then, after school, parents came in to make an oil lamp with their child being the teacher.
 
Impact? Those who are usually engaged in learning were not turned off by any of the ACE additions. They continued to work with the same gusto. Whether interested in Pokemon or Lego or not, they engaged with the task. 

The main impact has been with those who are often not engaged with learning - those that are easily turned off. We saw boys (and it was mostly boys) really engaged by the Pokemon task: trying new words, working at home and asking, "When's English?" The Year Six pupils saw the buzz at home time where people were looking at their work. Year Five experienced seeing one of their peer’s work being used in an interview on Facebook. The Year Four pupils felt special and appreciated by having their Tweets replied to by an ACTUAL author.

We're working in an environment of testing, assessment and accountability. When do the children work best? When they don’t realise they're learning! When Lee Parkinson visited our school, he spoke about 'Camouflaged Learning'. He said that in his experience, if you ask a child in Year Three to write instructions for how to make a cup of tea, they will tell you to "Go away" (Lee didn't say 'Go away'). However, can they write instructions for Minecraft, using a Raspberry Pi, plaiting hair, or anything they're interested in? It takes a bit of extra work, it involves getting inside of the minds of the learners, but it makes a huge difference! 

Make it enjoyable. Make it memorable. Make it interesting. 

They’ll learn and might not even realise! 

 Let us know what you're up to too...

Bar Reports for Attainment Data

In a recent discussion with James Pembroke, he suggested various different ways to manipulate and display our junior school data in order to analyse it. One of these was to create 'Bar Reports' for each cohort as they pass through the school.

When thinking about how to do this, Excel, Numbers, G Sheets and other applications were an option, but I went with PowerPoint so that I could have more control over how the finish product looked.

In PowerPoint, I created arrays of 100 squares and then coloured these according to the percentages we'd assessed children at. A slightly time-consuming process, but well worth it and something that has shown us aspects of our assessment, attainment and progress that we had not previously seen.

The three pictures here are completely fictional and in no way represent any school, children or their data.

On Dropbox, is the template and an example. I hope it's useful. Any comments or suggestions, please share.