How to unlock the power of school improvement planning

CPD, performance management and development planning may be ‘backroom’ processes but they are crucial to student achievement.

It’s a big concern, then, that many schools still lack the means to intelligently track and manage these crucial processes.

Very little of what a student does nowadays in school is left untracked and unanalysed. Accountability has been one factor behind this assessment revolution. Ofsted demands an increasingly sophisticated picture of student progress so that any gap in pupil attainment can be pinpointed and addressed quickly. The collective will of teaching staff and school leaders to do the best they can do for their pupils is another.

But the processes that support staff performance, such as performance management, school development planning, self evaluation and CPD, aren’t given the same level of scrutiny in many schools.

This is surprising given what we already know about the impact these processes have on pupil performance. TheTeacher Development Trust for example points to a New Zealand study showing that classes whose teachers had taken part in high-quality professional development improved twice as fast as those in other classes. It also showed that the 20 per cent of pupils deemed ‘least able’ made improvements up to six times faster than their peers in other classes.

The chief reason these processes aren’t given the level of attention that, say, pupil attainment receives is that it is difficult and time consuming to track and manage them in a meaningful way on a lever arch file of paper or in an Excel spreadsheet. Another is that there are no significant repercussions for not ‘working the plan’ or producing real evidence of connectivity between these processes.

This needs to change. Ofsted today wants schools to give full account of the improvement processes that ultimately have a huge impact upon pupil attainment. It wants evidence that the SLT knows the school’s strengths and weaknesses, that leaders are fully involved in self-evaluation and that development plans are focused on improving teaching and raising achievement.

If lever arch files and spreadsheets sounds like your school’s approach then your admin will need to be at its best to produce the joined up, rich information that you will need to meet the demands of Ofsted and, as importantly, help staff make the biggest impact they can on pupil achievement . But this approach is just not sustainable for most schools.

In order to generate worthwhile information, the systems you use must be intelligent. They must do as much automatic administration as possible and produce the information you need.

Your system should be responsive to the information that is fed into it. Remember that your colleagues are much more likely to engage when they know that the information they put in actually leads to changes in the way things are done in your school. Also, everyone should see the value of the time they put in not only in the school context but also in terms of their own career development.

It is also a good idea to think about the actual school improvement ‘jigsaw’ and what you need to do to make the pieces work together.

Any school improvement process will include priority planning which in turn should lead to action plans which are owned by individual staff members. Their progress and activity should be tracked and evaluated for effectiveness. Any areas of improvement that are identified from this evaluation should in turn inform staff professional development.

Once you are clear about the process, consider exactly how and where you will record it and manage it in a way that is retrievable and meaningful?

Ideally, you should record this information in a way which works for you and this often means using a purpose built ICT system. This will cost you in the short term but over time you will justify the investment by producing information of a far higher quality.

Making information work for a range of contexts is also an important consideration. Imagine a colleague working on aspects of leadership within a team project, perhaps aimed at improving boys’ behaviour. So many elements of this work will contribute directly to this person’s career development as well as meeting a development need for the school. It makes sense that these contributions should feed more than one area of accountability without the need for hours of work duplicating information for different reports - and the risk of lost evidence.

With increasing school collaboration, for example in federations, academy chains, trusts and teaching school alliances, the issue of performance evaluation becomes even more complicated. In these situations a school will have responsibility for driving improvement in other schools. If these schools fail to get a proper hold on the management of school improvement processes this could compromise the ability of several schools to continue improving.

As the UK education system fragments there is now an even greater need for schools to manage themselves as effectively as possible. Paper and spreadsheets might produce data about their school improvement processes, but this won’t be intelligent because it will be so difficult to manipulate.

It really is time for schools to get a clear, intelligent view of school improvement processes so that they can meet the demands of accountability – and help staff help pupils achieve.

Outstanding Testimony - Seend Primary School

"...it is perfectly in line with Ofsted’s requirements and ensures that all I have to focus on is the school improvement work needed to raise standards..."

"I am in the first year of using Bluewave.SWIFT so I am still not fully aware of its ultimate potential. However it has already had a profound affect on certain aspects of my work. I was initially looking for a system that would help me to present a more structured School Development Plan and that is exactly what I got. The governing body were very impressed with what I was able to present to them this year, as it clearly links in with the Ofsted Categories. However, the system has given me much, much more. It has allowed me to input the Teacher Appraisal targets onto the system – linked to the projects within the School Development Plan and to Professional Standards. The system encourages the staff to then take ownership of recording their progress against their targets by logging on and recording their evidence.

The Self-Evaluation section provides an extremely comprehensive set of prompts to encourage you to assess yourself and identify where you need to improve – thus linking into the School Development Plan. With the facility to tie in CPD as well, as far as I am concerned, it is perfectly in line with Ofsted’s requirements and ensures that all I have to focus on is the school improvement work needed to raise standards and not worry about whether I have missed something or that it is not all joined up thinking – the hard work has been done for me.

One other thing to add is the ongoing support that I have received in building up the skills base to operate the system has been second to none. I am happy to recommend this as a complete system in managing school improvement."

Jackie Chalk, Headteacher, Seend CofE VA Primary School