View from the Summit…
Peter King, Head Teacher at the Federation of Mowden Schools (Infants & Junior)
I nearly didn’t make it to the SCHOOLS NorthEast Summit last month. I only gave myself an hour to get from Durham to Newcastle (!) and after the umpteenth traffic jam I nearly detoured off to spend the day in solitude somewhere, planning a training day on boys’ achievement instead, that I’ve crazily said I’ll deliver in school in a couple of weeks. I parked ‘illegally’ in the stadium in an RVI reserved space, by now already late and almost hoping I wouldn’t find anywhere, to discover there’s no direct route into the facilities from the car park, so that when I finally sat down, Masha Gordon was in full flow and had already climbed half the world’s highest peaks.
I can’t say I was initially that impressed. I’ve been to enough education conferences and heard enough ‘inspirational’ speakers to know that I’m never going to climb Annapurna or row for Team GB or open an orphanage or whatever it is that’s meant to motivate me to be a better headteacher. But Masha, she did a bit of number on me because right near the end she mentioned about getting girls to be braver and learning about risk, which reminded me about a meeting I’ve got coming up with the local FE college principal about engaging our Year 5s in some STEM type activities, particularly the girls who don’t go into these areas in representative numbers. Note to self, I thought: change the forthcoming training day title to ‘How to raise boys’ achievement and get girls to be braver’. I even tapped up Masha afterwards for some links to the stuff she was talking about. How sycophantic was that?
Justine Greening was okay. A bit vanilla, I thought, but nonetheless good to see her up here in our patch, and anyway I can cope with a bit of vanilla after all the Magnum and Cornetto of her recent predecessors. I must have got the traffic ire out of my system by now too because I resisted the temptation to grab the roving mic and ask the obvious question. “Justine, you’re a proud product of the state comprehensive system. From the North too, successful. Marvellous. Why on earth then are you supporting the expansion of selective, socially restrictive grammar schools?”
Sir David Carter was a refreshing surprise too. He obviously matched his presentation to his audience, but his focus on good teaching being the thing rather than structural change was welcome. I liked his stuff on ‘followship’, getting others to believe in your vision as well as a need for realism. Nice. Just a shame that his HMI colleagues in our region haven’t picked up his message fully yet. I get the weekly Ofsted inspections update email. It reads more like an obituary column every time. Have a word please, Sir David.
The best of the day for me though came at the end, the last couple of sessions, and not just because I was totally stoked on exhibitors’ Moams by this time. For the penultimate session, I rather randomly chose Dr Rebecca Allen’s slot on KS2 assessment findings and what a choice this turned out to be. Rebecca is a statistician and Director of Education Datalab, which in itself sounds nothing significant, but actually turns out to be the black ops wing of FFT. Honestly. If you want stats with attitude, go to Rebecca and co at Education Datalab. She posed challenging questions of her own, like why do North East youngsters do so well at primary but not at secondary. But she also came at data from different angles too, demonstrating the LA to LA variances between KS2 writing this year as opposed to it being school to school difference. Near the end of session one she lobbed in a quiet grenade about teacher assessment being inadvertently biased towards certain groups e.g. girls (wait, did she just say that? Does she know I’m planning a PD day on boys’ achievement?) which she planned to talk more about in session two. I was hooked and followed her into said session. Post session sycophantic chats were now becoming the norm for me and I swapped email addresses with Dr Rebecca, who has since sent me some useful links about teacher assessment bias. Her final presentation also dealt with the unreliability of teacher assessment generally and how we’re probably fooling ourselves when it comes to fine differences in statements. From a statistician it just felt different, a bit edgy and more than a little anti-establishment.
The Education Datalab blogs are well worth a read. One recent missive defends the low results of a particular North West authority, from a very robust statistical evidence base. These guys have the ear of government and other big education institutions, but they don’t necessarily tow the usual line.
So by the end of the Summit, I’d inadvertently come across way more interesting material for my forthcoming training day and was glad I hadn’t gone off elsewhere instead. And I didn’t even get a ticket for my free RVI parking. Result. Thank you SCHOOLS NorthEast for a really interesting conference.