“You don’t fatten the pig by weighing it” An evocative phrase used by those who would rightly challenge the concept of over-assessment or too frequent external assessment or inspection. A Head Teacher’s Union leader even described the English Ofsted as the “Office of Pig weighing”. The use of the phrase has taken on a global currency as [...]
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Having to make difficult decisions is a key part of my job. Some of these decisions can often be unpopular - but I suppose that’s what I get paid for.
Every decision is usually associated with a variety of options which will usually have a number of distinct features, namely:
Consequences - each option will have positive and negative consequences directly associated with [...]
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Posted in Children's Services, Conferences, Culture change, Ideas, OUtcome agreements, Parental Involvement, Partnerships, Planning, Public Services, Strategic, Uncategorized, Using data, school based management on May 15th, 2008 4 Comments »
I’m attending the Association of Directors of Social Work conference in Crieff.
One the key themes emerging is that of personalisation of services to users. The social work field is light years ahead of education in terms of using a mixed economy system for delivering services, by commissioning others from the private and voluntary sector to [...]
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We had a meeting on Friday where we looked further at how we could use outcomes as drivers of our new service improvement plan.
It was good to give this topic a significant amount of time and it looks like we are making progress.
We have agreed that each part of our plan will have:-
- an overall outcome, [...]
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The Educational Institute for Scotland (EIS) - the biggest teaching union in the Scotland have issued a number of press releases over the holiday period.
The last of these was entitled League Table approach and too much Testing remains Harmful to Education, say EIS
“The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) has called for a radical rethink on [...]
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Posted in Using data on Dec 6th, 2007 No Comments »
The PISA results for 15 year olds were released on the 4th December.
If we are really serious about improving the performance of the lowest attaining 20% then we have to take account of some of the findings of this research.
Consider this:
Streaming at an early age tends to increase the impact of socio-economic background on student performance, [...]
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I’ve been doing some more work on how we might make use of outcome agreements with schools. I’ve looked at the logic of this in some earlier posts but it’s only by experimenting with actual outcomes that we can start to see whether or not they would be a good idea.
Sometimes it’s only by looking at such [...]
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It must be just the time of year but a plethora of international acheivement data is being made available in matter of a few weeks.
The most recent of these is the Progress in International Literacy Study 2006 PIRLS you can download the entire report from here but beware it’s 63mb and takes along time to download.
I’ve taken [...]
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The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardised assessment that was jointly developed by participating countries and administered to15-year-olds in schools.
The survey was implemented in 43 countries in the 1st assessment in 2000, in 41 countries in the 2nd assessment in 2003, in 57 countries in the 3rd assessment in 2006 and 62 countries have signed up to participate [...]
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It’s one of the real benefits of keeping a Learning Log that you can read what other people think about your opinions.
And so it was tonight when I came across a comment on Rob Hill’s blog about a post I’d written on Sunday about Schooling for the Future where Rob suggested that I was being unusually pessimistic about [...]
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