He said he used to make a point of dealing with all of his emails before he left work on Friday, but gradually this became impossible to do because, he eventually realised, everyone else was doing the same and “dealing with” meant forwarding to someone else, usually him!

So his solution, simple when you think about it, was not to open his inbox after midday Friday. He reckoned there was little that couldn’t wait until Monday and even resolve itself if left to settle over the weekend.

In a previous post you mentioned the work on ‘emotional intelligence’ that your school has developed - how much do you think this has contributed to raising attainment? I am not a teacher, but I do think this kind of work has a great deal to offer in equiping children from a very young age with the kind of skills that are needed to learn successfully.
Regards

Steven Wray

Breadth of experience and the language enrichment that goes with it is the missing link for so many of our pupils. To attain in the way Scottish Society expects (ie 5-14 assessment in primaries and the 4 capacities of C for E) requires a level of language that many of our pupils can’t reach. That coupled with their diminished experiences and opportunities are more than a school can change entirely alone. Interestingly, a recent TES article spoke of how the middle class bent for after school enrichment classes contribute significantly to the attainments and achievements of those pupils, widening the gap even further.

This sounds like I see our community in a deficit way. I don’t. There is, for example, a wealth of community and extended family loyalty and support here that is an achievement not recognised by our education system or found in other parts of society.

It’s a complex question we wrestle daily with.

If we provide a standardised service to communities with different needs we really shouldn’t be surprised when we get different outcomes. If we keep on delivering services in the same way we will not alter the simple fact that outcomes in health and education are strongly predicted by parental income / social class.

Inequality in outcomes of health and education represents what the Chief Medical Officer Harry Burns calls a ‘wicked problem’. Such problems have multiple interlocking causes and therefore do not have easy answers, are not amenable to quick fixes and can only be addressed effectively on multiple fronts. The good news is that human beings are good at solving wicked problems, because we can think creatively and learn from experience and our mistakes. It seems to me that Don’s options wrestle with the challenge of providing room for creativity in addressing a difficult problem whilst also meeting the need to ensure that school are accountable for the service that they provide.

Do the options Don has outlined create the space for schools to be creative about meeting the needs of their particular communities whilst being accountable for improving educational outcomes? I don’t know but my belief is that one option is not going to be enough. Certainly in regard to health inequality we don’t yet know enough to be confident about any particular option or set of options.

The outcome I would like to see is one that allows schools to try the options that seem best to them for working on the problems of inequality with the communities they serve. As a maths teacher once told me ‘its more important to me that you try your best and show your workings than it is to get the answer right – because that way I know you’re learning’. Perhaps head teachers can be held to account by showing their working on the problem of equity rather than just the final outcomes.

Using an outcome based approach the Local Authority agrees a set of outcomes which will relate to the achievement and attainment of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

This is a target which appears to have been agreed without any consideration of the capability of the system. That’s an approach likely to have unintended adverse consequences elsewhere, as it leads to gaming.

Perhaps an alternative quality-based approach would be to examine the results achieved by the system as it is now; see how consistent they are; start to think about why the results might vary, and look for ways to improve the system to achieve more consistently good results?

Where is the school that is managing to overcome all these barriers to significantly change the outcomes for groups of ‘disadvantaged’ pupils?

I work in a school with a high FSM Entitlement, 22% If I remember, with many going on to Uni. and enjoying the fruits and benefits that follow, I believe good teaching and pupil attitudes to school and learning along with aspirational parents or sometimes grandparents, has this ‘outcome’. The teachers can be aspirational if there is no home version. These pupils have become - architects, product designers, graphic designers, tech teachers etc. Sometimes these pupils have become turned on by enjoying a subject, been inspired etc.

The school above has had higher than avg. Higher and Adv Higher pass rates for years, in fact ‘beat’ the Indp. Schools pass rates for all Adv Highers last year.

Pupil and Teacher working setup is the key. Not always income.

Maybe the school above has started the ‘journey’ to remove barriers, irespective of the LEA funding and policies.

Nick

“You’re only as good as your day off!”