As another month passes by in the world of education, another wave of new initiatives start to appear on the horizon, disseminated by the Department for Education and adopted obligingly by school leaders. Recent announcements have included a “passport” of activities for primary school children and mandatory teaching basic life-saving skills and first aid to all children. In isolation, these are positive contributions to the overall education of a child. However, in the current accountability driven environment, they add to the ever increasing ‘tick list’ of interventions a school must deliver.
Performance measures such as Progress 8 reported in league tables, have led to a culture of intervention within our education system, where the focus for teachers has shifted from providing quality first teaching to implementing intervention measures at every turn. These interventions are veiled as essential tasks to ensure a child makes progress but often, the additional work by teachers is used to demonstrate school leaders are acting to boost their performance measures should an inspector call.
In a significant number of schools, this takes the form of extra lessons every evening for students preparing for examinations, breaks and lunches taken up by catch-up sessions and school holidays mottled with revision sessions.
Only 1-14 per cent of educational outcomes can be attributed to the work of teachers and within that, there are plenty more factors outside of the individual teacher’s control so this disproportionate focus on intervention and showing you are trying to tackle underperformance detracts from the great work which could be happening in schools.
Ofsted’s new inspection framework will pass judgement on the ‘quality of education’ rather than focussing incessantly on outcomes, placing much weight on test and exam results. The new framework will look for a broad and balanced curriculum, something that should provide us with a good opportunity to break away from this culture of intervention and reset the system.
Schools are in a catch22, league tables and performance measures mean schools want to do anything they can to gain those extra grades – any deviation from this could leave schools designated as ‘failing’ and therefore vulnerable to ‘intervention’. Whilst Ofsted with their new framework would remove the incentive for school to show they are doing everything they can, though an endless regime of intervention. Whilst the government still sets floor standards and fanaticises league tables schools will still need to ‘keep their grades up’.
The only solution is for school leaders to take the decision to stop playing for league tables, protect their staff wellbeing and bring the focus back onto their overall curriculum offer and quality first teaching – interventions provide a distraction from what teachers do best and add exponentially to teacher workload. Whilst schools work to appease Ofsted and the Department for Education’s performance measures school leaders will find they are adding to the workload demands on staff and diminishing what can actually be construed as a well-rounded education.
Leaders need to be brave and put an end to the intervention culture. As staff workload decreases and the focus shifts back onto quality first teaching the outcomes for students will improve. Department for Education announcements for adding first aid and activity passports will be enriching but not all consuming and certainly not used to hold schools and their teachers to account.
The future of education needs to be far removed from the current culture of intervention and those brave enough to make the changes needed first will reap the rewards. Schools need to be about more than an endless tick list of intervention strategies and avoiding floor standards. Moving away from intervention at every turn and focussing solely on creating a curriculum, which is enriching for students and had quality teaching at its heart will yield greater results for all of our students and restore some balance in an intervention obsessed education system.