Assessment for Learning Strategy

The DCSF have released the Assessment for Learning Strategy, which follows on from the "Making Good Progress" pilot. It is intended to "support schools in using assessment information to improve and plan provision, as well as improving the quality of the assessment process itself."

“Assessment for learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there”.
- Assessment Reform Group, 2002

Key points:
- The aims of the strategy are that every child knows how they are doing what they need to improve and how to get there; every teacher is equipped to make well informed judgements about pupils attainment, understands the concept of progression and knows how to use their judgement to plan; every school has structured and systematic assessment systems; every parent and carer knows how well their child is doing.
- It highlights three aspects of assessment: day-to-day; periodic and transitional.
- £150m over three years to support schools in delivering the strategy, through the standards fund.
- Yearly targets, for the following three years.
- A timeline of roll out, with training for schools between autumn 2008 and spring 2009, which is the responsibility of the local authority.

"Social Mobility"

The Prime Minister announced a crusade on social mobility within the UK (see Downing St. news release).

Key points:

- Moving to offer nursery places to 2 year old's in the most disadvantaged communities.

- Pilots in certain areas, to give one off payments of £200 to parents who use services such as Children's Centres.

- Publish a plan for child care and early learning and reforms to how these are funded to be released later.

- Doubling the number of Teach First placements, a scheme aimed at getting the best graduates into schools serving disadvantaged communities.

- Increasing, by 10 more local authorities, the use of the Family Intervention Project, a cross government, multi-agency approach to tackle anti-social behaviour by intensive engagement of families.

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Read DCSF News Release.

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Read BBC News article.

See BBC TV News piece

Positive Leadership at school level

This research by the Audit Commission (which was blogged earlier), explored the external factors to school success, of which 6 "Key Features" were identified. One of which, "Positive Leadership at School Level" is summarised below:

Key points:

- The leadership of individual head teachers is critical in mobilising staff, pupils and the community behind the broader agenda. This level of commitment is variable across schools.

- The NCSL, Ofsted, ECM and workforce remodelling are ensuring schools need to develop schools ability to respond to the wider community needs.

- Schools partnerships with local church or other faith communities; local business or the voluntary sector can also be useful.

- Schools need to set out a clear and individual vision, incorporated within school plans, which sets out the school's role in the local area and how the school will work with the whole range of public services in support of both school and community success.

Examples of schools in Kirklees and Leeds inform the report.

External factors for school success

This Audit Commission report from November 2006 focuses on the external factors to school success, rather than the internal ones. It also offers examples of practice and tools to assess effectiveness. Drawing on research from 12 councils, serving deprived areas, the authors concentrate on regeneration and renewal; social housing; community safety; arts, sports and recreation; and youth services.

Key points:
- School improvement and renewal are inseparable issues from neighbourhood improvement and renewal, particularly in the most disadvantaged areas.
- Community safety partnerships and agencies can work with schools to help tackle crime and antisocial behaviour, both in and out of school, thus contributing to neighbourhood renewal and supporting high aspirations and educational achievement in school.
- Housing conditions affect children’s health and ability to learn; and the profile of housing stock in an area affects the intake of a whole school and very often the performance of its pupils.
- Arts, sports and recreation services can support schools in many ways. They may provide additional facilities or resources to deliver the curriculum. They may help build children’s confidence and self esteem in a different context from the classroom, and give disaffected young people a more constructive alternative to crime and antisocial behaviour.
- Making effective use of both universal and targeted youth services can help to foster more successful schools, through linking young people to wider opportunities for personal and social development, and helping to tackle the root causes of underachievement and disaffection through individual support.

Australian - Brighter Futures Intervention programme

Brighter Futures is an Australian voluntary program that provides targeted support tailored to meet the needs of vulnerable families with children aged under nine years or who are expecting a child. Brighter Futures provides families with the necessary services and resources to help prevent an escalation of emerging child protection issues. It aims to strengthen parenting and other skills to promote the necessary conditions for healthy child development and well being. This report provides a baseline of activity in the Program up to September 2007.

Key points:
- The Brighter Futures children are typically under the age of six with a strong representation in the age group of two to four years. More than a third of the children had a medical condition and half of the children had a development delay.
- Nearly half of the children were identified to require intervention for behavior problems. Most of the children also had socio-emotional problems.
- Warmth, hostile parenting and consistency were three dimensions of parenting that had been identified in previous research as having an important impact on children’s subsequent health and development. Parental warmth was identified to significantly correlate with children’s behavior score. On average, the Brighter Futures parents scored slightly higher on the hostile parenting measure than the Australian population as a whole.
- On average, the primary carers assessed themselves as a ‘better than average parent’. However 13 per cent of participants stated that they had some trouble or were not very good at being a parent, compared to less than two per cent of the overall Australian population.
- More than half of the primary carers stated that they sometimes felt that they needed support but could not get it from anyone and 37 % stated that they often or very often felt that way.
- Primary carers demonstrated high levels of satisfaction with the services and the amount of service they received from the Brighter Futures program.

Literacy progress of young children

This study by the Institute of Education followed up the impact on children’s literacy in London schools a year or more after intervention had been received. In the 2005-6 school year literacy progress was compared of the lowest achieving children in 42 schools serving disadvantaged urban areas. The children, aged around 6 years, who received Reading Recovery in their schools were compared with those in schools which provided them with a range of other interventions.

Key points:
- Those children who received Reading Recovery achieved significant gains in all assessments compared with those who did not.
- At the end of the year the literacy achievement of children who had received Reading Recovery (RR) was in line with their chronological age. The comparison group was 14 months behind with an average Reading Age of 5 years 5 months.
- At the end of Year 2 the children who had received RR in Year 1 were achieving within or above their chronological age band on all measures and were still around a year ahead of the comparison children in schools where RR was not available.
- The RR children had an average word reading age of 7y 9m, compared to 6yr 9m for the comparison children. The gender gap that was noticeable amongst low attaining comparison children, with boys lagging behind girls, was not evident in RR schools, where there was no gender gap.
- Writing achievement showed a significant difference between RR and comparison children