Late last month the Sutton Trust and Durham University released a report ranking 21 different strategies for improving pupil achievement. The report summarised the evidence relating to the strategies and commented on their value for money. The intention of the report is to provide schools with some evidence on what the ‘pupil premium’ (set to be £430, per qualifying pupil, in 2011/12) is best spent on. The results are interesting, but perhaps of limited use for schools.
The Sutton Trust makes clear that the report should not be read as a prescriptive list of what schools should be introducing, but it is a ‘toolkit’ which schools can use to see if their planned strategy is a ‘better bet than others’. The Sutton Trust also stresses that it should not be assumed that the higher-ranking strategies would work well in all situations.
Despite these caveats it is still worth looking closely at some of the results. Perhaps worryingly, some of the traditional strategies widely used by schools are not judged to be particularly effective, or value for money. Setting class groups by aptitude or ‘ability grouping’ ranks 19th, the use of teaching assistants comes in at 16th and after school programmes, a strategy pushed by many academy schools, places 13th out of 21. On closer inspection however, some of the strategies may not be as ineffective, or indeed effective, as their ranking suggests.
The strategies ranked 1st and 2nd respectively, ‘effective feedback’ (letting pupils know how they are getting on relative to their goals) and ‘meta-cognition and self-regulation strategies’ (encouraging pupils to think about their learning and evaluate it) are arguably easier to implement in smaller classes, however reducing class sizes is only ranked 12th. The report concludes that reducing class sizes is only effective if class sizes can be lowered to 20, and that using teaching assistants as a way to artificially reduce class sizes is not effective. Nevertheless it could be the case that effective feedback and meta-cognition and self-regulation strategies are best implemented in smaller classes, or those with well-trained/effective teaching assistants. It quickly becomes clear that few strategies are implemented in isolation.
Similarly the ‘assessment for learning’ strategy currently operating in some schools reportedly works better in smaller classes, which, once again, opens up the debate about whether teaching assistants could do this artificially, or if money would be better spent employing more teachers to do so.
Another interesting result is the fact that parental involvement is only ranked 9th, the report makes it clear that although parental involvement is associated with pupil success, more parental involvement does not necessarily mean more success. Homework is described as having a ‘moderate impact for a very low cost’, and is ranked 6th, however it would appear intuitive that parental involvement in encouraging their child with homework, and perhaps assisting them, could be highly beneficial. Once again it is clear that strategies cannot be examined in isolation.
I’m sure that the Sutton Trust would accept this; the difficulty however is testing how successful strategies interact with one another. This is perhaps why it could be more useful for schools to heed another bit of advice given in the report:
‘The aim of the toolkit is to encourage schools and teachers to make their own informed choices and adopt a more ‘evidence based’ approach: they will need to monitor the effect of their chosen approach and evaluate the investment to ensure it is having the desired effect.’
This captures the crux of the situation, what schools really need is the time and expertise to monitor, refine and develop strategies that work best for them. This should not be forgotten and is hopefully how the pupil premium will be used – not just as money to be spent picking from a shopping list of possible interventions and strategies.
