Education, Heartbeat of a Nation - Policy Network

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groups. We need to grasp theopportunities offered by CurriculumOnline – the ‘digital curriculum’ –which can supplement the standardcurriculum offer. We need to use thepower of ICT to organise learning inmore effective units of time, and alsotake schooling beyond school time. Weneed to use ICT to make for moreefficient and useful assessment andtesting. And we need to see a stepchange in the quality of theeducational tools available to theteacher, with genuine savings in timeand workload, as it becomes the normfor every teacher to plan, teach, andmark using a laptop.Second, there have been dramaticsteps forward in developing anintelligent accountability framework ineducation, based on national tests.70 per cent ofyoung people atsecondary schoolsay that theyare bored.But we must get the right balancebetween assessment for learning andassessment of learning.Assessment for learning is the use ofdata to promote student learning.Other teachers are involved throughprofessional discussion of themeaning of the data and subsequentadjustment of teaching strategies.Students are involved by settingtargets, developing action plans, andevaluating success.To ensure high quality teaching in the21st century, together we need toensure that data will be used at fourlevels. In classrooms to identifystudent learning needs and theappropriate teaching strategies, withevery pupil working towards apersonal set of learning targets. Inschools to celebrate good teachingand plan professional developmentactivities. In Local EducationAuthorities appropriately to offerchallenge and support. Everyunderperforming school anddepartment needs to be on the road toimprovement. At the National levelpolicy and resources need to beproperly developed and allocated.Third, if we are going to focus betteron effective teaching, and if we aregoing to improve it for the majority, weneed world class ContinuousProfessional Development. Theresearch suggests too many in-serviceinitiatives do not meet their goals. It isalso striking how few schools organisetraining on a cross-curricular basis.We need to work with schools toensure that high quality staffdevelopment in the ‘workshop’, theINSET course where teachers gainunderstanding and seedemonstrations, is related back to the‘workplace’ – the classroom andschool. That requires the opportunityfor sustained practice, collaborationand peer coachingIn Japan, the dominant form of inservicetraining is the ‘lesson study’,where groups of teachers work on thedesign, implementation, testing, andimprovement of “research lessons”.We need to make professionaldevelopment more demanding,collaborative, well paced and useful –exactly what we demand for ourstudents.This brings me to my fourth issue – theradical reform of the school workforce.vol 2.1 progressive politics 23
21st Century Public Services – David MilibandWe are committed to an expanding,better paid, and better supportedteaching force. But we also know itmakes no sense for the teachingprofession to be untouched by thebreakdown in demarcations, and by thedevelopment of front-line flexibility,that is the basis of effective serviceacross the public and private sectors.In October, the Government maderadical proposals for reform of theteachers’ contract, and for remodellingof the school workforce. The aim is tocut teachers’ workload, reverse thetrend towards a smaller and smallershare of the teaching week beingdevoted to teaching and at the sametime raise the quality of the learningexperience. The key is to make muchmore use of a wider range of adultexpertise, from the learning mentorhelping children with behaviourproblems to the lab technician inscience lessons to the languagespecialist.To realise the vision of morepersonalised teaching and learning wemust embrace the chance to do thingsdifferently: different ways of doingadmin tasks, different ways ofproviding cover, different ways ofpromoting high quality learning, underthe leadership of a qualified teacher,but not only using qualified teachers.This is not a threat to professionalismbut a new support for it.Fifth, no change is likely without highquality school leadership. In a systemof devolved but accountableresponsibility institutional leadershipis key.The quality of each lesson is not onlydown to each teacher. It needs to besupported by a whole school approachto teaching and learning, every schoola professional community of teacherswho are also informed learners andeffective colleagues. Togethertherefore we need to support today’sleaders to ask and answerfundamental questions about schoolorganisation and practice.The devolution of budgets meansthere is more flexibility for schoolleaders, but more hard choices too.These are choices for Heads and forGovernors: they need the capacity andsupport to make them. Performancemanagement should be a right not aWe need to see astep change in thequality of theeducational toolsavailable toteachers.threat. Every leader needs to lead thedevelopment of his or her staff. Wehave made significant strides forwardin the UK with the introduction ofthreshold payments which offer a 10%pay boost to teachers passing aperformance threshold after five yearsin the profession. Now we face thechallenge of ensuring that the paysystem is an effective part of wholeschoolimprovement strategies. Andthe leadership team itself needs to bedeveloping, engaging a range ofskilled professionals to provideeffective leadership for the school.We have taken the first, important stepin establishing the National College forSchool Leadership. The newLeadership Incentive Grant (LIG)represents dedicated money for the1400 most challenging secondaryschools (out of 3500) to raise thequality of leadership.Finally, we need to link what is done inthe classroom to provision beyond theclassroom. It stands to reason thatespecially for disadvantaged childrenschooling needs to compensate forfamily circumstances, but it can only doso if provision out of school hoursprovides for motivation and engagementas well. This calls not for longer hours forteachers but for the development ofserious youth provision, using theotherwise fallow school estate.Reform Works: Schools asEngines of ChangeEngland has historically had aschooling system where the bestprovision was world class, but theaverage was not good enough. Thatremains a fair summary of ourchallenge. Since 1997 I am pleased tobe able to report significant progress –such that the OECD reports that wehave one of the fastest-improvingeducation systems in theindustrialised world.The foundation of progress has been inprimary education, where threequarters of 11 year olds now leaveschool reading, writing and countingwell, and one third have the readingage of a 12 or 13 year old. Significantlythe fastest progress has been in theareas of greatest disadvantage; andvital to my argument about the focuson how we teach, the reason forimprovement has been concentratedattention on the teaching techniquesof all 220 000 primary school teachersin the country.In the secondary sector we are seeingindications of fast improvement in somedisadvantaged city areas that have beenpiloting some of our nationalprogrammes, summarised in our24 progressive politics vol 2.1
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