There’s a common idea in schools that the best way to get kids who are living in poverty on track academically is simply to teach them better. Sometimes we over-complicate things in schools. But in this case, we’re over-simplifying them. It is obviously a good thing (although not easy) to improve teaching in a school. But it is not obviously going to reduce the attainment gap between kids who are eligible for free school meals and those who are not. Here’s why not….
What ‘quality first teaching’ means
For teachers and support staff working with children with special educational needs or disabilities in mainstream schools, ‘quality first teaching’ is usually used to describe the principle of meeting the needs of all children in the classroom as far as possible. Following the principle has very specific consequences: teachers should be trained to recognise certain learning difficulties; they should be equipped with techniques to support children with special educational needs and disabilities. These techniques are not without controversy. There is much less evidence than we would like on the value of changing the slideshow’s font or providing coloured overlays. Nor are they always adequate. We may still struggle to keep the child with ADHD in the classroom. But we know what we’re trying to achieve and there are many lists out there of things to try out as we try to get there.
In recent years, the term ‘quality first teaching’ has been translated into a new context with a new meaning. There is a growing breed of teacher specialist in schools with responsibility for the attainment gap between children who are eligible for free school meals and children who are not. In this context, ‘quality first teaching’ is being used to relay the idea that the best thing that a school can do for children on free school meals–the thing that will most likely reduce the attainment gap–is to improve the quality of teaching across the whole school. (How do I know teachers are meaning this? Because I asked them.)
The new message of quality first teaching does not emerge directly from research
The idea that good teaching is the most important lever schools have in improving the education of children eligible for free school meals is presented to schools as the product of research: guidelines endorsed by the Department for Education advise schools to spend 50% of their pupil premium (more than £1 billion across England’s schools) on improving teaching quality.
This messaging isn’t the result, however, of researchers comparing many different kinds of approaches for children eligible for free school meals. It isn’t even the result of measuring the consequences on children eligible for free school meals when schools attempt to improve the quality of teaching. There have been a number of studies that attempt to measure the variation in examination and test results between different teachers, to estimate how much a good teacher can add to a child’s test score (the answer so far is between 10 and 20%). One of these papers suggests a larger impact of around 50% and the children in this study are possibly from poorer households than the other studies. So we might conclude that good teaching is more important for kids who are from lower-income homes. But the data is scanty because the study was published in 1992 using data collected in the early 1970s. There were only a handful of children for each teacher in this study (so we might not be surprised that the variance in this case is large). Nor was it clear how to improve the quality of teaching; some of the effectiveness of these teachers was associated with having the same ethnicity of the students (all of these seven- to twelve- year-olds were black).
On the other hand, there are schools where senior leaders have been attempting to improve the quality of teaching for the sake of children eligible for free school meals and yet the attainment gap has not decreased but got bigger. We’ve tried everything, they’ve told me. Head in hands, it is frustrating and confusing, this is supposed to work: what are we doing wrong? There are teachers everywhere who champion children from poorer homes and who are working hard to support them. Why don’t we see the impact of training teachers on metacognition, questionning and feedback on our attainment gap?
The scattergun approach to improving teaching across schools
Improving the quality of teaching is a good thing to do (although perhaps an entirely different thing to getting better examination results–we could just bring back the cane to do that). But there are many complicated relationships between socio-economic background and good teaching. I suggest that there are certain kinds of good teaching that ‘click’ with children from more affluent homes. To start with, the children who are eligible for free school meals need to be in the classroom to receive the improved teaching. And then they still might not be in the same place as others to benefit from it. Learning is a slow process of a thousand small increments that comes from habit. It is a process of hanging more and more things from the pegs that have already been drilled (more or less securely) in the mind. What is the most crucial thing that is holding children who live in poverty from learning (on average) as quickly as others? We just don’t know how much a role teaching plays in that and what kinds of teaching are important.
As a result of putting quality first teaching to practice (in the context of reducing socio-economic attainment gaps), senior leaders have implemented dozens of different practices. These include staff training sessions, bonus payments for new staff, learning walks, seating software, after-school interventions, curriculum initiatives, changes to performance management practices, timetabling changes, and more.
We know all of this because schools are being asked to justify their policies by reference to research evidence. In most cases, school leaders cite the message that quality-first teaching is the most important thing for their students eligible for free school meals. This acts a blank cheque to do anything they beleive might improve teaching. There is no guarantee that any practice chosen is well-evidenced. So the bureacratic measures potentially do more harm than good, if only by wasting the time of our teaching workforce. But more dangerously, they leave teachers with the false security that their school policies are backed by evidence and they are doing the best thing they can.
Thank you for reading. All comments welcome.