Research School Network: Teaching activities: What exactly will the adults be doing differently? – part 5 Our latest blog in our Pupil Premium Strategy series considers how we can achieve the outcomes we set for disadvantaged pupils.

In the previous blog we published in our series on writing an effective Pupil Premium Strategy, we looked at the importance of setting ambitious but realistic outcomes for disadvantaged pupils. We also considered how success criteria need to be precise and measurable in order to make it possible to evaluate whether or not the strategy is making a difference.

In this post, we turn our attention to how schools intend to achieve these outcomes: improving the quality of teaching through a small number of carefully selected and clearly defined activities.

Unfortunately, many schools don’t tend to do either of these things particularly well, at least judging by what is written in their strategy documents. In the majority of cases, there are far too many activities selected to improve the quality of teaching, and many of them are not very well defined. From an outsider’s perspective, it is often difficult to see how they are likely to make much of a difference.

While Pupil Premium funding can be used for things like recruitment and retention or purchasing curriculum and assessment materials, the biggest difference to pupils’ learning is likely to come from developing teachers’ expertise and improving what happens in classrooms every day.

This is essentially the rationale behind the EEF’s tiered approach: prioritising high-quality teaching as the foundation of an effective Pupil Premium Strategy. Improving teaching benefits all pupils, but is particularly important for improving the outcomes of disadvantaged pupils.

Doing fewer things better

But if improving teaching makes such a difference, why am I suggesting that schools should concentrate on doing less rather than more?

To answer this question, it might be useful to provide a brief example from my own school context. 

Like many schools, we have been using Show Me as part of our core routines for nearly 10 years. Show Me is one of the ways we check for whole-class understanding by asking pupils to show a short answer (one or two words, a letter or a number) on the count of three. The teacher then scans the room to check understanding and adapt accordingly.

That is what is supposed to happen. But even though Show Me is heavily codified in my school, we practise it regularly in small groups and talk about its importance in briefings, there is still inconsistency.

Pupils raise their boards before the count is finished. Pupils write too small or in a colour you cannot see. Or worse, the task set requires a paragraph or complex calculation that you cannot possibly scan and react to from the front of the class!

Whenever this happens, the inferences the teacher can make about pupils’ understanding become a little less valid.

And all this happens in a school where the routine is tight. Where there is regular training and feedback. Where the routine is prioritised. Not because teachers don’t care or don’t understand, but because, well, they are human beings, and human beings are not automatons.

My point is that embedding Show Me has taken a long time, and it is still not quite right in my school. It’s good, but it could be better. This is after nearly 10 years.

Show Me is a relatively straightforward teaching strategy with a fairly simple rationale. So if it takes that long to embed Show Me consistently, how long might it take to improve something far less clearly defined? Something like Quality First Teaching, for instance, or perhaps more pertinently, adaptive teaching?

Being precise about what needs to change

There are two key messages I am trying to tease out here. The first is the need to reduce the number of teaching activities that schools work on at any one time. The second is to be precise – I mean really precise – about defining them. Ask yourself the question: what exactly do we want the adults to be doing differently?

The two most common ways that schools think about improving teaching are both flawed, but in different ways.

The first is to select a nebulous focus like improving Quality First Teaching, adaptive teaching or, more recently, inclusive teaching. It is never entirely clear what these things mean, which runs the risk of widespread misunderstanding and, in turn, misapplication.

Improving adaptive teaching or developing literacy teaching feel more like a life’s work than a realistic focus for the lifetime of a strategy. 

Rather than focusing on these behemoth goals, it would be far more realistic, and far more likely to succeed, if the focus were on something precise. For example, improving teacher modelling to support pupils’ self-regulation strategies, or developing vocabulary teaching as the first branch of a long-term commitment to literacy development.

Even these examples, however, require further definition. What aspects of self-regulation will teachers model? What will this look like in practice? What are the essential or core components that we expect to see? Without answering these questions, we are still describing what we want to improve rather than precisely what we want teachers to do.

Professional development is not the outcome

The second issue around teaching activities that I notice when looking at Pupil Premium Strategies is that many schools opt to improve teaching through professional development.

Well, yes. Whatever teaching strategy is chosen, there will inevitably be some requirement to improve the knowledge and expertise of teachers in relation to that particular strategy or approach.

But this kind of logical connection between the desired activity and the means of putting it into practice is rarely what we see. Instead, professional development sometimes seems to be more for professional development’s sake. Now, we would all want teachers to continue developing their practice and have some agency in the areas of their own development, but this is not really the point of the Pupil Premium Strategy.

The purpose of any professional development activities chosen in this section is to support the implementation of the specific improvements to teaching that the strategy has identified.

Addressing the underachievement of pupils from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds is going to require teachers to work relentlessly and collectively towards these shared priorities. It’s challenging enough to improve teaching and develop consistency across a school, as my example above illustrates, without a professional development programme in which every teacher is pursuing an entirely different improvement priority.

Instructional coaching may well help individual teachers improve, but unless that improvement is connected to the teaching activities identified in the strategy, we should be cautious about assuming it will address the particular challenges experienced by disadvantaged pupils.

This is not an argument for removing teacher autonomy or expecting every teacher to teach in precisely the same way. Teachers need to exercise professional judgement about how they apply particular approaches within their subjects and classrooms. But there is an important difference between allowing professional judgement in how an agreed approach is implemented and allowing everyone to decide independently what they are trying to improve.

If there is one thing I have learned about how to start to address educational disadvantage, it is that everyone has to understand the challenge and lean hard into the collective response.

Using evidence to inform decisions, not justify them

Another pattern that emerges in the selection of teaching activities in schools’ Pupil Premium Strategies is the retrofitting of evidence in support of decisions already made. This can sometimes be driven by our pedagogical ideologies: we think this is the best way for pupils to learn, so we focus on evidence that supports this approach, irrespective of whether it is the strongest evidence available.

In a similar vein, strategies sometimes cite evidence that does not really warrant the selection of the particular teaching activity. The EEF Toolkit entry on small-group tuition, for instance, might be used to support additional staffing in core subjects, or the evidence on feedback used to justify a new marking policy. 

Neither is necessarily a poor decision, but the evidence cited does not automatically justify the activity selected. Employing an additional teacher is not the same as providing effective small-group tuition, just as introducing a new marking policy does not necessarily improve the quality of feedback pupils receive.

There is an important distinction between using evidence to inform our decisions and finding evidence to justify decisions we have already made.

The recently updated EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium is particularly helpful here. It encourages schools to use reliable research evidence to inform the selection of activities, rather than simply searching for evidence to support existing practice. It also emphasises the importance of considering whether an approach is appropriate for the pupils we are trying to support and feasible to implement in our particular context.

Evidence is not enough: feasibility and fit matter too

This brings me to one final consideration when selecting teaching activities: feasibility and fit.

Something might be supported by strong evidence, address an identified challenge and be precisely defined, but that does not necessarily mean it is the right thing for your school to do. Do you have the expertise, time and resources to implement it well? Does it complement your existing curriculum and teaching approaches? How does it fit alongside the other priorities that teachers are already working on?

It may be the right approach but simply at the wrong time. Sometimes we have to be realistic about our capacity for change. I genuinely believe that institutional bandwidth is a thing.

My example of Show Me illustrates just how much sustained attention even a relatively straightforward change in teaching practice can require. 

If we are serious about improving the quality of teaching, we need to be equally serious about the demands that improvement places on teachers and leaders. 

Selecting another activity because it appears in the Toolkit or because another school has implemented it successfully is not, in itself, a particularly convincing rationale.

Four questions worth asking

So, before adding another teaching activity to your Pupil Premium Strategy, I would encourage you to ask four questions:

1. Why this activity? Which of the challenges we have identified does this activity address? There has to be a clear thread between the challenge, the intended outcome and the response.
2. What exactly is the change? What do we expect adults to do differently, and have we defined the core components clearly enough? This doesn’t have to appear on the strategy but should be implied on it and definitely exist somewhere.
3. Why should it work in this school? Is there good evidence to support the approach, and does it fit our particular context?
4. Can we do it well at this moment in time? Do we have the capacity, expertise and commitment to implement it properly? Be honest: can we take this on right now and do it justice?

None of this is particularly complicated in principle. But as anyone who has spent time trying to improve teaching across a school will recognise, it is much, much harder in practice.

Ultimately, a Pupil Premium Strategy is not made stronger by the number of teaching activities it contains, the breadth of its ambitions or the volume of research cited in support of them.

It is made stronger by selecting a small number of well-evidenced, carefully defined and feasible activities that address the challenges disadvantaged pupils are experiencing, and then committing the time and collective attention required to implement them well.

Above all, we need to be able to answer one deceptively simple question: what exactly will the adults be doing differently?

Because if we cannot answer that, it is difficult to see why we should expect anything to change for the pupils’ outcomes we are trying to shift.