The document discusses priorities for Scottish primary schools, including improving consistency in teacher judgement of CfE levels, closing attainment gaps, and the importance of school leadership and parental engagement in achieving excellence and equity for all students. Standardized assessments and moderation within and across schools are seen as important ways to improve consistency, while literacy interventions and developing student self-belief are highlighted as means of reducing attainment gaps.

1. AHDS Annual
Conference 2016
Graeme Logan
Education Scotland
@GLoganEd

2. Overview
• Key priorities for primary schools (CfE, NIF)
• Achieving excellence and equity
• The importance of primary school leaders
• New inspection model – early reflections
• What next?
• Questions and
discussion

3. Curriculum for Excellence
2 iconic resources:
Es&Os for planning
Benchmarks for assessment
Streamline and simplify your approaches whilst
still ensuring you have a clear line of sight on the
progress of all children.

8. Curriculum for Excellence
Biggest challenge and top priority for BGE in
2016/17:
Improving confidence and consistency of teacher
judgement of achievement of CfE levels in
literacy and numeracy.

9. Improving consistency of teacher
judgement
• Moderation within and across schools, local
authority and national levels
• Any model of assessment based on teacher
judgement has some level of variance
• Progress since 2014/15 data collection

10. What needs to happen within and
across schools
• Clarity on the assessment model
• Constant focus and reflection on standards. 2
types of moderation are embedded (focused
and on-going)
• Use the national benchmarks
• Validating quality of teacher judgement top
priority for self-evaluation (QI 2.3 learning,
teaching and assessment)

11. What next for the NIF?
• Comms around the BGE assessment model
• Piloting standardised assessment as part of
the BGE assessment model
• Guidance on school improvement planning –
January 2016
• New NIF report publishing Dec/ Jan, along
with CfE levels at local and national level
• Moving towards one national improvement
plan for education on an annual basis

12. Vision for Scottish Education
• Excellence through raising attainment:
ensuring that every child achieves the highest
standards in literacy and numeracy and the
right range of skills, qualifications and
achievements to allow them to succeed; and
• Achieving equity: ensuring every child has the
same opportunity to succeed. The Scottish
Attainment Challenge will help to focus our
efforts and deliver this ambition.
• “Be rigorous about the gaps to be closed and
pursue relentlessly “ closing the gap” and
“raising the bar simultaneously”Improving Schools in
Scotland: An OECD Perspective 2015

13. The defining mission
The defining mission of this Government is to close the poverty-
related educational attainment gap. The Programme for
Government set out the top priority of raising standards in
schools and delivering opportunities for our young people to
succeed no matter their family background.
‘Closing the gap’ is a shorthand expression for all our work to
break the cycle of depravation for children and families living in
poverty

14. p15

16. The ‘gap’ continues to widen
and is evident in a range of data
• SSLN results (P4, P7, S3)
• National Qualifications
• Attendance and exclusions: exclusion rates
per 1,000 children are 52.0 for children living
in the most deprived quintile and 7.9 for
children living in the least deprived quintile

17. • Expected progress for all
• Excellent progress for many
• All SIMD bands proportionately represented in
the ‘excellent’
• In other words, no pattern of lower attainment
for children in lower SIMD bands
Closing the gap – how will we
know?

18. 2 key questions for every school
- To what extent are you ensuring
excellence in learning, teaching and
assessment ?
- In what ways can you demonstrate
improvements to equity for all learners?

19. In what ways will your school
demonstrate improvements to excellence
and equity for all learners
Organise your self-evaluation summary
under excellence and equity ?
Organise your remits, time, monitoring
calendars….. under excellence and equity?

20. Staffroom graffiti wall?
What is has your personal impact
on excellence and equity been this
week?

21. Literacy interventions – year 1 –
schools programme
– Support of speech and language therapists (9 LAs,
20 schools)
– Storytellers (6 LAs, 17 schools)
– Active Literacy strategies (4 LAs, 15 schools);
– Novel studies (4 LAs, 13 schools);
– Higher order approaches in reading (6 LAs, 11
schools);
– Paired Reading/Reading Buddies (5 LAs, 10
schools);
– Outdoor literacy (3 LAs, 13 schools);

22. ‘reading to and with children matters for both mothers and fathers, but the
impact of fathers reading – to children after they have started school –
appears even greater. Children whose fathers read with them less than once
a week
at the age of five had, by the
time they were seven, a
reading level half a year
behind those who had been
read to daily’
Read on, get on
(Save the Children, 2014)
Should any child leave primary
school without functional
Literacy and numeracy skills?

23. Importance of parents and families
• Number of words spoken to children by adults by the age of
36 months
– In professional families: 35 million
– In other working-class families: 20 million
– In families on welfare: 10 million
• Kinds of reinforcements:
positive negative
– professional 500,000 50,000
– working-class 200,000 100,000
– welfare 100,000 200,000
Dylan Wiliam – Attainment Challenge Masterclass - 2016

24. Self-Talk
• What do you tell yourself?
• How often do you catch yourself being good?
• Perceptions of self and others
• 4:1 ratio?
• Confidence, self-esteem, ability to overcome obstacles
• OECD (2015) noted that Scottish learners are resilient,
increasingly confident and motivated in learning

25. Parental involvement or engagement?
Parental involvement with schools
• Going on trips, helping in class, parents’ evenings
Parental involvement with schooling
• Helping with homework, keeping track of coursework
Parental engagement with children’s learning
• Moral support, interest in learning, guidance, time, quality
talk
Janet Goodall, University of Bath, 2016

26. There is a progressive continuum between parental
involvement and parental engagement.
The movement between the two represents a ‘shift in
emphasis, away from the relationship between parents and
schools, to a focus on the relationship between parents and
their children’s learning’
(Goodall and Montgomery, 2014, p399).
What do we mean by Parental Engagement?

27. Not just supporting the school but helping the school to
improve…….
Key Challenge for Parent Councils

28. • Evaluation using a range of data – know the gap before you can close it
• Curriculum Design – closing the vocabulary gap
• Working with partners – giving every young person the widest range of
opportunities to achieve. 50 things to do before the age of 15…..
• Improving literacy, health and wellbeing and numeracy in a range of ways
• Aspiration, self-belief, networks and connections
• Family learning
Achieving equity – some of the ways forward….

29. The role of school leaders….
• Create the best learning environment for staff?
• Look at your chain of impact
• Change the destiny of children living in poverty. Nature
gives us the ‘bell curve’ of attainment levels. If we don’t
change the bell curve we are not doing our jobs
properly!
• Are we always looking for the next big thing when we
haven’t done the last big thing well enough? (eg AiFL)
• Very high quality learning and teaching closes gaps.
Average learning and teaching doesn’t
(Dylan William 2016)

30. The role of school leaders….
• Helping to make the complex simple
• Being the narrator of the school
• Being bold and brave – taking full advantage of
curriculum flexibility
• Making choices and decisions (including saying
‘no’) with a strong rationale on what is best for
your children in your community
• Standards… what you permit you promote
• Not doing everything all the time!
• De-cluttering the curriculum?

31. “School leadership is a vital part of equity and
excellence in education. It is second only to the
quality of a school’s teachers as within-school
influence on educational quality and outcomes.
The most important responsibility of school
leadership is leadership for learning.”
Improving schools in Scotland: an OECD Perspective 2015
Leadership focused on Excellence and Equity:

32. being “leaderly”…
• clear focus on big picture
• distinguish technical from adaptive
• an understanding of people and how to get best from them
- the ability to build confidence
• resilience – it will rarely be a smooth, easy path
• bravery
• the ability to make connections and build partnerships
• the ability to manage change
• the ability to manage risk
• to be demanding and
painstaking
• hungry to learn

34. What will we hope to see in relation to
the 3 NIF Quality Indicators?
Leadership of change
• Clarity and impact of shared vision (not too generic!)
• Values and aims shared across school community,
alive and underpinning decision making and daily
actions
• Consistent impact from improvement planning across
the school
• Clear methods and approaches to implementing
change, which everyone buys into and understands.

35. What will we hope to see in relation to
the 3 NIF Quality Indicators?
Learning, teaching and assessment:
• impact of the curriculum and clarity of approaches
• quality of learning and engagement
• quality of teaching
• effective use of assessment
• clear, streamlined, high impact approaches to
planning, tracking and monitoring
• well planned, targeted additional interventions

36. What will we hope to see in relation to
the 3 NIF Quality Indicators?
Raising attainment and achievement:
• quality of attainment in literacy and numeracy
• trends in attainment over time
• overall quality and breadth of learners’ achievements
• ways in which the school can demonstrate equity for all
learners.
• Discuss and agree what you would expect to see in your
school in relation to the 3 NIF QIs and the other QIs which
are most relevant to your current priorities

37. Summary: what will excellent primary
schools be doing?
• Streamlining and simplifying approaches to planning and
assessment, focusing on the best possible progression for
all children
• Clear learning and teaching strategies in place to close
‘gaps’ in achievement
• Highest levels of confidence and consistency in teacher
judgement of CfE levels
• Proportionate approach to monitoring and evaluation
• Generic and targeted elements to improvement plan
priorities
• Collaboration: essential for excellence