If schools are really going to crack the issue of chronic educational underachievement among traditionally disadvantaged groups of pupils, they need reliable data on the scale and varied nature of their attainment gap, and how they compare to other schools in a similar context. This will allow them to learn from other schools about how to improve.
An intelligent examination of data has become the starting point for schools to take action to improve the everyday processes – such as leadership, management, teaching and learning, teacher development and pupil and parent involvement – which are the bread and butter of school life. In short the process of school self or external review and subsequent action is underpinned by the discerning use of data.
It used not to be so.
Some 20 years ago hardly any schools used data relating to pupil performance to measure their own progress. Before the publication of test and exam results very little data was available unless, at the primary school, some rare keen leader had kept longitudinal reading or National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) maths scores. At secondary school awards evenings – and not every school ran one – the head would give a broad brush and selective picture of exam results and other sporting successes. Subjective judgment, anecdote and newly-introduced public inspection reports from Ofsted were the means by which parents and the public judged schools.
Now, as set out above, there is a plethora of data used either by the public to judge the school's effectiveness or by the school as a springboard for further improvement, including the data available to schools through RAISE online, the Fischer Family Trust and more recently the Data Dashboard. My argument is that while these are important sources of information, they suffer from the disadvantage that they make the schools in the data sets anonymous. Yes, you can see where your school stands in relation to others – whether for example you are in the top or bottom 10% or 20% of performers on some particular measure.
But since the other schools are not named, nor do you have subject performance, you have no means of easily identifying which other school it might be sensible to visit to learn from others. That is not to say that those rich datasets are not useful to a school both in target setting for individuals and cohorts of pupils – they are. It is just that they are not as useful as they could be.
It does not have to be so.
In Birmingham in the 1990s a general drive for school improvement was made more focused when John Hill, the education department's chief statistician, suggested a means by which schools could compare their performance against other schools that had pupil intakes with similar socio-economic profiles. These data sets revealed widely differing pupil performance in apparently similar circumstances. What was different about what came to be called 'family of schools' data sets, was that the schools could see each other's data in full detail so that they could visit and try to understand why some schools practices differed so much.
The way the data was presented allowed a school to easily identify how it was performing in relation to schools in a similar context. It could see if was falling behind or its performance had stagnated. The point of the 'family' is that schools have similar prior entry attainment scores and similar numbers entitled to free school meals. So schools do not need to waste time – they can visit and learn from schools they know to be broadly similar.
A similar approach was taken at the start of the London Challenge in 2003, although the number of secondary schools involved – more than 400 – meant that much more meaningful comparisons could be made. It was then used in the Black Country as well as in Greater Manchester where there was an energetic development of inter-school focused visits aimed at school improvement. More recently, Yorkshire and Humberside have commissioned and begun to implement a much more ambitious online version of 'families of schools' where schools can construct different families based on self-selected criteria.
All schools should be provided with 'families of schools' data sets that enable them to identify other schools with similar pupil intakes. These could be developed from existing data sets such as RAISE online and the Fischer Family Trust. Schools could use these data sets to learn from each other, both at the primary level across the basics and in secondary, subject by subject and, significantly, with different groups of pupils. It would be a useful tool to encourage collaboration in our increasingly fragmented school system.
Sir Tim Brighouse ran the London Challenge as chief commissioner for schools. This post is an edited version of a chapter from Excellence and equity: Tackling educational disadvantage in England's secondary schools. The full version of Tim Brighouse's chapter 'The importance of collaboration: creating families of schools' can be downloaded for free from IPPR.