As we move to the end of a long summer term, our educational landscape continues to undulate beneath our feet. Since my last edition, we have appointed a new government and our newly appointed education minister, Bridget Phillipson, who was appointed Secretary of State for Education on 5 July 2024 and Minister for Woman and Equalities on 8 July 2024. In this edition, I will explore what the new government may mean for education in the years ahead and also share helpful research and amendments to the Ofsted framework that we are likely to see over the summer recess.
A new hope…
The King’s speech highlighted a number of shifts in the government’s lens for education. While the specificity of this remains to be seen, there were indeed some helpful pointers as to the direction of travel. The DfE have helpfully unpacked this for us here.
What was announced for education?
A Children’s Wellbeing Bill and a Skills England Bill were announced in the King’s Speech. This is likely to focus on the heightened SEMH needs seen in our children and the urgency in improving the care and support for our children and students.
What is included in the Children’s Wellbeing Bill?
The Children’s Wellbeing Bill will put children and their wellbeing at the centre of the education and children’s social care systems, and make changes to ensure children are safe, healthy, happy and treated fairly.
There are a range of changes which the government will aim to pass through the bill, to remove barriers to opportunity and make sure that the school system is fair for every child, no matter their background.
These include, but are not limited to:
- Making sure there are free breakfast clubs in every primary school.
- Limiting the number of branded uniform items that a school can require, to bring down costs for parents.
- Creating Children Not in School registers to support home-educating parents and to help local authorities keep track of pupils, so that children don’t slip under the radar.
- Giving Ofsted more powers to investigate unregistered schools and tackle patterns of poor care in children’s homes to keep children safe.
What is included in the Skills England Bill?
Skills England will bring together businesses, providers, unions and other bodies to try to boost skills training and tackle skills shortages to support sustained economic growth.
A Skills England Bill will work towards this, simplifying the skills system by transferring responsibilities from the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) to a new Skills England organisation, to make skills sector more efficient.
When will the education bills be introduced?
Before becoming law, the education bills will be debated by Parliament. Both bills are planned to be introduced in the first session of Parliament.
What else was alluded to in the King’s Speech?
There is a drive to recruit 6,500 new expert teachers for our schools and colleges
A comprehensive strategy for post‐16 education,
Strengthened work with local government to provide loving, secure homes for children in care.
Provide support for children with SEND and their families
Create higher-quality training and employment paths by empowering local communities to develop the skills people need.
Secure the future of our world class universities as engines of growth, ambition and opportunity for all.
Ofsted – a new direction with ungraded inspections
Ofsted confirmed on social media today that there will be a change to the way that schools are inspected for ungraded (Section 8) inspections. Their article can be found here.
Trying out the new approaches
Ofsted have been trialling a new approach to ungraded inspections, with the removal of the deep dive methodology. They visited a range of schools to try out parts of the inspection or do a ‘walk through’ of a whole inspection. Changes will take effect with a new way of working on inspection ready to go in the autumn term.
How will a new ungraded inspection begin?
As you would expect, the day before the on-site inspection begins, we’ll have an extended phone conversation with the headteacher, so no change there. As headteacher, you are encouraged to decide who else sits with you on the call so think abut your strategy and rehearse this with your team.
Through this conversation, the lead inspector will agree with the headteacher several areas of focus for the inspection. These will take account of things that the inspector wants to look at and things that are particularly important to the school – for example something the school has been working on, or something related to its particular context.
What will ungraded inspections look like when inspectors are in school?
The areas of focus will influence what inspectors do when they’re in school. At least a couple of these areas will be related to the quality of education, as you might expect. But they won’t focus on one subject and they won’t be deep dives. Ofsted state that inspectors will look at a group of subjects together. So, in a primary school, they’re likely to look at early English and early mathematics together as a group so they can make sure that schools are getting these important basics right. Or they might look at a group of subjects from the wider curriculum. In a secondary school, there could be a focus on the core subjects and another focus on, for example, vocational subjects. A further lens may be on an element of practice such as assessment.
And there will usually be one or two other areas of focus too. These might be related to personal development, behaviour, attendance, or something that includes all of these. These will be decided during the initial phone conversation and will be tailored to the school.
Ofsted state that as a result of the changes, the intent is that the intensity of ungraded inspections on subject leaders will be diminished. Ofsted will publish the updated inspection handbooks in September 2024 and will also provide videos for schools to expand on the changes and how these will be enacted in school.
How limited is working memory capacity, and how can we optimise its use? Evidence Based Education article by CJ Rauch.
In his article, CJ explores the capacity of working memory in students.
He surmises that our capacity for working memory increases with age over the course of childhood and that an adult’s capacity is more than twice that of a four year-old.
He suggests that a child can think of a small piece of information (item) and link this to others (chunking).
CHUNKING is where a number of items can be combined; in so doing, the combined items seem to behave as a single item thus managing cognitive load in the working memory.
He asks the reader to consider the following alphanumeric sequence:
M I 6 0 0 7 K G B C I A
Could you quickly memorise it if you needed to? Maybe, but it would probably be a lot easier if you broke the string up into more meaningful “chunks”:
MI6 007 KGB CIA
What can we do to increase the capacity of our working memory?
As far as we know, working memory capacity cannot be increased by training. However he does suggest that learning can be strengthened by understanding two key features of working memory:
- It is content-limited: we can only process a relatively small number of individual items or chunks at the same time; and
- It is time-limited: we can only hold information in working memory for a very short amount of time before it begins to decay (around 2-3 seconds, in some circumstances). Once the information decays, it’s gone until we are given the information again.
In your monitoring of lessons, therefore, keep a watchful eye out for the cognitive load put upon your students and check in that your teachers are building opportunities to chunk key items of information to make this easily digestable by the students.
Irresistible Learning 