Department for Children, Schools and Families
The Department for Education and Skills - Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners

The Department for Education and Skills - Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Departmental Strategy


Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners


Chapter 5: Personalisation and choice in the secondary years

Goal: Every young person achieving their full potential

1. As well as the choice of an excellent secondary school, every student should, within their school, have excellent teaching that suits them, building on what they know, fitting them for what they aspire to, and helping them reach their full potential.

2. The conditions for learning must also be right in every school - with good behaviour, regular attendance and excellent partnerships between schools, parents and the community.

3. Teaching in secondary schools is improving. The number of failing schools has nearly halved; and results for 14 year olds, and at GCSE, are improving steadily.

4. Since 1998, schools with the highest levels of disadvantage have improved nearly three times faster at GCSE than those in more affluent areas - thanks in part to our successful Excellence in Cities programme.

5. Both behaviour and attendance are also improving - with fewer violent incidents and fewer days lost to truancy.

6. There are 24,000 more secondary school teachers and over 30,000 more support staff in schools than in 1997. The average number of computers used for teaching and learning in each secondary school has risen from 101 in 1998 to 193 in 2003.

7. Ofsted judges over three quarters of schools to have high quality leadership; and they say that this generation of newly-qualified teachers is the best ever.

Issues and Challenges

8. But there are still serious challenges that must be faced and overcome.

9. In meeting these challenges, our offer to secondary pupils and parents will be:

Offer to pupils and parents

What our offer means in practice

Personalisation of teaching and learning

10. A good secondary school has effective teaching at its core. Teaching is tailored to the needs of individual pupils, with progress regularly assessed. The National Curriculum is not regarded as a constraint or a straitjacket - it is the foundation for a wide range of curriculum options and for a variety of learning experiences and styles. Successful schools know that learning continues beyond the formal school day or week, with a wide choice of options and experiences beyond the classroom.

11. A great deal of work is underway to raise the quality of teaching and learning in secondary schools. Training and support for teachers in the early secondary years - modelled on the primary school literacy and numeracy strategies - has produced the best results ever at age 14 and at GCSE, but the pace of improvement now needs to be quickened in six key areas.

(i) Moving from primary to secondary school

12. The failure to make a good transition from primary school is one of the biggest causes of poor achievement in secondary school. Building on what the best schools do already, we will:

(ii) A new secondary strategy for teaching and learning

13. Secondly, we will develop the Key Stage 3 Strategy - designed to improve teaching for 11 to 14 year-olds - into a Secondary Strategy covering the whole 11-16 stage. The Strategy will help teachers give careful attention to pupils' individual learning needs, set challenging targets for them linked to high-quality assessment, and offer tools to teachers to make lessons pacy, challenging and enjoyable.

14. This new Secondary Strategy will put extra focus on the areas of learning that many pupils find most difficult - for example, writing and close reading skills in English, algebra in mathematics, and investigative work in science. This will help every single pupil achieve their potential even in difficult areas.

15. We will also give extra support to pupils who have not been well-served by the system in the past, including:

16. We want to see a transformation in outcomes for looked-after children and young people over the next five years, with much greater stability in their lives. We expect local authorities to ensure more choice for looked-after children and young people about where they live, fewer out-of-authority placements and much less moving around between placements. Greater stability will lead to much better continuity in education: it will enable looked-after children to achieve more in school and will enable schools to do better for them. At the same time we want to see more personalised support and better access to activities and opportunities for looked after children and we will work to ensure that there are more, better trained, better rewarded foster carers.

(iii) ICT supporting personalised learning

17. Information and communication technology (ICT) is a powerful tool for learning, helping teachers explain difficult concepts, giving access to a huge range of examples and resources, and engaging pupils easily. It is also a vital tool for personalisation - giving the opportunity to tailor tasks to children without hours of extra work for teachers; and with the potential to do things like mark and analyse work automatically, picking out areas where a particular child has not understood, or where the whole class has missed and point and needs more explanation.

18. Since 1998 the Government has invested over £1 billion creating an ICT infrastructure in schools in England, connecting secondary schools using broadband, and training teachers. This investment has already had a dramatic effect but there is more to do both to equip all teachers to make the most of what is available and do develop better quality curriculum content and materials.

19. Electronic whiteboards, in the hands of competent and confident teachers, bring new dimensions to whole class teaching. Interactive slates hold the potential for learning that is both personalised and shared. Schools are increasingly investing in these types of technology, and we have provided £50 million over two years to accelerate this trend - enough for around 20,000 classrooms to be equipped with whiteboards. We will continue this programme of investment in ICT over the next five years.

(iv) Effective subject teaching

20. Secondary teachers are usually specialist teachers with a real love of their subject. The most inspiring lessons come from teachers being able to pass on their enthusiasm for the subject to their pupils; but too often this inspiration is lacking. We intend to develop more subject-specific support across the curriculum, to help teachers develop their subject knowledge and teach better.

21. We will appoint Chief Advisers for all the key subjects, to champion their subject and plan its improvement, including better subject-specific training for teachers, working in particular with outstanding heads of department in specialist schools, and with subject associations. The Chief Adviser for Mathematics will take forward our response to the Smith report Mathematics Counts, and oversee the development of a national maths centre.

Subject Specialism: Extra support for Mathematics

In our recent response to the Adrian Smith mathematics enquiry, recognising the particular importance of mathematics, we announced that we would:

(v) A richer secondary curriculum

22. The National Curriculum provides an entitlement to a broad, rich curriculum for every pupil. It needs to be kept under review, so that it fits young people for the changing demands of life and work in adulthood. Once Mike Tomlinson has reported on the 14-19 curriculum (which we discuss in more detail in the next Chapter), we will carry out a review to look again at what is studied by 11-14 year olds, and in particular at whether it offers good enough opportunities both for those at risk of disengagement, and for more able children who need to be stretched.

23. We will also widen opportunities beyond the classroom. Often, these provide some of the most memorable experiences at school - the school trip, the drama production, or playing in the school team. Our strategy for sport in particular will extend sporting opportunities for children in secondary school, building motivation and engagement as well as supporting health and fitness.

The PE, School Sport and Club Links Strategy

Over £1 billion is being invested by the Government to support PE and school sport. An ambitious target has been set for three quarters of 5-16 year olds to spend at least 2 hours each week on PE and school sport by 2006.

Spearheading action will be the massive expansion of the School Sport Partnerships - families of primary, special and secondary schools that come together to enhance sports opportunities for all. This includes competitive sports, with many partnerships setting up or joining sports leagues.

Specialist Sports Colleges act as 'hubs' for the partnerships, and show that sporting excellence supports high standards as well as health and fitness. Wright Robinson School is the largest high school in Manchester, serving an inner city area rated among poorest and most disadvantaged in the country. It has concentrated on making links with primary schools, increasing participation and achievement in all its pupils (both sporting and academic), and improving training for staff and other adults. It has increased the proportion of pupils getting five good GCSEs from 7% to 43% in sevenyears.

(vi) Improving behaviour and attendance

24. Good behaviour is essential to good learning and good citizenship. Although OFSTED say that behaviour is unsatisfactory overall in only 5% of secondary and 1% of primary schools, low level disruption is a problem affecting all schools to some extent. More extreme incidents of bad behaviour, though rare, have a big impact on staff and other pupils, and affect some schools disproportionately, imposing unacceptable burdens on teachers and damaging the education of other pupils.

25. School attendance is improving. 1,300 former truants are back in school every day compared to last year, and attendance rates have improved in 133 of the 150 Local Authorities. But this is only a start in eradicating a culture of truancy, much of it accepted or even encouraged by parents, particularly among older secondary pupils. Parents have a duty to see that their children attend school; schools and Local Authorities need consistent support as they seek to enforce this duty. In 2002/3 just over a quarter of pupils in schools with absence rates above 11% got five good GCSEs, compared with nearly three quarters in schools with absence rates below 6.5%. And poor attendance, if not addressed, can also lead rapidly to more thorough disengagement, anti-social behaviour and street crime. Better teaching, and a more interesting curriculum, have a part to play in engaging pupils more effectively, but we need to go further. We will:

26. We will also address the issue of schools that are asked to take on large numbers of hard-to-place or disruptive pupils through theyear.

27. We will expect groups of schools and colleges, including Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) and special schools, to take collective responsibility for the education of young people in their area, through clear agreements which set out systems for managing excluded and seriously disruptive pupils. The agreements, reached through Admissions Forums, will set out:

28. We will encourage Admissions Forums, schools and Local Authorities to secure the funding to support these agreements and to support the education of hard to place pupils - and will encourage Authorities to devolve funds to groups of schools to do this.

Case Study

Swale Project, Kent

Eight secondary schools (including a grammar school) in Swale are collaborating to manage behaviour and reduce exclusions. The group have been delegated £300,000 by the LEA to allocate across schools according to need. This has funded family liaison workers, counsellors, social work time and police, often shared across several schools. Headteachers are also now collectively responsible for the Pupil Referral Unit (PRU), and PRU places are shared out between schools, according to their needs, for preventive work. Headteachers have agreed to contribute £5,000 for each pupil they exclude permanently; but they are now often able to arrange managed moves between schools. There are clear indications of success - last year, there were 28 permanent exclusions from schools in the group; so far this year, there have been fewer than 10.

29. This Autumn, the Department will issue model agreements on the education of excluded and disruptive pupils drawn up in partnership with foundation and voluntary schools, Local Authorities and headteacher associations, and will also give advice on the process for reaching these agreements and making them work. There will be a strong expectation that every Admissions Forum will develop an agreement, and every school will sign up to one. We will seek legal powers so that where this does not happen, agreements can be required and enforced by the Secretary of State.

Partnership with parents and the community

30. Successful schools also have strong links to parents and the wider community, drawing strength from those links, and in turn helping to develop and strengthen their local community. At primary school, most parents and carers have a lot of contact with the teacher and the school. But parents can feel very distant from secondary schools; pupils begin to want more independence; and the teenage years can be difficult. As in primary schools, we will work intensively with schools to help them engage parents more effectively, with booklets for parents on helping with schoolwork, and practical advice for schools on how to work well with parents.

31. We will also make pupil and parent views part of school self-evaluation, so that every parent and every pupil has the opportunity to express their view on the quality of teaching and other school services as least once a year. We will promote standardised surveys of pupil and parent views to enable schools to compare themselves with others.

Example: Questions from standard pupil surveys as part of London Challenge

How often do the teachers praise you when you have tried hard?

How often do other pupils make fun of people who work hard?

How often do you behave badly at school?

How often are other pupils so noisy in lessons that you find it difficult to work?

Do you think that bullying is a particular problem at your school?

Do you think that the teachers deal effectively with bullying?

How often do you have a teaching assistant (other adult) helping the teacher in lessons?

How often do you do joint work (activities, lessons, projects) with pupils from other schools?

32. We will encourage schools to make more use of their websites for communicating with parents - for example, showing on a website what homework has been set, giving pupil timetables, and having a simple system for parents to email teachers.

Extended Schools

33. Partnership with parents and the community will also be supported by Extended Schools (which we discussed in Chapter 3). We want every secondary school to become an extended school, offering:

34. Many secondary schools will go beyond this, offering comprehensive services including healthcare. There will be 240 "full service" Extended Schools by 2006.

Changing the system to deliver our offer

Better teaching through investing in the workforce

35. Central to improvements in teaching and learning is excellent professional development for all teachers - with more emphasis on classroom observation, practice, training, coaching and mentoring. To build up teachers' demand for high quality training, and encourage them to drive their own development, we will refocus teacher appraisals to become teaching and learning reviews. These will ensure teachers are:

36. We will consult with our partners, including employers, trade unions and headteacher associations, about these proposals, and in due course will make formal submissions to the School Teachers' Review Body.

37. We believe that this better link between development and progression will help to make sure that there is strong demand from teachers and schools for high-quality development. We will also do more to make sure that there is a good supply of training and other professional development opportunities available to teachers, and have asked the Teacher Training Agency to take on a new role in co-ordinating their supply.

Teachers' TV

38. We will also launch, in early 2005, a new digital TV channel - Teachers' TV - which will be dedicated to sharing good practice, inspiring and giving insight, and helping professionals learn from each other. In a pilot of the channel, 90% of the test audience said they would watch the channel; 86% said that TV was better than any other medium for receiving training; and 88% said that the channel was effective at sharing best practice.

Workforce Reform

39. As well as improving teachers' training and development, we will continue to reform the workforce by building on our two national agreements with our employer and union workforce partners. The process of partnership and dialogue with employers and organisations representing teachers and support staff has resulted in a ground-breaking workforce agreement, and subsequent agreements on reforming the teachers' pay scale. We are committed to building on these strong relationships in taking forward our programme for workforce reform.

A New Teacher Professionalism

These changes will usher in a new professionalism for teachers, in which career progression and financial rewards will go to those who are making the biggest contributions to improving pupil attainment, those who are continually developing their own expertise, and those who help to develop expertise in other teachers. There are already four main stages in the career ladder for teachers, and we will build professional development into each one. We want to see:

Some teachers will progress more quickly than others up this career ladder.

40. The pay and workforce reforms are ensuring that classroom teachers get the right support from a more widely drawn school team, and are fairly rewarded for what they do. They are boosting recruitment to teaching while also bringing in tens of thousands of other highly skilled and trained adults. The reforms are ensuring a more personalised approach to pupils' learning, offering them extra enrichment activities, helping schools with marking and display, and supporting teachers so that they have more time to teach. There are more adults working beyond the classroom too, including in pastoral and administrative roles. In the next phase, schools will want to take the reforms even further, particularly as they pursue opportunities to become extended schools.

41. Our continuing work will include:

Leadership

42. The quality of school leadership remains acritical determinant of the success of each school in raising pupil attainment. The programmes of the National College for School Leadership are already helping to ensure that we have the best prepared, best developed, highest quality school leaders our system has ever had. Over 12,000 headteachers and aspiring headteachers have taken the new National Professional Qualification for Headship. There are nearly 2,000 subject leaders on the "Leading from the Middle" programme, and over 1,000 experienced headteachers on NCSL's Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers. 1,100 bursars have been trained on the Certificate of School Business Management. Following the recent independent review, we will help the National College strengthen its position as a strategically focused, powerful hub of school leadership, supporting our overall strategy.

43. Chapter 9 sets out our overarching strategy for building the capacity of the workforce in education and children's services as a whole.

Timetable for Change

Taken together, our reforms mean that:

Now, in 2004:

By 2008:

Our Long Term Aim

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