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Estyn Recommendations & CfW
What the inspection process tells us about CfW progress
A whole term has passed now since the beginning of Curriculum for Wales implementation in schools and the Estyn inspection team have been busy. For the first time in many years, the inspection process is now the only method by which primary schools are held to account. Secondary and all-age schools have the additional pressure of the external examination results at age 16, but these too will soon be changing.
How has the inspection process changed since the new curriculum entered our schools and what can it tell us about the future of CfW? We’ve taken a long, hard and detailed look at all of the inspection reports published by Estyn for schools who have been visited since September and attempted to answer those questions. We’ve focused only on mainstream provision and on those schools who were part of the standard inspection cycle, rather than those receiving a visit as part of an ongoing monitoring process. We’ve identified some fascinating shifts from the inspection language of old. If you’d like to look at our original data, check out the pdf linked below. If you’re after more of an overview of the latest developments and what they might mean for education in Wales, read on.
Let’s start with some facts and remember this analysis doesn’t include EOTAS, independent or special school provision. It also doesn’t include historic monitoring visits where recommendations were set prior to September 2022:
- Total number of schools visited – 54 (just under 4% of the total number of schools in Wales)
- Primary schools – 47
- Secondary schools – six, of which only two had implemented CfW as of Sept 2022.
- All age schools – one which had not implemented CfW at the time of inspection
While the new inspection framework from Estyn has removed the judgements such as 'good', or 'excellent', on analysis it is clear there are still five distinct categories. They are:
- Schools whose practice was worthy of a case study
- No follow up and no case study practice
- Estyn & LA Review
- Significant improvement
- Special measures
Of course, it doesn’t follow that a school who has practice worthy of a case study equates directly to an ‘excellent’ school in old money, but we can say that the removal of judgements hasn’t been as much of a clear sweep as was suggested.
Some 16 of the 54 schools inspected have been asked to prepare a case study on an element of their work. Seven of the schools inspected were judged as needing significant improvement or special measures. Eight of the 54 schools inspected were judged as needing an Estyn & LA review, which takes the total of schools needing some form of follow up since September to 15. That’s 28% of all schools inspected have not reached a level at which they can continue with their improvement journey unmonitored.
So, the question is, how is Estyn judging schools’ progress? And the answer is pretty complicated. We haven’t seen a wholesale shift to a new way of inspecting as promised by Estyn in their new inspection guidance. What we see is a much more mixed bag, with a new terminology and focus rubbing along with the language and approaches of the past. If you look really closely, and we certainly did, you can even see the hallmarks of individual differences between inspectors a differing set of interests, ideologies and ways of expressing themselves through the recommendations.
Which, when you consider that schools providing a consistency of provision for pupils is high up on the agenda right now, the fact that our inspectorate is varied and variable in its recommendations to schools, doesn’t reflect the expectations for schools.
We identified 13 different categories of recommendation made to schools in the new inspection process. Of these 13, we’re going to take a detailed look at seven of them. Before we do that here’s a full list of all 13 categories, with those we’ll be homing in on in bold text:
- Attendance
- Challenge
- Cross curricular skills including, literacy, numeracy, digital competence & Welsh
- Evaluation & Improvement
- Governors
- Health & Safety
- Independent Learning
- Leadership
- Outdoor Learning
- Planning for Progress
- Professional Learning
- Pupil voice & influence
- Quality of teaching & assessment
So, let’s dive right in.
Challenge is a really interesting recommendation. You can actually see the shift in language over time. Early on recommendations focus on teacher expectations, but as we get closer to Christmas, teacher expectation is out, and recommendations focus more on the appropriateness of the level of challenge for the pupils. There’s also only one mention of standards from within this category. This is a theme we’re going to see throughout this analysis. Standards as a concept has almost entirely been replaced by progress. There are still a few residual references to the standards pupils achieve, but these appear mainly in the cross curricular skills category or in evaluation and improvement. What the challenge category also neatly exemplifies is the link between the overall judgement the school receives from the five listed above and the type of recommendations they are given. Challenge provided for pupils is a recommendation more commonly reserved for those schools who are doing well. Of the 18 schools that received a recommendation in this category, only one required significant improvement.
The same correlation can be seen in the ‘Independent Learning’ category of recommendation. This too seems to be almost entirely reserved for successful schools, with only one school here requiring an Estyn Review, all others are ‘no follow up’ or a case study school. So, what’s going on? Are only children in successful schools the ones who need to be appropriately challenged and supported to become independent learners or are those improvement targets just too advanced for schools struggling with planning and improving the quality of teaching. It’s only when you ask these types of questions you begin to see how subjective and biased the whole inspection process might in reality be. In this category there are also two recommendations made for two separate and unconnected schools, (who coincidentally are just 8 mins apart by road and were both inspected in September) where the recommendation is exactly the same. Word for word. Make of that what you will.
What’s been happening with the Cross Curricular Skills? It’s been ten years since the first introduction of the Literacy and Numeracy Framework, so you’d expect far fewer recommendations in this category as practice has been more effectively supported. It’s a large category, covering four discrete areas of the curriculum and it receives 52 recommendations for 41 of the schools inspected. We do see standards mentioned, but in only three of the 52 recommendations. A good question here might be, how are schools able to show inspectors that pupils are making progress in their literacy, numeracy, digital and Welsh skills without the benefit of a national standard for oracy, writing, digital or Welsh skills? Inspectors require schools to share with them assessment data as part of the inspection process. However, if each school is assessing its own curriculum as per Welsh Government guidance and each school has its own unique local curriculum, that also means their assessment data will be unique. We certainly don’t envy the challenge inspectors face of understanding and comparing each schools’ progress given there is no scale or method of comparison.
So, already we’ve seen progress as a theme in two categories and it appears in several more. In the Quality of Teaching and Assessment, which generates 25 recommendations, 12 of them focus on improving the quality of teaching specifically to support pupils to make progress. The schools that received a recommendation in this category are skewed towards the bottom end. Those schools from the top end of the spectrum have recommendations that require improvement in areas such as feedback to pupils or disseminating good practice across the school. This category is one that separates the successful schools from those at the bottom end of the spectrum. Three out of the four schools in Special Measures have recommendations requiring improvement in the quality of teaching and assessment and no doubt that will make up the majority of their improvement work.
Another sizeable category of recommendations is ‘Evaluation and Improvement’. This category saw 26 recommendations generated - that’s nearly 50% of the schools inspected. Does that mean that half of the schools in Wales aren’t good enough at pinpointing what’s working and what’s not and knowing what to do about it? Or, could it be, that this is the new big thing to prove that you are good at? Of those 26 recommendations, 10 of them required schools to directly link self-evaluation and improvement processes with pupil learning, pupil progress or “what pupils know, understand & can do”. It’s not that schools haven’t been carrying out a self-evaluation, just that the focus for that document has been different. It’s no longer a paperwork hoop schools need to jump through but a trail of cause and effect that schools need to document, showing how they use data to identify pupils’ needs, link it with teachers’ skills and address the deficits through professional learning. It’s the system that’s changed, not necessarily the schools. Time will tell if this new evidence trail has a lasting impact on learners’ experiences and outcomes. It should be mentioned here that professional learning, while one of the categories, receives only two of the recommendations. That’s just over 1% of the total number of recommendations. When we know from research that the quality of the teaching is a hugely significant factor in closing the disadvantage gap, why aren’t schools being scrutinised for the quality and impact of the professional learning they provide?
So, that just leaves us with ‘Planning for Progress’. This category garnered only 12 recommendations. Five of the 15 schools in some form of ongoing monitoring had a recommendation from this category. Schools being required to improve their approach to planning for progress largely focused on the curriculum and how it supported pupils to move forwards, only two of the 12 recommendations identified improving teachers’ shared understanding of progression as being something the school needed to improve. It seems that the curriculum as the progression model has been recognised by Estyn as a key driver of helping pupils to excel rather than the nebulous “shared understanding of progression”.
If you’ve managed to get this far in this mammoth blog, congratulations. It’s certainly been an enormous task collating, analysing and making sense of the data Estyn has provided us with and there’s certainly lots more we haven’t had the space to share. Completing this exercise has allowed us to begin to draw some conclusions about what schools should be thinking about in their preparations for Estyn. They are:
- Know what your pupils’ need and make sure your curriculum provides opportunities to address those needs
- Collate data about how pupils are progressing by knowing exactly what you are teaching and whether pupils are learning what is being taught
- Be aware that inspectors are human, that they’ll come to your school with their own set of cognitive biases and individual expectations. It’s your job to challenge those biases and expectations, where you can see they do not support the progress of learning in your school
- Inspection is currently the only form of accountability for primary schools in Wales, whereas secondary schools will be held to account through the broader Cap 9 measure. This makes the school performance landscape very uneven which no doubt, will have unintended consequences of its own
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