It’s not easy to contribute to a government report with recommendations when your modus operandi is explaining what’s gone wrong in schools, then declare it tricky to fix. But making data work better in schools is what I, alongside a dozen teachers, heads, inspectors, unions and government officials, were ask to write about.
Our starting point was observing the huge range of current practice in schools, from the minimalist approach of spending little time collecting and analysing data through to the large multi-academy trust with automated systems of monitoring everything right down to termly item-level test scores.
Whilst we could all agree that these extremes – the ‘minimalist’ and ‘automated’ models of data management – were making quite good trade-offs between time-invested and inferences made, something was going very wrong somewhere in the middle of the data continuum. These are the schools without the resources and infrastructure to automate all…
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