CC Brett Jordan
I am part of an exciting project to measure what matters in a primary school. We think others might be interested in working with us, or have already started this journey. This blog post is a ‘message in a bottle’ because we’d love to hear from you if you think you we can help each other. This post explains our rationale to gather information to help our children, beyond literacy and maths attainment.
I am a parent governor at Larkrise Primary School in Oxford. As a governing body, we are increasing our commitment to making the values that underpin our school more explicit. Like many happy schools, we know that there is a culture at the school which adds more than warm fuzzies to the life of our community, and that has tangible educational benefits. Some years before Guy Claxton and Bill Lucus came up with their 7Cs, Larkrise developed the 5Cs.
Our 5Cs are: Caring, Confident, Curious, Creative, and Celebrating.
The governors want to support all staff to focus on what matters to us all – balanced children who have a love of learning; who are able to use a fronted adverbial at the right time, but can also sing the right song to cheer up a friend; or cheer when a peer asks a fantastic question and presents possible answers. We feel this is proving harder as the weight of workload and data forces teachers to focus on a narrow view of what education is for.
We believe professionals should use a wealth of evidence to enable depth and richness in learning – and, alongside the SLT, have decided to support the staff to focus their teaching, informed by greater knowledge of each child and their capacities/capabilities/character. Quality relationships are the beating heart of education.
In collaboration with the truly amazing Ed Finch, Deputy Head, I am trying to coalesce this into more strategic and actionable work. As I mentioned, we want your help. But we have already started a project to create a 5Cs Dashboard – so we can check the ‘pulse’ of our school.
Here is what we know, so far:
- The 5Cs dashboard will be an assessment tool, not a tracking system.
- It will be a mechanism to raise the profile of the 5Cs in the teaching and learning.
- We are not trying to prove kids are making progress in ‘caring’ (for eg)
- It will be a personalised analysis tool for the adults to support the children better.
This is an assessment experiment. We expect to make mistakes over the first few years, and adapt and evolve this dashboard. Initially, we expect less robust data – but we expect to see it develop and be more useful as time goes on.
We have started creating a Minimum Viable Product – which we hope to use this term – and which will be reviewed and iterated on a termly basis.
If you’d like to learn more, have a similar project going on, or can help us – please get in touch with me at eylanezekiel.governor@larkrise.oxon.sch.uk , tweet, or comment on this post.
We’d love to hear your views on this and genuinely appreciate challenge or helpful critique.
What do you think?