More tips from Adam Boxer
Video transcript
right adam tip number four please all right to make good use of data compared to other subjects yeah tell me about this because again the reason i found this interesting was it’s very easy isn’t it just to get kind of in your own silo just focused on in my case the math results and so on and so forth so so why are we bringing in other subjects yeah so so most data in schools is nonsense um and is used really really badly and the reason why is because it takes average measures and applies them to individuals so um it’s like you know if you have let’s say you’ve got a kid who’s in year nine or whatever um and so they start school in year seven and they’re 110 centimeters tall and then in year nine they’re 160 centimeters tall and you go to the little charts on the nhs and it says well look you know 11 year olds who are 110 centimeters tall on average end up being 170 centimeters tall when they’re in year nine this child is clearly too short i mean like that’s obviously nonsense right because those are average measures yeah on average the kids in year seven who are x will end up be being y in year nine and that’s what all school data is right all school data is you know my secondary secondary data yeah for you’ve got 500 000 students in every cohort in general for the 50 000 students that come in at this particular level they go out at that particular level and then what we do is we say right well this student was in that bracket why aren’t they at that level now yeah yeah they’re below target yeah yeah you’re like well it’s you know it’s normal it’s natural yeah don’t stress so a lot of time that’s a problem and you get sent data that says these kids are below target do something about it yeah right yeah yeah so so the problem is yeah for every kid that’s below target there’ll be a kid who’s above target and that’s again normal or natural and so it’s difficult then to figure out who the kids that you really actually like okay these kids below target because their target’s stupid yeah yeah i mean you’ve got a kid who just got a six or four or whatever and their target is a nine like yeah it could be that i’m really at my job or it could be that their target is rubbish um it could be both of course uh you can never really know but the point is you click that’s the point you can’t really know so what what we tend to do in the department is we say right well these kids are below target let’s see how they did in math and english right okay so let’s say i’ve got a kid whose target is a six and they got four in science yeah i look at their math in english and they got four in maths and they got four in english okay i don’t care kid’s fine kids find targets wrong yep but if i look at that kid he’s he’s got four in size he’s got a six in six target and he’s got six in english six in mets okay what what are they doing that i’m not yeah because you know look obviously it could be some kids are really good at english and math and not good at science yeah but in most cases you’d expect students to be roughly in the right place in my plus or minus one yeah for kids five in science and sixth english and math yeah yeah not that bothered right but if a kid is two grades out then i start thinking hang on could i be doing something a bit differently here that is smart use of data yeah because it kind of removes that that natural error around the distance between where they are and their target uh and says you know look if you’ve got a kid who’s got four for you and they’ve got seven in english and seven in medicine you’re doing something wrong it’s not necessarily you’re doing something wrong but you could do something differently to help that kid out more yeah what what’s going on in english and mess that he’s doing fine and he’s not in science what’s the story here investigate figure out yeah don’t use that data as a stick to beat people with but you say what what is going on here and i think that’s a i think that is a good use of data i imagine some statisticians will say it’s still well dodgy but i think in general that’s a better route and and there will be times you know so we sit around and look at data like this as a department because it’s important if you’re entering data you do something with it we don’t enter a lot of data in the data that we do enter we do something with we look at the data and we’ll say um look you know this kid is this is where they are uh this is where they could be um is there anything we can do differently sometimes the teacher will be like i don’t know what i could do differently and i say you know do you think if i put them on a report to me do you think that would help so maybe i don’t know this that or the other you have that conversation uh and then you tailor your response accordingly you don’t need to stick to beat someone with them we’re not we don’t have like data targets yes we don’t have you know those three targets a year for your performance management or whatever um so yeah i think that’s just like a quick it’s not necessarily easy it depends on your data systems but you should be able to get someone to teach you how to do a vlookup or pull out from four matrix or whatever um to figure out what they’ve got in english and maths but that can give you much much much much much better information than just looking at their distance from their target that’s brilliant that i always remember and also it works the other way around you can have a kid who’s on their target yeah yeah so if a kid is his target is four he got four in science but he’s got eight in english and mets yeah don’t be resting on your laurels yeah yeah yeah yeah because it’s not good enough that’s interesting i remember a few years ago i had this year 11 class and there was a lad in there and everyone wanted him to be in their class because he got a ridiculously low result at sats at key stage two and you could like he was gonna absolutely smash his target and it was just like amazing and you i was thinking what a great teacher i am because he’s gonna beat his target by three levels or whatever but then you had other kids in the class who you thought i mean their target’s a joke but you kind of dismiss that as a joke don’t celebrate the ones where they’re the two you know and and that kid the proof of the pudding is that kid will have been doing the same in english math and science etc yeah so i mean good job craig yeah well done yeah but the than they are in science in english and history or whatever yeah that’s the kid to celebrate yeah yeah not to celebrate that kid but to say i’ve done a good job by this guy that’s good love it you