Until 2019, Ofsted expected schools to focus on their students making both ‘rapid’ and ‘sustained’ progress in their learning, and in response, school leaders filled their school development plans with cunning action plans to try to achieve it. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they didn’t succeed; because they couldn’t; because learning is almost never both ‘sustained’ and ‘rapid’.
Then the 2019 Ofsted Handbook was published, and we were finally given Ofsted’s first grown-up version of an inspection framework. The need to ensure students make good progress dominates – as it should – but gone now is the demand for ‘rapid’ progress and in its place are evidence-based evaluation criteria that are backed by a well-written, concise Ofsted summary of research document (do look for it, it’s worth reading!)
Of course, it would be ideal if all students could make rapid, sustained progress in their learning in all subjects – who wouldn’t want that? But learning is an incremental process requiring time, focus, and practice; it’s full of starts and stops, two steps forward and one step back, and it’s often layered with frustrations and sudden breakthroughs. Generally, what we really need is sustained progress – learning that sticks.
Let’s focus for a moment on the point about learning happening over time: first of all, expertise develops over time – if we pause and think, we know this to be true. Consider a professor of history: they probably studied history at school, took an A level in it, then a degree, followed by a Masters and a Doctorate. it’s a lengthy process; rapid it is not! This is true in all other domains, too. Great writers, doctors, plumbers, footballers, engineers, singers, chess players, chefs, and teachers have invariably spent a lot of time developing their expertise – in any complex domain, you can’t just decide to become expert on a Monday and make rapid progress to get there by Friday.
Second, learning can’t be measured in the short term; only performance can. Learning should be measured over the longer term because if a student can’t remember what ‘erosion’ is three/six/nine months after they were taught it, how can we say they have learned it?
Why is this important? It’s important because if we accept that sustained learning in schools is what we need, we must accept the need to build knowledge carefully and incrementally over time, principally through:
• Schemes of work that specify precisely what students will learn
• Schemes of work that account for progression, and cycle back systematically to previous knowledge to help it stick
• Knowledge organisers that contain the most important knowledge, presented in a quizzable format, so students can share responsibility for building their knowledge systematically over time
• Teaching that ‘bangs on’ from Day 1 until the end of the course (see a previous blog on this!)
• And great behaviour for learning, of course, so valuable time is not wasted
It is the going back over key knowledge, over time, that makes it stick for the long term – it’s just not a rapid-progress thing.
