What should teacher ‘accountability’ look like in school?

‘A body of men, holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by anybody’. Thomas Paine, Rights of man (1791)

How best to hold teachers to account for the important job that they do? This is a question that deserves careful thought in schools.

Maybe you take the view that teacher accountability is precisely what the 2012 Teachers Standards are for? Don’t they lay out clearly what teachers are accountable for?

Only to a point: the Teachers Standards are too big-picture to act as the best guide to evaluating teachers’ performance in individual schools; they were designed to be the big picture, and a minimum standard – they weren’t designed to be the devil in the detail. Look at Teachers Standard 2 as an example. It calls on teachers to ‘Promote good progress and outcomes by pupils’. Standard 2 is then broken down into these five bullet points:

• Be accountable for pupils’ attainment, progress and outcomes
• Be aware of pupils’ capabilities and their prior knowledge, and plan teaching to build on these
• Guide pupils to reflect on the progress they have made and their emerging needs
• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of how pupils learn and how this impacts on teaching
• Encourage pupils to take a responsible and conscientious attitude to their own work and study

 

In principle, there’s nothing wrong with teachers being ‘accountable’ for pupils’ progress in their learning – what is more important than that? And the five additional bullet points feel sensible. But the second to fifth bullet points are woolly and arguably impossible to measure (how would you go about measuring whether a teacher has ‘taken account in their planning of students capabilities and their prior knowledge’, or whether they ‘encourage pupils to take a responsible and conscientious attitude to their own work and study’?) And measuring the first bullet point – the big one – is greyer than a dreich day in the Highlands. Consider that we have agreed in our school that the teachers will be accountable for how well their students achieve in their external examinations (it is common in schools for teachers to have appraisal targets linked to students’ performance in examinations). Now consider these situations:

 

1. I take over the teaching of an English class at the start of Year 11 and they then take their GCSE English Language and Literature examinations at the end of the school year. Am I truly accountable for their attainment, progress and outcomes at that point? Is that fair? I mean, they’ve probably been taught English by 11-13 different teachers since they started school aged five, and they’ve been doing the actual GCSE course since the start of Year 10 – i.e. they had done about three fifths of the course before I started teaching them. Factor in, too, that Year 11 is shorter than any other school year because the exams start around mid-May, so you actually have only two terms and a bit in Year 11.
2. I teach the Biology element of a Year 11 Combined Science group’s course; but I didn’t teach them in Year 10 (their former Biology teacher left at the end of Year 10), and their final GCSE Combined Science grades are the result of their performance in all three of the Biology, Chemistry and Physics elements of the GCSE course; they have different teachers for Chemistry and Physics. Am I fairly ‘accountable’ for their Combined Science results? They too did an awful lot of Science before they started doing GCSE Science.
3. I teach Year 11 Maths set 3 and in January of Year 11 six students move up into my group from Set 4, whilst a further five students move down into my group from Set 2. A corresponding number move out of my group to go up or down a set. So I finish Year 11 with a very different class from the one I began the year with.
4. I don’t teach a Year 11 or Year 13 class this year, so there are no external results against which to hold me to account.

 

Those are just four examples of real situations that schools face all the time, that muddy the waters of teacher accountability for pupils’ attainment and progress as set out in the Teachers Standards.

There are numerous variables at play when it comes to how well students attain in their Year 11 and Year 13 external examinations (in this country, these are the key measures of both an individual student’s and an individual school’s academic performance up to the age of 18/19). Here are some of the variables:

 

• The stability of a student’s home situation
• The parents’ level of income
• The effects of the peer group/friendship group
• The student’s level of motivation for individual subjects
• The student’s level of effort in individual subjects
• Luck

And yet: we know that the quality of teaching is a huge contributor to how well students achieve at school. We both sense it instinctively and there is also plenty of research and hard data that proves it.

School leaders and teachers – and everyone else who works in schools – need to be accountable; accountability matters, and knowing we are accountable affects our performance. The key question is: how best to hold people to account? The devil IS in the detail here: exactly what should we hold teachers to account for? And how should we go about it? Should the processes around accountability, such as the observation of teaching, always be equal for all teachers?

These key questions are, among other things, the subject of my next blog.