Teach Secondary - Issue 14.6

TROUBLED transitions We take a closer look at an ambitious survey of pupil attitudes that seeks to pinpoint when and how pupils start to disengage with school from Y7 onwards... According to a new national study (see tinyurl.com/ ts146-T1), over a quarter of pupils start to disengage from school while in Y7. The research – led by ImpactEd Group, with backing from ASCL, the Confederation of School Trusts, Reach Foundation and Challenge Partners – involved over 100,000 pupils nationwide, with the resulting data made available to all schools taking part. The findings seem to suggest that the point of transition between Y6 and Y7 may be evenmore of a critical juncture in pupils’ school education than was already assumed, with levels of pupils’ trust, sense of agency and perceived safety taking a hit upon starting secondary, and often never fully recovering. Here, we talk to Dr Chris Wilson, ImpactEd Group Director and Co-Founder, on how the data was gathered, and why the emergence of those findings shouldn’t be a cause for despair, but rather the starting point for a transformative approach to sharing knowledge and practice fromwhich everyone can benefit. Was there anything especially innovative or unusual about how you acquired data for the study? We underpinned our research with a fixed question set informed by the academic literature. We worked with Professor John Jerrim of UCL, who devised a robust, overarching model for school engagement covering the concerns of both employees and pupils (and which we’ll be using to examine family engagement in future). The model posits that there are three types of school engagement – cognitive, emotional and behavioural. How you think, how you feel, and ultimately, how you act. A key component of the research was wanting to ensure that schools, teachers and pupils wouldn’t have to put huge efforts into sharing their data with us, only to then wait for months – or even years – before eventually receiving a report outlining national trends that they’d struggle to action locally, within their context. We therefore developed The Engagement Platform [TEP] – an online platform that lets school leaders examine the findings as they pertain to their local context within a week of submitting their data, along with the ability to compare those local results to national benchmarks. What does TEP do, and how can it be used? When researching education issues at a national level, there’s always a risk that the emphasis will end up being placed on these exciting, ‘blockbuster’ national findings. We’re certainly interested in national trends – some of which can be rightfully concerning, or profound – but the worry is that school leaders aren’t necessarily equipped to understand how those trends relate to their local areas, and thus design actionable plans off the back of what the research shows. By making the data much more granular, as TEP does, a school can potentially identify, say, how disengaged their Y9 girls, or students eligible for free school meals are compared to the national average. If provided with a sufficient level of detail, a school could look at the data and come up with a workable action plan. Do schools incur any costs for getting involved in the study and having access to the tools you describe? ImpactEd Group is currently sponsoring the research. Schools are required to make a financial contribution, but it’s around 50% of the cost for a comparable service in most circumstances. Our aimwith TEP is to not just share data with individual schools, but to also start building communities of practice, around case studies showing how certain schools have done especially well in particular areas, or with specific groups. By what process did students submit their answers to the survey? A big challenge with this kind of research is that the time when pupils answer questions about themselves and their school can influence their answers. Ask pupils (or employees) questions about school in September, and the answers will be very different than if you were to ask them in April or May. We’ve tried mitigating for that by organising fixed census windows, so that school communities can trust that they’re being benchmarked against other schools, pupils and employees responding to the same set of questions during that same two- week period. Younger pupils tend to complete the research survey via tablet devices or in school computer rooms. Older students could opt to have the questions sent as a link via e-mail, or be assigned a “Boysweremore likely than girls to report trusting teachers at their school,girlsweremore likely to say that they respected them” 50 teachwire.net/secondary