Download the YOUGOV School Leaders Benchmark Report discussed in this episode

What's in this episode? Interview with former Assistant Headteacher, Rob Eastment, Client Services Manager, Firefly Learning on new YouGov survey findings on senior leaders, schools and data: what do they really want and currently experience?

Subjects covered:
Parents evenings and reports - can the experience be improved?
Looking at data in parallel industries: aviation and healthcare
Data, the cloud and security
Some example stats:
47% of SLT disagreed that their schools were using their existing technology successfully
80% of SLT said they would welcome daily access to student grades, attendance and departmental performance

Sample Quotations:

Private schools do monitoring achievements of students, they are monitoring it for their own purposes as opposed to the need to feed the information to county council and government.
States school teachers are very much under the cosh when it comes to the paperwork. Stuff that actually is getting in the way of what you want to do in the classroom.
The biggest issue with data collection is that somebody has to collect it. You need time to collect it, or you need a process that allows you to collect it easily. And you have to have a very good reason for collecting it.
The trick is being able to collect the data so that the teachers aren’t having to do more to hand it over to you.
The student’s performance is only part of the equation. There's the other aspect which is: what happened that got the student to bring about this performance?
That approach to be able to learn from what the best are doing rather than we are watching to see what you are doing wrong
John Hattie talks about visible learning and visible learning being a two way street. I’ve got to be seen to be teaching, the students have to see that I am teaching them as much as I have got to see they are making progress.
A lot of students are tied to this idea of success, the importance of success means that failure is massively stigmatised. And yet it’s an important part of that process. And if they can see the data and they can understand it, that's fine.
There is a perception that IT and computers are the universal panacea. And if I buy enough computers and if I buy enough iPads everything is going to be fine.

References:

Robert Eastment:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/robert-eastment-a0218452 
Firefly Learning:
https://twitter.com/fireflyteam 
http://fireflylearning.com 
[email protected]  
YouGov Benchmarking Report, ‘Transparency on Learning’:
http://fireflylearning.com/blog/yougov-benchmarking-report--transparency-of-learning-in-uk-state-schools 
https://twitter.com/YouGov 
John Hattie:
https://twitter.com/john_hattie 
https://twitter.com/VisibleLearning 
Matthew Syed:
https://twitter.com/matthewsyed  
‘Black Box Thinking’, Matthew Syed

Phil Beadle:
https://twitter.com/PhilBeadle 
‘How To Teach’

Paul Black and Dylan William

'Inside Black Box Standards Assessment'

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inside-Black-Box-Standards-Assessment-x/dp/1871984688 

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