Burn your data trackers đ„
Walk away from the madness â youâll never look back.
Some of you might have seen me tweet recently about a friend who called me in tears, on the verge of quitting teaching forever.
In this short blogpost, I want to address one of the more pernicious aspects of her workload and appeal to the headteachers and assessment leads who are still demanding that teachers use trackers to record vast swathes of nothingness.
The problem
Iâve tweeted before about something I call the âData Evilness Indexâ (DEI).
All schools that use trackers (to tick off curriculum objectives for each child) automatically generate a Data Evilness Index. Some are worse than others.
You can work out your own DEI with a simple calculation:
DEI = (Total Number of Objectives on Tracker (for all subjects) x Number of Children) x Number of Ticks/Highlights Before Objective is âMetâ
I used this formula to calculate my DEI in a previous school:
Reading objectives for each child: 15
Writing objectives for each child: 28
Maths objectives for each child: 47
Total: 90 objectives for each child
(90 objectives x 30 children) x 3 ticks = 8,100
DEI = 8,100
Just to clarify, that is 8,100 judgements that I was asked to make in one school year â thousands upon thousands of clicks on a computer screen.
What is the likelihood that all 8,100 judgements were valid and reliable?
Oh, and did I mention â I was judged almost exclusively on the outcomes of those judgements; they were the foundations of my reputation and were the difference between getting a pay rise and not getting a pay rise.
Still valid and reliable?
Now, presumably, like my old school, your tracker-happy school is also asking that each judgement is based on evidence. Evidence that you could go and point to in a book or on a test?
So every time you log on to your tracker to make a judgement against one objective for 30 children, you have to cross reference your judgement with several pages in each childâs book and / or test evidence?
And how long does this evidence take to find for each child? (Some schools even ask that teachers UPLOAD PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE against each objectiveâŠit makes me weep).
The anatomy of a tracking session:
- Get the books out and find past test papers / assessments: 3 minutes (divided by 30 children = 6 seconds per judgement)
- Log on to tracking system: 2 minutes (divided by 30 children = 4 seconds per judgement)
- Choose objective
Find that childâs book in the pile
Hunt down the lessons relevant to that objective in their book
Look at childrenâs answers and reflect on whether they have âmetâ the objective
= 1 minute per judgement - Find childâs seperate assessment materials / test data
Hunt down the questions relevant to that curriculum objective
Look at childrenâs answers and reflect on whether they have âmetâ the objective
= 1 minute per judgement - Record judgement on tracker
Log off system
Put all books and test papers back: 30 seconds (divided by 30 children = 1 second per judgement)
TOTAL TIME TAKEN UP BY TRACKER:
One judgement = 131 seconds
131 seconds x 8,100 judgements = 1,061,100 seconds
= 17,685 minutes
TOTAL = 294.75 HOURS (>12 days)
Unrealistic?
âWait!â I hear you cry⊠âIâm SURE I donât spend 294.75 hours a year on my tracker.â
Well, quite.
You meanâŠyou donât cross-reference every single judgement with books and test data?
SoâŠwhen youâre on the trackerâŠyouâre actually making quick snap judgements based on your sense of each child?
THIS IS EVEN WORSE!
The way I see it, teachers in tracker-happy schools are either:
a) spending ~294 hours a year producing meticulously evidenced data on their trackers
b) spending hours uploading snap judgements and pretending they are gospel, purely for someone elseâs âbenefitâ
If it is the latter, then this is clearly all information that is stored in the teachersâ heads, which can be extracted at a secondâs notice simply by asking them a question about it when needed. So why ask them to spend hours recording it onto a tracker?
Either way, this is an astonishing waste of time and resources. And to thinkâŠmost schools spend money on these trackers (and then complain about funding cuts đ€Ż)
The solution
Before I get to solutions, let me re-state 3 important principles:
- It has been proven comprehensively that childrenâs academic progress is not linear (hereâs an excellent analysis: https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2015/03/why-measuring-pupil-progress-involves-more-than-taking-a-straight-line/). Therefore, to act as though it were by pretending to âmeasureâ progress and insisting that it goes up in arbitrary steps each year is lunacy.
- Either the data on your school tracker has hard evidence sitting behind it, in which case youâre happy for your teachers to spend hundreds of hours gathering and reporting it, or it merely represents a teacherâs best guess, based on their professional judgement and tacit knowledge of that child. If it is the former, I suggest that there are better uses of your teachersâ time. If it is the latter, then why make teachers spend hours recording what is in their head already?
- The more granular the detail, the less reliable it will be. Why are you insisting on tracking mountains of curriculum objectives? Who is benefiting? Is there nothing you would rather your teachers were doing? May I strongly suggest that the only useful data to have at a glance is whether or not children are on course to reach expected standards in a subject. Be honestâŠby Year 6 thatâs all the data you really care about most: âWill they pass or wonât they?â
If any more information is needed, ask the teacher! Or better still, go and grab that childâs book and check for yourself. Why not have a book scrutiny purely on geometry across the school, or fronted adverbials, to get a snapshot for a particular area?
Wiser people than me have spent a lot of time thinking of solutions â perhaps the wisest among them being @jpembroke
His video guide to Progress Matrices is probably the gold-standard. In this video, he is using the Insight Tracking software which is garnering quite a lot of support on Twitter as an alternative.
Iâm not sure anyone can do better than the guide above.
However, here is another meagre offering, which could be implemented tomorrow and would save hours and hours of teachersâ precious time:
In reality, you donât need me or anyone else to come up with the solution. Once you accept that the only useful information to have at a glance is basically âon trackâ or âoff-trackâ, it doesnât take a genius to build a system around it.
Anything on top of this should only be requested on a need to know basis. So before you ask a teacher to come away from their planning to report some data for you, youâd better have a bloody good reason for knowing.
Hate the sin, not the sinner
I feel very, very angry about the subject of data trackers. They are one of the most useless, vacuous and time-wasting things that schools currently do. However, hopefully it is obvious that I use terms like âevilâ in jest.
I recognise how hard it is to run a school under current pressures. Many leaders had good intentions when implementing their trackers and I know they are only focussed on securing the best progress for the children in their care.
However, if we are serious about workload, we must put an end to the practice of excessive data tracking ASAP.
In case youâve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, youâll also have noticed that Ofsted will no longer even be looking at schoolsâ internal data.
What a perfect chance to reset the data madness and free up the nationâs teachers to plan the best lessons in the world.