Burn your data trackers 🔥

Walk away from the madness — you’ll 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

I’ve tweeted before about something I call the ‘Data Evilness Index’ (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 ‘Met’

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 — 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 — 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 child’s 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 objective…it 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 child’s book in the pile
  Hunt down the lessons relevant to that objective in their book
  Look at children’s answers and reflect on whether they have ‘met’ the objective
  = 1 minute per judgement
• Find child’s seperate assessment materials / test data
  Hunt down the questions relevant to that curriculum objective
  Look at children’s answers and reflect on whether they have ‘met’ 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?

“Wait!” I hear you cry… “I’m SURE I don’t spend 294.75 hours a year on my tracker.”

Well, quite.

You mean…you don’t cross-reference every single judgement with books and test data?

So…when you’re on the tracker…you’re 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 else’s ‘benefit’

If it is the latter, then this is clearly all information that is stored in the teachers’ heads, which can be extracted at a second’s 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 think…most schools spend money on these trackers (and then complain about funding cuts 🤯)

The solution

Before I get to solutions, let me re-state 3 important principles:

1. It has been proven comprehensively that children’s academic progress is not linear (here’s 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 ‘measure’ progress and insisting that it goes up in arbitrary steps each year is lunacy.
2. Either the data on your school tracker has hard evidence sitting behind it, in which case you’re happy for your teachers to spend hundreds of hours gathering and reporting it, or it merely represents a teacher’s 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 teachers’ time. If it is the latter, then why make teachers spend hours recording what is in their head already?
3. 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 honest…by Year 6 that’s all the data you really care about most: ‘Will they pass or won’t they?”
   If any more information is needed, ask the teacher! Or better still, go and grab that child’s 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 — 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.

I’m 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 teachers’ precious time:

One per subject for each year group.

In reality, you don’t 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 ‘on track’ or ‘off-track’, it doesn’t 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, you’d 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 ‘evil’ 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 you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’ll also have noticed that Ofsted will no longer even be looking at schools’ internal data.

What a perfect chance to reset the data madness and free up the nation’s teachers to plan the best lessons in the world.