So the first week after half term is done and dusted and it was a great week … well let’s just say that no-one has been injured (even after Seager invaded my blog!) Actually it was a very good week.

It’s been an opportunity for me to get on with putting the finishing touches to our department tracking sheet. Most HODs will have their own way of keeping tracking of the bigger picture within the department, despite most schools using a whole school tracking system (we use SIMs) and I wanted to see what others were doing in different schools so I put a shout out onto twitter and several (lots!) of you fabulous peeps sent me copies of what you use … the good news (for me) is we are doing the same as most of you. In terms of year 11, I keep a transition (from KS2) matrix based on targets and this gets updated after each assessment so we can get some handle on final outcomes but one of the things that came out of the “sharing” is that we probably need to be looking at specific teaching groups too in more detail, especially with a new team.

So I’ve made a change so that it includes a one page summary per year that includes “school target” and also FFT “D” (see below) for each teaching group and then also the latest assessment data showing the “state of the nation”. I’ve also prettied it up a little (yep! You know me!) and as we go through the year each summary will be added to it so that we can build a picture of how the students make progress, given that the make-up of the student profile is very different to our last school. (It will also be useful having the “entry and exit” points clearly available for Seager when it comes to putting together the SEF/DIP – or whatever you call it!). Having this “over time” view is important to me as I knew to some extent how much ground each of our previous year groups would cover in a year and I now need to build up that body of knowledge here – I know there are “averages” and “should do this” kind of figures that people bandy around but there is so much variability, some of which can be controlled and some of it can’t. The plan is that once we have each established ourselves with our teaching groups we should be able to extend the distance covered in a year. That takes time, I know, and is very dependent upon each teacher teaching to their strength in terms of specific types of groups.

There are a couple of things that are “new” to me at Alcester Academy that I thought I’d share: –

• School (i.e. student) target is generated from KS2 level, with 3 levels of progress being the norm unless students achieved a KS2 of 4.3 and above which is 4 levels (the difference here is that before we were told to work on 4 levels for those above KS2 level 5 and not 4.3). I’ve had the discussion before (so don’t go “there”) about setting targets and I know that lots of you think they are arbitrary – don’t shoot me! They are exactly that though, a target to aim for … it doesn’t mean that they should limit ambitions or ‘owt because targets can be exceeded you know!
• Internal assessments at school level are broken down further into sublevels (i.e. E.0, E.2, E.5 and E.8) to be able to measure progress (fingers crossed) being made and this is reported to parents too. In the past we were only asked to collate “full grades” and then we kept “marks from next grade” on our departmental spreadsheet. I like the fact that the journey to their target grades is broken down into smaller chunks too.

Tomorrow we’re off to London to do something with a group of AET maths departments. Doing this type of thing I find there is also an element of “geekexcitement” (I know it’s not a real word … it should be!) because getting out and about is my second favourite type of CPD (after twitter!) as I always come back full of ideas, but I also get a little bit nervous because I soooo want people to take back something even if only “ONE little golden nugget”.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to putting some faces to names and meeting new ones!