It’s that time of year again. Appraisal targets have been met and set, improvement plans are underway and reports are beginning to be compiled for Governors/trustees. Government performance tables pop up in tweets, WhatsApp messages and emails. The ISDR will hit school leaders before Christmas.

Throughout my career, it has been a time of great stress. The desire to reduce school improvement to a series of simplistic performance measures, information charts and tables has always irritated me. It usually leaves me incandescent with frustration, and the doors and walls of my house with new kick marks.

Such stress results from a sense of injustice, both real and (I accept) perceived. How can such simplicity of data accurately acknowledge the complexity of the pupils we educate?

I have never known such complexity as now, and it is only going to increase. For pupils to be reduced to a homogenous group of children, parcelled up together as a neat group of numbers, is insane. I have no doubt that teachers and school leaders, in most schools up and down the country, have noticed similar trends.

Our cohorts now contain pupils that feature as follows…

·       Pupils in our Enhanced Provision, their education being provided skilfully by specialist teachers largely away from their peers, such are the level of their needs.

·       Then there are other pupils who require an environment somewhere between the classroom and the provision, for example a high-functioning autistic pupil who can write an A-Z of exotic fruits, but cannot engage in any type of conversation and sings incessantly.

·       There are some pupils recently arrived from Africa, Asia and South America with indescribable experiences from childhood, now thriving and gaining confidence despite crushing disabilities or traumatic childhoods.

·       Pupils whose experiences during the pandemic delayed their development (they were in Y1 and Y2 during lockdowns), and are only now beginning to flourish.

·       Other pupils are prodigious and multi-skilled but prone to distraction, each with unusual learning styles.

I’m in awe of the staff who are teaching, coaching, supporting, loving these pupils.  They instinctively understand the complicated nature of the class.

But we have too many people, circling the periphery of our system, who are increasingly unable to understand this complexity, or stand deaf to its carrion-call. For them, it raises too many questions and leads to an unwillingness to accept this…yes, complexity.

To accommodate their ignorance, leaders have to present disaggregated data, individualised data, a range of plans, analysis and evaluations, each with supporting evidence, in order to justify the lack of alignment with national data. This work is back-breaking and creates such a huge amount of work that it then takes people away from the very core purpose of their role! It has a financial implication too as it requires more management time, taking people away from the frontline.

For those interested in accountability, where do you start when your % of EHCPs is 5 times the national average? How do you measure the collateral challenges presented to schools in such circumstances? How do you rank complexity? How do you adjust for this in performance tables?

Well the bottom line is that you just can’t. and you can see how this is unpalatable for many auditors and regulators. It’s just too complicated.

I wonder if I do have the answer though. In my new role within a Catholic MAT, there is a fantastic leader of data and management systems who has been setting up deep analytics for the schools currently in the Trust, at this stage focused primarily on pupil attendance. It may be possible in the future to widen this to a whole range of granular data that is able to deal with the complexity I outline above. I am not a Luddite, and if technology can help in understanding the complicated nature of schools and children, then great.

Because we can’t ignore data. It isn’t going away. And there is another debate which must surround the privacy of data and the sharing of information – the ethics if you like. That is a huge area on its own.

If it assists with reducing workload too, then even better. As a headteacher, I would love a data manager to provide me with detailed information showing how our children are progressing within their complex, individual contexts. It would save me at least three days of my summer holiday for a start.

To sum up, maybe there is a positive way forward. In the hands of good people, skilled and principled, we can use data to tell the stories of those multiple schools where things have become so, so complicated.