What is an ‘effective’ school? Part 2: Assessing effectiveness

Group of children photographed from above on a tarmac surface with a tree painted on the ground inbetween them

In the first part of this blog, I ascertained that the two generally globally accepted purposes of education were

to benefit economies, societies and nations – with all of the political and ideological ramifications that implies, and
to develop children’s characters and skills in preparation for a fulfilling adulthood – with those attributes being variously specified and defined (or not) by those designing the education system.

Presumably, then, an effective school – as a place that is fundamentally designed to deliver education – would be one which is fulfilling these purposes, and it should therefore follow that any assessment of a school’s effectiveness should be grounded in how well it is fulfilling them.

However, according to a recent study in the US, “virtually all public and commercial school performance measures are derived from observational comparisons: typically, average test score levels or growth for individual schools among a school’s enrolled students.”^{i(pp.36–37)} So this is showing that schools are assessed on their test scores – with graded assessments having been described by a representative of The Association of School and College Leaders in the UK as a “a woefully blunt tool with which to measure performance”, as quoted in another of my previous blogs – and/or the numbers of students enrolled with them. It is difficult to reconcile either of these measures with the purposes given above.

Turning to the School Effectiveness Index, which claims to have a “consistently high” reliability, and which is cited as a resource for some research in this area (e.g., Khun-Inkeeree et al., 2022)ⁱⁱ, we find that it only measures the attitudes and behaviours of teachers, including the quality and quantity of their “products and services,”ⁱⁱⁱ implying that it is the teaching staff, and them alone, which determine a school’s effectiveness. This hardly begins to address the purposes of education.

Similarly, recent research into the so-called ‘London effect’ of improvements in student outcomes in disadvantaged London neighbourhoods concentrated on interviewing a selection of leaders from the schools identified. Unsurprisingly, the results showed that school effectiveness was improved by a list of school policies, improvements in the quality of teaching, and ongoing evaluation of both students and systems.^iv

This emphasis on the quality of staff as a measure of school effectiveness was echoed in the March 2024 newsletter issued by the Chartered College of Teaching in the UK, which stated that staff professional learning and engagement with educational research would “strengthen school effectiveness”^v and indeed, one of the four criteria used by Ofsted in their evaluation of a school’s effectiveness in the UK is ‘leadership and management’. The other three are ‘quality of education’, ‘behaviour and attitudes’ and ‘personal development’.^vi It is easier to see how together these four criteria address the two purposes of education, but again, as Ofsted’s overall evaluation of a school is given as a single graded assessment of ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ the assessment tool used is “woefully blunt”.

One of the ways that Cambridge Mathematics has looked at how school education is preparing children for a fulfilling adult life is to ask 36 people (so far) in different professions if they use or rely on any maths that they learned in school and how they would change the school maths curriculum – see the ‘Interviews and Intersections’ category under ‘Blogs’ on our website and search for the ‘Intersections’ blogs. This is a very limited sample, but what is interesting is that most of them mention that they use the basic school maths of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and percentages in their lives, and nearly all mention that maths education needs to be real-world based, with practical activities and possibly case studies to show how maths is applied to, and relevant for, adult life and careers. As one person expressed it, “I would teach pupils everyday practical examples to give them confidence and ability to do whatever life throws at them.”

But perhaps we are all asking the wrong people the wrong questions. Who are the main stakeholders when it comes to a school education?

The students who receive it.

So how effective do they feel their education is? Has anyone thought of including their voices and their perceptions of their currently lived experience when researching school effectiveness?

In 2010 Langhout and Thomas stated that “the sociology of childhood perspective encourages us to listen to children’s perspectives and view children as experts in their own lives” (p. 61).^vii Surely, it is only when the main stakeholders – the students themselves – have a voice in what a school does and how it does it, will that school have a chance of being really ‘effective’. Is there anywhere in the world where the state education system is successfully fulfilling the two agreed purposes of education, as judged by the main stakeholders – the students in that system? Please let us know in the comments below if you are aware of any, how they are doing it, and what the results have shown.

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