Scottish Government

4. LEARNING ISSUES IDENTIFIED IN SCHOOL FEEDBACK

4.1. Reported factors that promote or inhibit progress

School staff in tranches two and three (2008-09) reported that progress was hindered by the following factors:

• Making the time and space for staff to consider longer-term targets whilst immersed in the challenges of day-to-day school work.
• Senior staff juggling multiple projects/goals concurrently.
• Staffing shortages in particular subjects such as Home Economics.
• Staff turnover generally, loss of senior staff in particular.
• Lack of identification among staff with the transformational plan.
• Initial negative perceptions of evaluation as 'checking up' among some staff.
• The development of strained relations between external partners was also cited by schools as a potential inhibitor to effective partnership work, for example between college educators and practitioners in industry or between the Council and a local management committee over community access to school facilities. Schools of Ambition project managers were aware of the inter-personal skills required in fostering and sustaining collaboration.
• The capacity of educators trained for the post-compulsory sector to manage behavioural issues that might be presented by school students.
• Protracted liaison with council housing and property services departments in order to make changes to the school estate.
• Processes involved in purchasing equipment or site licences, which can delay progress and affect projected timelines.
• Local authority ICT firewalls inhibit the use of some web-based educational applications.
• Local authority servers in some cases struggle with the web applications that demand a particularly high bandwidth.

Progress was accelerated by the following factors:

• Additional material resources.
• Dedicated time for project leadership and coordination.
• Devolved opportunities for leadership among teaching and non-teaching staff.
• Maintaining a high public profile for School of Ambition work.
• Grounding changes in evidence (provided by formative feedback from cycles of on-going and planned evaluation activity).
• Openness to peer observation among recent entrants to the profession.
• Provision of in-house training by training lead facilitators e.g. in Feuerstein training or enhanced training in coaching and mentoring.
• Availability of enhanced and start-up funding.
• Flexibility to make changes to the curriculum in light of formative feedback from evaluation.
• Incentive of flexibility in allocating innovation budgets to/across departments through a transparent competitive bidding process.
• Networking activities to share ideas
• Tri-level coordinated and complementary support - school level, local authority and government

4.2. Issues for the support team

The numbers of questionnaire respondents reporting confidence in using a range of research and evaluation activities in their school was encouraging, see Figure 3. A clear majority of informants were at least fairly confident in undertaking all of the listed research tasks. This may suggest growing confidence in schools to conduct research with little external support. Confidence was lowest in relation to analysis of qualitative information and compiling the Telling the Story portfolio.

Figure 3 - Respondent confidence in conducting a range of evaluation activities*

* Presented as percentages to allow comparison of elements (N varied between 33 and 34)

Twenty-six questionnaire respondents made suggestions for the most useful support that research mentors could provide over the next few months. Ten made general statements about the importance of communication and discussion while others were more detailed in their requests, see Table 5 below. It was evident from a number of comments that informants were clearly thinking about the production of their 'Telling the Story' when they responded to this question with a number highlighting the need to look at the nature and content of this report.

Table 5 - Respondent requests for research support

The Virtual Research Environment ( VRE) had been used by a minority of informants during the previous 6 months. Seven had accessed it, 15 had not and 12 suggested an intention to use it in future.

In the feedback reported above, informants identified a range of material, technical, organisational and strategic issues that they felt inhibited or accelerated progress. Feedback suggests that further collaboration with the Research Support Team is advisable to raise levels of confidence in analysis among those charged with evaluating and reporting the rate of progress and the impact of innovation on pupil learning.