Not that really annoying board game but how the average teacher feels about current education policy. Just as there is no average teacher, there is also no average education policy.

Some policies make perfect sense (educating kids in the dangers of releasing personal data onto the internet), some are knee jerk (I’ll let you fill in those…), some need to be a little more thought through (including how they are going to be practically implemented) before even being introduced (performance related pay for teachers).

Blaming politicians for meddling with education policy is a little like blaming police for arresting people. They are doing their job, and just like we do not want the police to arrest the wrong people, we do not want
politicians to implement the wrong education policy. Therein lies the nub of the problem. Is the right policy to maintain the status-quo, is it to change to a more evidence based practice or is it to trust our instincts and
experience?

Should it be established by a reliable currency for measuring the impact of what we do on what we value? Before we make changes we need to agree these measures and proceed through a series of measured actions to keep what works best and adapt and lose what has the least effect. If we are going to take such a new direction we need help. Fortunately help is on the horizon. We at Osiris urge every teacher to familiarise themselves with the work of John Hattie and Visible Learning Plus.

As soon as we can measure the effect size of what we do with every child and through each intervention, we can stop treating everything as average. The best schools and teachers already do this. Hattie’s system, featured in the infographic, would allow all schools and teachers to measure effect size to the same scale.

In future when politicians stand up and introduce new policy, we can ask them what the impact will be, how they will measure it and where else in the world it has been proven to work. The Education Endowment Fund, Education Media Centre (who we support) and Durham research are already moving us down this line. In the future, an end to frustration, no more average education policies but ones that work for all teachers and pupils. SR