FRONT COVER PROFILE Sythwood Primary School
SEVEN TOP TIPS FOR ENSURING EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT REVIEWS Transparency
Robustness
Always set clear performance expectations and where appropriate, link these expectations to professional career pathways, setting school- wide workforce measurements.
Consistency
and development, not only by ensuring that everyone’s review takes place on time, but also by providing a structure and allowing the SLT to have an overview of agreed targets,” she said. “Every staff member completes a self review prior to a meeting with their line manager. Areas to work on are clearly identified and used to inform performance management. Armed with that information we run reports, look for common areas of need and tailor professional development activities appropriately. For example, recently we organised specific training for phonics for KS1 support staff who were supporting SEN pupils – a requirement identified by our BlueSky system.
“Self-evaluation documents allow the SLT to pull together strengths and areas for development straight after a learning walk or book scrutiny so that we can amend our School Improvement Plan immediately. In this way we ensure that we are using the data to move the school forward.
It is important that both reviewers and staff fully understand protocols, time tables and expectations. Discussions regarding appraisals should be supportive, robust and of a consistent standard
Fairness
All staff should be made aware that support will be offered to them if training and development is required to meet their objectives
Awareness
All staff should be made aware of protocols and procedures to be applied if progress is not being made as planned. It is important that intervention strategies are understood and agreed by all.
Reflective practice The Swanage School
“It is helping with our overall school improvement by providing much clearer and more up-to-date feedback. Our staff can see clearly where their strengths are. There’s no ambiguity – if a target is not met it is clearly stated, as is the action necessary for improvement.”
The Swanage School, an Academy secondary school in Dorset, has been using BlueSky’s performance management solution since opening as a free school in 2013, achieving a ‘Good’ Ofsted rating in 2015 and going on to become one of the best performing schools in the county and in the top 6% of schools nationally. Deputy head Jenny Maraspin explains; “We wanted to track the impact of continual professional learning to ensure that all our performance management activity had a direct impact on raising standards of teaching and learning in the classroom. “BlueSky provides a clear way of recording evidence against objectives and monitoring performance continually. We get deeper and more thoughtful objectives and think through their impact too. For example, after every lesson observation there’s an expectation that the ‘observee’ will create a CPL activity relevant to any points raised. In this way, our observations become developmental and not judgemental.
Protocols and procedures The school should have protocols and procedures in place to ensure that new reviewers are appropriately trained in their role. Staff should be involved in discussions about protocols and procedures to ensure they remain fit for purpose.
Objectives should be moderated to ensure that they are robust enough and reflect the level of challenge appropriate for that individual and their position. Evidence gathered by third parties, such as the reviewer, should be agreed in advance.
Training and development
Both training and development need to be well crafted to meet the needs of the individuals and groups of staff. Measures of impact should be established in advance of support being given.
“BlueSky saves administration time and gives value for money in that it elongates the impact of our in-house CPL. It is definitely the vehicle that gets teacher development embedded and raises our standards of teaching and learning - without a doubt.
“It makes for a happier body of staff who are really aware of pedagogy and definitely promotes reflective practitioners.”
Standardisation of process across multi- academy trusts
Standardisation of process is also particularly important at the moment, due to the growth of multi academy trusts, where executive boards must be able to track the process being followed by their staff across all the different schools. In the sad event that there were a capability issue with a teacher, if he or she were able to demonstrate that they had been treated differently from a teacher in another school within the same trust it could potentially cause a major difficulty. If a teacher were ever to take a school to a tribunal the fact that standards across a trust were inconsistent could become a big issue. Therefore standardisation of areas such as lesson observations and other quality assurance issues is essential.
CIT South is a MAT comprising three schools in Lincolnshire. “We chose BlueSky because we needed a coherent, convenient and efficient way of tracking performance management across our three schools,” said Daran Bland, executive head teacher. “It has proved particularly useful as we have grown as a federation. We are able to add to the information we have, to analyse it and most importantly to utilise it.
“There is now a triangulated approach to where we are collectively headed as schools – performance management informs the training opportunities available to staff and links directly to school improvement planning.”
Teach First uses BlueSky to track the progress of its teachers. May 2017
www.blueskyeducation.co.uk www.education-today.co.uk 41
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