The devil is in the data

@Inglish_teecha popped up in my Twitter feed with the following tweet:

@GuardianTeach Trouble is, with all the time spent managing the data, there's no time to prepare the teaching and learning.

Instantly my blood was up. I'm a very big fan of data in schools, and I have come across this sort of attitude before. Then I remembered one of the golden rules of schools: context is everything.

My philosophy regarding tracking student progress and target setting is simple. I believe that at the end of a lesson all kids should know something that they did not know at the start of the lesson. For more practical subjects, you can talk about being able to "do" something new instead if you like. That's my idea of learning, and if we hold on to that idea and make it happen through teaching, then we're getting it about right.

In order to know whether all the kids now know something they did not before we have to do some form of assessment. Black and Williams ideas on "assessment for learning" are now commonplace in teacher training (though perhaps not being implemented in classrooms) and if we regularly check student understanding as we go along, doing summative assessments at the end of term should be a doddle since we have plenty of evidence to base those assessments upon.

The next step is to use these assessment data against meaningful targets so as to identify which students are falling behind and need support, or equally to identify able students who need greater challenge. Classroom teachers should be doing this as well as middle and senior leaders.

As I say, simple, and frankly essential in any decent school.

Which is where the context comes in. Context is everything. A decent school with good leadership knows how to do data right. Do it wrong, and it can easily lead to a situation where data gathering gets in the way of the core business, which in schools is of course teaching and learning. It's fair comment for @Inglish_teecha to claim that in their context, in their school, they feel it is going wrong.

If leaders then turn this data on the teachers to try and beat them up over their performance, then we have a problem. Plus if the targets are not meaningful, because they are set too low, or are too "aspirational", or are simply made up, then the whole thing falls apart, and the devil is in the data.

So I apologise, @Inglisha_teecha, whoever you are. I was angered when I first saw your tweet, but it helped remind me that actually successfully tracking student progress is a tricky business, and I bet there are more schools getting it badly wrong than there are getting it right.