Governor Questions

[ConfusedGovernor]

I've just received the stats for pupils progress.

And there's one (statistically significant) group of kids who are not making progress in one subject.

Which obviously I'm really concerned about.

Those kids are already on an intervention. So I'm in effect questioning the effectiveness of the intervention. And I know the school think the intervention is really great and is a real strength of the school.

Anyone got any suggestions for what questions I should ask, how I should phrase them - and is there anything additional I can ask for? ie a more indepth report or an additional meeting or something?

Then I suppose your next step is to ask at the governors meeting why writing has not been pushed for this particular cohort and how this decision fits in with the overall picture of this cohort making progress in literacy as a whole. If you're ofsteded then I assume that the same data will be available to inspectors as has been made available to governors. You need to have minuted discussion of what the school is doing to improve writing levels (the challenge part) at the same time as supporting the improvement that has been made in reading.

Disclaimer: am only a relatively new governor on the curriculum committee. Am also part of a new scrutiny panel and am waiting for the appropriate governor training. So I may be completely wrong!

You need to also bear in mind the huge shift in SEN integration. There are many, many children who would have been sent to Special School because of Moderate learning difficulties, who are now Mainstreamed.

There is a general skew in the level of disability we see in children today. Far more Severe or Profound learning difficulties, which means that Special schools have become almost completely Severe/PMLD. My DD goes to a Special School with over 100 children. She is one of a small minority of MLD children. They have so many Severe/PMLD children that they have had to build an extension to allow space for the children they have.

I'm not justifying your school, at all, but school is for education of the whole child. It is quite possible that the children in the cohort you mention are just not ready or able to write functionally yet, and to be honest, with the age of technology, they will be able to get ahead much more easily if they can read, rather than not read.

Whether they can write or not? It isn't that much of a barrier. They could learn to type, dictate, whatever. Reading is the key that unlocks the door of life.

No, I won't let this be explained by severe SN (although that was one of many excuses she gave me)

This is a third of the cohort.

(and less than a fifth of this group have a statement)

Even kids on P scales need to move up the P scales.

But they all need to be taught writing.

There is one child in this cohort who will probably never learn to read and write, and who will certainly go on to a special secondary school. Only one.

Is it the intervention that is the problem, or the way in which it is being delivered?

Sarah - as a governor I can't comment on the intervention.

Nor do I know if it's being delivered correctly or not.

However, from what I understand as a parent, it is being delivered correctly.

RWI is a phonics program, and is only designed to teach reading and spelling. However you won't move up a sublevel in writing by improving your spelling.

So, and this is more or less what the literacy coordinator told me, there is no way these kids writing level could improve because they are not being taught the skills needed to move them to the next sub level.

Sarah - as a governor I can't comment on the intervention.

Nor do I know if it's being delivered correctly or not.

However, from what I understand as a parent, it is being delivered correctly.

RWI is a phonics program, and is only designed to teach reading and spelling. However you won't move up a sublevel in writing by improving your spelling.

So, and this is more or less what the literacy coordinator told me, there is no way these kids writing level could improve because they are not being taught the skills needed to move them to the next sub level.

Well, by the sounds of it your question isn't: "why aren't these kids progressing?" - you know why. Your question is: what is our expectation of progress of this cohort? And what do we expect of the benchmark? There must be similar groups in other schools; the question is not how this group progress against the rest of the school - there are lots of cozy subjective reasons for low expectations here - but how they progress against similar groups at other schools.

You may get further by linking that question to the Ofsted key criterion of "Attainment" which I'm sure will be all over your curriculum committee like a rash.

I don't know much about other GBs (I'm parent governor at a Special School, and fwiw I would agree with Lougle that you don't necessarily make progress on the p-scales)

"No, I won't let this be explained by severe SN (although that was one of many excuses she gave me)

This is a third of the cohort.

(and less than a fifth of this group have a statement)

Even kids on P scales need to move up the P scales.

But they all need to be taught writing."

But, ConfusedGovernor, you can't explain away a valid explanation.

You say that less than 20% (1/5) of the group in question have a Statement. Statements are incredibly hard to get. The national average for a Statement of Special Educational Needs is 2%.

So, if the entire cohort was, say, 300 children, then the national average applied would see roughly 6 of those children with a Statement.

The subgroup you refer to is 1/3 of the cohort. Even if all of the Statemented children within the cohort were in this group (presuming the grouping is organised by ability), there would be 6 children out of the 100 children in the subgroup who have Statements.

But, in your subgroup, there are ';ess than a fifth' who have a statement. So, using my sample group of 100 children, bearing in mind the presumption that the grouping is done on ability, the close to 20 of the children could have a Statement.

That means that in your subgroup, the number of Statements is 3.33r x the national average.

Then, you have to understand that figure in the context of our economy and the SEN system. Statements are incredibly hard to get. For every child who has a Statement, you will probably find at least five more that ideally should have a Statement but have been placed on School Action Plus. Then the children who are on SA+ who need it. Then the children who should be on SA+ but have been fobbed off with SA.

Of the children with Statements, you will find that there are children who need 20 hours of 1:1 support who actually have 4 hours of 'small group work' and the other 16 hours of funding has been absorbed by meeting the needs of the children who couldn't get a sniff at a statement.

Realistically, unless a parent has a high level of intelligence and a bit of balls, and a school has kept detailed records showing a lack of progress, a child hasn't got a hope of a Statment unless the child is causing a major disruption in class.

Writing will always come after reading. Because to write a word, you have to have the foundational skills in place:

• You have to know that the squiggles on the page mean something.
• You have to know that a particular squiggle on a page will always mean a particular thing. It doesn't ever change.
• You have to realise that when we read, the words go left to right.
• You have to be able to concentrate long enough to remember which squiggles go next to each other.
• You have to have an adequate grip on the writing tool.
• You have to have reasonable fine motor skills.

The list goes on.

I'm not saying to lower your expectations. I'm just saying that you'd get better results by trying to understand the context of your statistics rather than presuming that they signal a teaching problem.

RWI is only supposed to be used every day for an initial period and should then be used in conjunction with other strands of Literacy once the first phase has been completed.
We started it in January and Year R-4 (Children who needed it) did it every day for half a term. Since then we reviewed (and reviewed and reviewed) and now they do it 3 days a week and do something similar to Big Write on the other days.
Ask them about the their long term exit strategy

• How regularly are we assessing these children to see if this intervention is having the desired impact?
• Is the desired impact sustainable?
• Is the desired impact worth sacrificing levels in writing for?
• how long do they think it is feasible to continue with daily RWI in terms of staffing/impact on other pupils etc
• What is the likely impact /worst case scenario/best case scenario on writing levels at the end of this year
• How can we justify the slower progress in writing achievement in the SEF or to OFSTED?

- What % of these children will still make 2 levels progress by the end of KS2?

But Lougle, those last two:
^- You have to have an adequate grip on the writing tool.

• You have to have reasonable fine motor skills.^

are writing skills. Prerequisites to writing, not writing itself. But in a Literacy class, you would file them under "writing". The OP's point is that they are concentrating exclusively on reading skills, and if he is eg the Literacy governor, he is held accountable for their progress in both.

ITA about the whole SN in mainstream thing and the nightmare of assessing what you have got when so few who need statements have them. But that is why I am suggesting he go out there and find a school with a similar intake/group and ask what they are achieving with that cohort. He needs an objective measure and there aren't many ways of getting one in this situation.

I think that the school has told you why there has been no improvement and it is not a surprise if the pupils are not doing any writing that they do not improve their writing skills.
I think that Bossoftheschool is correct, you have to be asking them what their longer term exit strategy is. If they really don't know what it is then you have every right to start getting on the soap box and start shouting. If however they expect in say three months to have made a marked increase in reading sufficient to stop RWI and that it will then accelerate their writing skills then you have to accept the view of the professional for now. However I would get everything said minuted so that there is no backsliding on this because eventually you are going to have a lot of angry parents if this does not work.