Let’s indulge in two thought experiments.

Scenario 1. Imagine you have no data about a class you start to teach in September. You have no knowledge about their prior attainment and no knowledge about what they have learned before. You don’t know what their behaviour is going to be like or what they are predicted to get in their next set of national exams. What do you do?

Scenario 2. It’s December and you have just completed a round of mocks with Y10. You have lots of data: how they performed in each past paper, what their target grade is, what their behaviour and participation in class is like. You can break down the data by gender, ethnicity, pupil premium etc. How do you use this data?

I will come back to both of these thought experiments later.

Analysis

Teachers and school leaders have a tendency to collect and analyse data: mock data, target grade data, behaviour scores, end of unit assessment data, question level analyses etc. We then like to slice this data by various groupings: ethnicity, prior attainment, SEND vs non-SEND, pupil premium vs no pupil premium etc.

The problem with all of these analyses is that they usually do not tell us what the root cause of underachievement is. Certainly, they do not tell us what the root causes within our sphere of influence are. For example, not all pupils eligible for pupil premium funding face the same (if any) barriers to learning. Underperforming pupils in a cohort that belong to the same ethnic group may well be underperforming for different reasons. A high prior attaining pupil from a well-off family might be facing all sorts of difficulties that haven’t been picked up by any of the categories listed above. Such analyses also miss those pupils who are clearly quite bright and making reasonable progress, but in reality we know to be coasting.

What if we go back to first principles and list a set of root causes of underachievement? At the very top, we will put the factor that meets the two criteria: ‘most possible for schools to influence directly’ and ‘potential size of influence’. What factor(s) would you come up with?

I think there is one key factor: how hard my pupils are working. I can, with careful thought, reliably measure ‘hard work’ at the individual level that will prevent me from making generalisations associated with the aforementioned categories such as ‘pupil premium’.

Fundamentally, data analysis of the sort I describe above can be useful for identifying issues at the cohort level, but really, hard work is the data we as classroom teachers know best. We can see it in every interaction of every lesson, and we see it in the quality of our pupils’ homework every week. The question is, how do I know how much more I can push each of my pupils?

What do I mean by hard work?

For any given pupil, I always ask myself:

1. Does this pupil give 100% in lessons? Do they put their hand up for every question? Do they complete all independent work with full focus?
2. Does this pupil complete their homework every single week? Does this pupil complete extension work every single week?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, then it doesn’t really matter if the data says they are ‘exceeding their target grade’ or even are ‘at the top of their class’. I know they can do better. And I will push them to do better.

What if a child is underperforming? Again, if the answer to any of the questions above is ‘no’, then I need to do something to change that.

Philosophy

How we perceive this depends on our philosophy to a large extent. I firmly believe that teachers have a responsibility to teach well & create conditions that set pupils up to work hard, and for that hard work to lead to noticeable success in and out of the classroom. For example, I believe teachers should teach explicitly, and give lots of opportunities to participate, build fluency with rehearsal & therefore feel really successful in lessons.

I believe that teachers should set homework which meets the following criteria:

1. Covers content that has already been covered in class.
2. Gets pupils to practise acquired knowledge to fluency.

I also fully believe that pupils should take responsibility for their effort. I believe pupils have agency and therefore choose whether or not to participate in lessons and decide how hard to work in and out of lessons.

Culture of hard work

In order to enable pupils to feel their efforts at home lead to them knowing more (and therefore becoming more intelligent), I set my classes a weekly high-stakes quiz based on the homework, sat in exam conditions, which I mark each week. The quiz serves to show pupils that their effort is directly linked to their quiz score. For example, if they participate well in lessons and spend enough time learning their physics equations and practising at home, they should score close to 100% in the quiz. If they do not practise at home or focus in class, they are less likely to have achieved the fluency and will score less well.

Praising the best quizzes, improvements in scores or narrating excellence in quantity and quality of homework is a key part of my lessons. I invest a lot of time praising effort and hard work. In fact, when pupils improve their quiz scores or score 100%, I beam with pride, we collectively applaud the efforts & one pupil even gets to wear a ceremoniously awarded stethoscope for the lesson! Equally, I show my disappointment when pupils let themselves down by producing poor quality homework or show a clear lack of effort.

In lessons, the amount of praise I give to those participating most & those whose focus is strongest creates a culture where such traits are seen as respectable & praiseworthy. I fire tonnes of simple ‘check for listening‘ questions to my pupils throughout my explanations to give them opportunities to participate easily and succeed. I give them ample opportunity to rehearse key ideas throughout the lesson so they can build fluency through ‘turn and talk‘. After each correct answer, I shower the pupils with praise to reinforce their effort and participation.

The collective result of these actions is a culture of pride in working hard. This is how self-esteem is built. My pupils love getting their quiz scores back, especially if they know they have worked hard. I get tonnes of pupils showing they have done extra practise each week because they relish the chance to celebrate the fact they worked extra hard at home. When I ask pupils: who do you think has impressed you this week in our form, the answers from others is invariably people who demonstrate the value of hard work by working hard at home, or by participating really well in lessons (amongst other values I shall come to in future blogs).

Back to the scenarios

To return to our thought experiments at the start of the blog: I don’t really think either scenario is more or less helpful for me as a teacher. In all honesty, if the data isn’t there, it can prevent me from lowering my expectations for pupils. If the data is there, the simplest questions I can ask myself are: what do they tell me about how hard my pupils are working? How can I push them to take more responsibility, while I take responsibility in reflecting on how well I am setting them up to succeed? These are the biggest levers for tacking pupil underachievement. This is also why I do not believe in ‘target grades’. It is far more helpful to ask if a pupil is working as hard as they could possibly be. This is one the main factors which allowed every single pupil in my last GCSE science class to score the top grades in Combined Science: 9-9. Incidentally, their mean score was a full 40 marks above the 9-9 grade boundary. Each of those 31 pupils pushed themselves & took pride in working hard.

But it wasn’t the grades that I was most proud of; it was the fact that they worked their best. I have had pupils with the most unimaginably difficult health or economic circumstances that may have tempted me to expect less of them, persevere through lessons & produce astonishing homework, and this taught me that many pupils find the sense of control over how hard they work to be a hugely motivating factor.

Learning to love hard work is one of the most valuable traits we can develop in our pupils. Working your hardest gifts you with a sense of agency, ownership of your outcomes & leads to fulfilment. Whilst it is easy to use data to obsess over pedagogy & curriculum refinements, it is really pupil character that trumps all. And if we know a pupil is working his hardest, it doesn’t really matter what his grades are. Those grades truly belong to him. He will feel proud of it, because he did his best. And so will we.

@Mr_Raichura / @PriteshRaichura.bsky.social

If you’d like to book CPD with me, have a look at: https://bunsenblue.com/training-cpd/

In a future post, I will explore with more granularity how we can build a culture of hard work & look at other values that I think schools can focus on. These levers usually achieve greater success in every measure because they are about forging culture. As the saying goes, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”