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Improving teaching and making the whole of the learning process more effective is the key to raising standards. There are at least three initiatives that are keeping good teaching at the top of the school improvement agenda. Every Child Matters is at the heart of almost everything that is happening in schools and at its centre it clearly and emphatically emphasises the importance of meeting the needs of all children. Secondly, ‘personalised learning’ - which is a new-ish term for making sure that the learning needs of all children are catered for. Finally, is the importance of successful performance management which is being modified slightly during this year. When performance management is done properly it is about understanding what successful teaching is, observing it in the classroom and improving as many skills and techniques as possible.

Making sure teaching is being improved
Your school improvement partner (SIP) will be helping you to raise standards and one of their aide memoires is Strategies for Improving Schools: A Handbook for School Improvement Partners, which can be downloaded from www.standards.dfes.gov.uk. It suggests that you have to: ‘ensure there is an unvarying focus on improving teaching and learning’.

You will also be completing your self-evaluation form (SEF). To do this properly you will have to monitor classroom performance so that you know how good the teaching is and what improvements need to be made. Section 5a (Quality of Provision) asks, ‘How good is the quality of teaching and learning’ and suggests that you consider:

how well teaching meets the needs of the full range of learners and course requirements the suitability and rigour of assessment in planning, learning and monitoring learners’ progress the diagnosis of and provision for individual learning needs the involvement of parents and carers in their children’s learning and development.

So, if you want to find out those areas of teaching you might need to improve you don’t have to look much further than the SEF. But this is too simple and it will not be very helpful if all you do on training days and at staff meetings is attempt to improve teaching by just repeating the questions from the SEF. We need to be much more specific.