MAY 14 ― On each of about 203 days, for around 11 years, Malaysian children spend five to six hours in school, nine to ten hours at home and in their communities. For the remaining time they sleep. This amounts to around 13,500 hours in the classroom with their teachers and more than 29,000 hours at home during their schooling years. In addition to this, nation’s children spend a further 33,000 hours in the care of their parents and caregivers before they even start formal schooling at the age of 7.
A child’s educational achievement is influenced just as much by the 62,000 hours they spend at home and in the community as by the 13,500 hours they spend in the classroom. So if parents are able to get the home environment right, a child can succeed – even if they attend a crummy school.
Obviously the ideal situation is that home and school are both rich environments that are equally conducive to student achievement. So what are the factors Inside the School Gates that impact on learning?
Let’s start with two factors that tell us relatively little about whether a school is outstanding or underperforming:
1. School Facilities ― For parents it can be very tempting to judge a school by the quality of its facilities: Olympic sized swimming pools, tablet computers for all, open plan classroom concepts and snazzy looking beanbags in the library. However, not all that glitters is gold.
CfBT Education Trust research shows that school facilities have remarkably little impact on student achievement. Beyond the basics of ensuring appropriate levels of temperature control, lighting, ventilation and acoustics – the rest is just window dressing that has only marginal effect on the actual learning experience. So whilst good facilities are nice to have, they are not all that necessary.
There has also been considerable research into the effects of technology on student achievement and at the moment the data strongly suggests that the heavy investment required in equipping classrooms with computers does not translate into major learning productivity gains.
2. Exam Results ― Every child needs to leave school with a government-backed certificate and for parents there is a tendency to think that there must be a simple and direct relationship between a school’s exam pass rate and the quality of education that it provides. The truth is far more complex and whilst exam results do tell you something about a school, they don’t tell you everything you need to know.
The reality is that many high performing schools are in catchment areas where there are middle class demographics. Middle class parents often have higher aspirations for their children and provide considerably more out of school enrichment experiences. Socio-economic status on its own is one of the biggest predictors of academic achievement – irrespective of the quality of schooling.
I have visited schools with top exam results and high performing school status, where I was not greatly inspired by what was going on in the classrooms. Children made strong progress almost in spite of the teaching. I have also visited ‘average’ schools where many of the students came from squatter communities. Whilst these children left school with ‘average’ grades they did so because of outstanding teaching, in context of low parental aspirations. Something really special was happening in these ‘average’ schools.
So if school facilities and exam results are all a bit of a blind alley, what are the more important factors that distinguish and outstanding school from a poorly performing one? Three of the most important education game changers are outstanding leadership, brilliant teaching and unrelenting parent power. Let’s unpack each in turn:
1. Outstanding Leadership ― granted outstanding leaders on their own do not guarantee great schools but they act as a key binding agent to make things happen. Recent research by CfBT Education Trust, in partnership with Oxford University, tells us that high performing principals do not work longer hours than other principals. Instead they spend more of their time walking the corridors, more time coaching teachers, interact more often with parents and spend more time with students. In short, they get their priorities right, delegate the paperwork to others and focus on what really counts: driving up the quality of teaching.
If, when you visit your child’s school, the principal is walking the halls, observing lessons and they welcome the opportunity to talk to you – the chances are you’ve got a good leader on your hands. If the principal recognises the importance of maintaining the school’s GPA but doesn’t overly obsess about the exam results – the chances are they’re an outstanding leader that recognises teaching quality is king and that by focusing on this relentlessly good exam results happen, almost as if by magic.
2. Brilliant Teaching ― this is a lot harder to unpack and do justice to in a few paragraphs but two of the key characteristics of strong teachers are empathy and feedback. The global research suggests that when students’ feel that their teacher really cares about them and their progress, they take far more interest in their own studies. So a science teacher with high empathy but low subject knowledge will likely do significantly better than a teacher with a PhD in Nuclear Physics who does not take time to learn their students’ names.
Good quality feedback is also essential. After all, how can a student improve if they don’t understand what they could be doing better? Research by Robert Marzano, John Hattie, Paul Black and more than 250 other scholars suggests that feedback is actually the most powerful tool in a teacher’s armoury. Getting students to understand how to improve by giving clear and actionable feedback results in gains in student achievement that are amongst the largest ever reported for education interventions. Equally important is feedback from student to teacher, so that educators know how to raise their game.
The research also tells us that good quality student feedback is actually far more important than receiving a grade. Students who are given comment-only feedback and no score/grade on their work actually learn more. The problem with grading is that students fixate on their score and don’t properly digest feedback from teachers on how to improve. They learn that points mean prizes rather than that knowledge is valuable for its own sake.
3. Unrelenting Parent Power ― One of the challenges with ambitious national education reform is that there are very few buttons or levers that central government can push or activate that actually drive up performance in the classroom. Federal governments are simply too far removed from the school gates to have any meaningful impact. This is just as true of Malaysia as it is of South Korea or even Finland.
Recent research by the World Bank makes the distinction between ‘Long-Route Accountability’ of the education system and ‘Short-Route Accountability’. Long-Route Accountability happens when civil society and parent action groups complain to central government. Government, being too far away from where the service is delivered, pushes the one or two buttons that it has available but its powerful policy cannons either fire too long or too wide. So nothing changes and, to parent groups, it feels as though their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
Short route accountability, on the other hand, happens when parent groups become active at the school level. Whilst parents lack the powerful policy cannons of central government, when they mobilise at the local level, their flash bangs and fire crackers are aimed with high precision and can actually be far more effective. The deafening cacophony forces school leadership teams to act, to make the noise go away.
CfBT has experienced this first hand. In India we trained semi-literate women’s groups in rural villages to inspect their schools on a daily basis, using traffic light scorecards – with the results being aggregated, ranked and presented to all school principals on a monthly basis. The net result was that school performance skyrocketed.
So, what do we conclude? Outstanding school leaders that walk the corridors can create school cultures that nurture brilliant teaching, stoked with plenty of empathy and feedback. But unrelenting parent power at the local level creates short-route accountability, which is the Mother Lode for fostering outstanding schools the length and breadth of Malaysia.
*Dr Arran Hamilton is Director of CfBT Education Malaysia (www.cfbt.com.my), a not-for-profit organization founded in 1979, which in turn is part of CfBT Education Trust, the world’s leading not-for-profit education consultancy.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.
