Measuring what matters: Redefining data’s role in schools
Written by: Amarbeer Singh Gill and Jennifer Curran
9 min read
AMARBEER SINGH GILL, TEACHER EDUCATOR, AMBITION INSTITUTE, UK
JENNIFER CURRAN, RESEARCH SCIENTIST, AMBITION INSTITUTE, UK
We [often] question the judgement of experts whenever we seek out a second opinion on a medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, when it comes to our own knowledge and opinions, we often favor feeling right over being right... We need to develop the habit of forming our own second opinions.
Grant, 2021, p. 18
We distinctly remember telling parents/carers, ‘Your child has been working hard this year; it shows because their end-of-term scores have gone up.’ We also remember the guilt at realising that the quantitative measure that we were sharing didn’t fully represent the progress and development that the pupil had made across the year, because it couldn’t. It’s something we still sit with today and is the reason we felt compelled to write this article. Not because we believe that schools are doing something ‘wrong’, but because the great responsibility
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