Frank Norris MBE
Frank Norris MBE is Chair of our national Education Executives network and an education adviser based in Manchester. He is the former CEO of Co-op Academies Trust and former HMI and senior Ofsted manager with an education improvement background spanning several decades. He is currently an adviser to the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and is a trustee and chair of finance at the Great Academies and Education Trust.
In this article, Frank focuses on the importance of focusing on long-term impact and legacy – and not being consumed or overly defined by those very common, often all-pervading, short-term measures of success. Key to this is ensuring we are informed by contextual wisdom and understanding what our pupils, staff and communities need – in an evolving landscape – in order to thrive.
Olive farmers in Greece when planting olive groves do so in the knowledge that it will be their grandchildren who will benefit from the result. Olive trees have an interesting life cycle. For the first seven years, they produce almost no fruit, at least none that is worth harvesting. From seven to thirty years there is a significant increase in the amount of fruit produced. Then from thirty-five to one hundred and fifty they reach maturity and there is a full production of fruit, and they can continue to do this for another hundred years.
During the past few weeks and months, three separate education related issues have aligned and have made me think more deeply about olive growing as it relates to the measurement of our impact in education.
The first was a discussion with an eminent statistician who is very familiar with school attainment and progress data. He mentioned in passing that generally, education data is often unreliable and that the difference in academic performance between one school and another is largely down to factors outside of the school’s control such as pupil demographics, housing and local issues. I have been around long enough to know that although this is probably correct, it doesn’t stop, nor should it stop, the analysis of pupil outcomes. The bigger issue is whether we, as education practitioners (and, indeed as a system), sometimes place too much emphasis on one set of narrow results and don’t sufficiently consider and place emphasis upon the wider progress being made over time (as shown through pupil wellbeing data or NEET and future employment outcomes, for example). This is something referred to (with examples of the type of wider intelligence we might consider) in detail in Forum Strategy’s recently published ‘In Practice Guide’ on pure accountability.