Numeracy monitoring , evaluation & review support pack

Self-evaluation

Self-evaluation is an effective way of identifying your school’s baseline. Should you repeat the process over time it can be an effective way of measuring the impact of implementation. Through self-evaluation schools can identify strengths and weaknesses fairly easily, and this can accelerate the process of deciding which aspects need to be targeted in the short, medium and long term. More often than not self-evaluation processes review the aspects in question throughout the whole school. It is an essential phase of information discovery as a basis for a strategy or a strategic plan to develop the aspects for attention across the school. Departments may also self-evaluate, but the examples and context below are more effective as whole school approaches. It is quantitative data that is usually gathered during a self-evaluation process, therefore the skill of analysing data is vitally important. There will also be opportunities to gather qualitative information, so this information must also be considered when analysing your results.

Examples of key questions to ask yourself when self-evaluating, useful to share with SLT for consideration in their whole school self-evaluation and for AoLE/department leaders in their departmental self-evaluation.

How high a priority is numeracy in our improvement plan?
Do we have a consistent approach for developing pupils’ mental calculation skills?
Do we have a consistent approach to teaching basic calculation strategies?
Does our planning provide opportunities for pupils to use numeracy skills, including numerical reasoning across the curriculum?
Do our schemes of work demonstrate planning for progression in developing pupils’ numeracy skills?
How effectively do we assess pupils’ numeracy ability?
How well do we use information from numeracy assessments to plan activities that challenge all pupils, including the more able?
How well do our transition plans support consistency and progression in pupils’ numeracy skills?
Do teachers have the skills and knowledge needed to plan for and recognise progress in numeracy?

Audit

Undertaking an audit can be an effective and quick way of evaluating the school's situation regarding a specific aspect. The results of the audit allow the school to identify the baseline and the aspects that need to be targeted, as well as effective practice to share. Through revisiting the audit on a regular basis (once a year, for example) you can measure impact as well as the impact of implementation during this period.

An audit can be an effective way of evaluating the following aspects:

Staff skills and confidence in using specific aspects of Numeracy

Identify gaps or common needs that need to be targeted.
The findings can feed into the school's professional learning plan.
A staff skills audit can be carried out as an individual school or as a cluster.
Audits can be differentiated to focus on different responsibilities (e.g. Senior leaders / Middle leaders / Teachers / Teaching Assistants).
An opportunity to review skills as well as the confidence of individuals.

Staff skills and confidence in planning and preparing Numeracy related experiences

An opportunity to identify the staff's training needs.
An opportunity to evaluate the range of experiences staff are confident in planning and identify gaps.
The findings can feed into the school's professional learning plan.

Learners' opinions about the way they use Numeracy to support learning outside of Maths lessons

An opportunity to steer the provision by using learners' voice.
An opportunity to evaluate learners' confidence and attitude towards numeracy.
Evaluating learners' opinions about their experiences with numeracy related activities - Are they happy with the variety? Do they value numeracy? Do they think they're currently making progress with their numeracy skills? What could be better? What kind of things do they want to do?

Current provision of Numeracy across your school

An opportunity for staff/faculties to identify their current provision for numeracy.
An opportunity to evaluate if/where purposeful numeracy opportunities are already in place.
Identify missed opportunities.
Identify common aspects of numeracy used across the curriculum that can feed into the school's professional learning plan.

NOTE: Book reviews and listening to learners exercises are talked about more under the next section 'monitor, evaluation and review' , however you my find it useful to include these exercises under this section. There's no particular order that you have to follow, the important thing is to ensure you have conducted different exercises that allows you to establish a clear picture of your starting point. What are the strengths and what are the areas needing to improve? You will then be in a position to create a strategic plan based on your school's specific needs.

Personalised Online Numeracy Assessments

The personalised numeracy assessments are statutory for all schools in Wales, and should be a contributing factor to your self-evaluation.

Personalised Numeracy assessments are adaptive, meaning that questions are selected based on the responses to previous questions, which means that learners can show the extent of their skills in the assessment.
This provides a tailored assessment experience for each learner and will help all learners develop their skills through understanding what they can do, the things they may need to work on, and what their next steps might be.
The assessments provide schools with information on the skills of individual learners, groups and whole classes.
The progress chart shows all the online assessments a child has taken.
Using the information from their assessments, the graph shows where each child is in comparison with all other children in their year group across Wales.
The assessments are useful to establish your baseline, but can also be used during your strategic plan as a tool to monitor progress.

Advantages

A suite of reports is available that highlights individual learners' specific strengths and areas for improvement, and whole class or year group overview profile.
Helps to identify key group of learners needing additional intervention and the specific areas that needs improving.
Helps to monitor progress over time.
A fair way to assess and establish a baseline

Here is a link to the WGs personalised assessment administration hand book, and here is a link to the WGs guidance for practitioners on individual learner feedback and progress reports.

Here is a powerpoint from GwE to explain the personalised assessments and each report available. Findings from these assessments should feed into your strategic plan for Numeracy.

Important considerations

Do staff look at the results analysis for numeracy procedural and reasoning at an individual/class/year group/school level ?
Do learners have opportunities to reflect on their results- have they used the interactive feedback material on Hwb?
Are reports been shared with parents and carers?
What are the key areas for improvement?
What are the strengths?
Are there any staff who seem to be effective at teaching certain aspects? Can you use them to share good practice and support others?
Is there a difference in the achievement of different groups of learners? i.e. ALN, EAL, high/middle/low prior attainers, male/female ....etc
Are learners making progress in procedural numeracy?
Are learners making progress in numerical reasoning ? How does this progress compare with their progress in procedural numeracy?

Additional Resources

Using the toolkit your organisation can encourage staff, students, members or service users to take an annual check of their numeracy levels on the National Numeracy Challenge. The Challenge is free, easy to use, allows users to understand their current numeracy level, and enables them to quickly improve with tailored learning resources that are best for them.

Link to an editable audit on MS forms that could be used to evaluate the numeracy skills and help subject leaders identify where professional learning needs are.

To support schools and practitioners in providing opportunities to develop, extend and apply numeracy skills, the Numeracy Framework has been updated and continues to be available as non-statutory supporting guidance.

If you are new to the role of 'Numeracy Coordinator' and/or new to teaching in Wales, you may find these short videos useful to familiarise yourself with the CfW requirements for Numeracy.

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