Skills Assessment Framework

Making skills count
Updated Framework for 2014-15
July 2014
Introduction
Enabling Enterprise works to ensure that one day, all students will leave
school equipped with the enterprise skills, experience of the working world,
and aspirations to be successful in the rest of their lives.
We do this by working in partnership with schools and top businesses to bring
the world of work into the classroom – through lesson-time projects, challenge
days and trips to those businesses.
Since Enabling Enterprise was formed in 2009, we have grown from working
with a single class to over 35,000 students in 2013-14. The number of
businesses has grown from just two to over fifty today.
Crucially though, our mission has never been about simply putting more
students through our programmes. Rather, we need to ensure that we are
providing a transformative impact for each of those students – that their time
on Enabling Enterprise programmes is setting them up for their lives.
This is why our impact assessment has always been vital at Enabling
Enterprise. This framework updates our piloting over the last two years of a
more quantitative approach to skill assessment, building on the lessons we
have learned.
We aspire that our impact framework supports all of our work to put students
on the right trajectory for success in the rest of their lives.
Tom Ravenscroft, July 2014
Impact: Finding a better way
Assessing skills development has often been rudimentary, and
needs to build on the qualitative to include more quantitative data.
Where we were (2009-2012):
Broadly, in skills assessment two broad ways of
measuring impact are used:
(a) Intertemporal SelfAssessment
(b) Snapshot feedback
giving quick responses
Advantages:
• Produces clear outputs that show general direction of
travel is sound, and results are tangibly improved.
• Immediate feedback on effectiveness of one-off events.
Disadvantages:
• Depends strongly on children’s self-assessment – a
key skill in itself.
• Gives little guidance as to potential programme
improvements or relative successes.
• Insufficient data for comparing programme
effectiveness between students or schools.
Where we focused our efforts (2012-14):
We aim towards a method of measuring objective
values, rather than subjective measures:
(a) A set of identifiable
levels for students
(b) Tracking changes in
these levels over time
Advantages:
• Can identify the progress of individual students,
highlight areas of weakness and eventually produce
individual action plans for improvement.
• Have a tangible way of tracking progress of individuals.
• Intellectual framework to underpin programme design.
Disadvantages:
• More challenges around the production and control of
data and added complexity.
Review of progress to date
Now is the time for making any changes for 2014-15, so that it can be built
into our planning and programme development.
What is working well in our impact framework?
How could we continue to build on this?
Providing evidence:
• Produces strong evidence that our programmes
are effective in boosting students’ skills.
• Much more robust and comparable data to the past
supporting long-term programmes.
More increments:
•
Have a greater number of levels and sub-levels to
more accurately track progress. Currently there are
only 8 levels which means that progress is not
always reflected.
Supporting design work:
• Provides an intellectual underpinning to our work.
• Skills framework informing and supporting the
design of activities and projects in the children’s
‘stretch zone’.
Share more data
•
Sharing assessments back with teachers sooner, to
support their planning.
•
Make the interactive parts of gathering the data
more compelling to students.
Increasing programme effectiveness:
• Strong and increasing level of engagement from
schools. The level of detail we can provide schools
with helps them to adapt the programmes to the
right level for their students.
Use the framework consistently
•
Embed more references to the skills and levels into
the projects themselves.
Increasing teacher engagement:
• Progress is clearer and more easily understood.
4
Increase accuracy of data gathering
•
Start using control groups to provide clearer
evidence of progress. Experiment with different
approaches to student interfaces.
© Enabling Enterprise | All rights reserved | www.enablingenterprise.org
2014-15 Impact Measurement: The Skills
We will further develop our levelling framework, by introducing more sub-levels and
targeting by age rather than mimicking the national curriculum levels.
For 2014-15, we are maintaining a focus
on the same enterprise skills as we had
previously. These are now being
communicated widely with the students so
that they can identify their own progress
in each skill:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Working in a team
Leading
Listening carefully
Sharing ideas
Problem-solving
Using imagination
Staying positive
Aiming high
The use of a set of icons for these
different skills is helping to reinforce them
and ensure that they are used
consistently throughout our programmes.
2014-15 Impact Measurement: The Levelling
We will further develop our levelling framework, by introducing more sub-levels and
targeting by age rather than mimicking the national curriculum levels.
Example:
Working in a
Team
Each skill area is now broken down into 16
sub-levels which tie into the age of the
students.
This means that there is a target ability for
children in each year group, and then a
development level (which would be the
target for a year group below) and then a
‘better’ and ‘best’ level for the children to
aim for, being one and two year groups
higher than their target respectively.
This should allow a smoother transition, and
more manageable steps for the children’s
progress.
2014-15 Impact Measurement: Bringing it Together
This simpler framework will make it easier to track and support students’ progress over
their time in school, whilst maintaining the principles that have been effective to date.
Example:
Working in a
Team
By the end of Year 13
Below Target: I can reflect on the team’s progress
and make suggestions for improvements.
Year 13
Target: I can reflect and evaluate on the team’s
approaches to tasks and carefully influence to get
better results.
Year 13: Best
Better: I’m aware of the team leader’s strengths and
weaknesses and actively support them when they
need me.
Year 13: Better
Year 13: Target
Best: I understand the skills of other team members
and adapt my approach to them
Year 13: Below Target
By the end of Year 1
Year 7: Target
Below Target: I can take turns with other children.
Year 1
Year 1: Best
Target: I can work with other children to do
something together.
Year 1: Better
Year 1: Target
Better: I know why teams are sometimes better than
working by myself.
Year 1: Below Target
Best: I am happy to help with different jobs in my
team.
1
7
Year Group
13
2014-15 Impact Measurement: Using the Framework
It is the combination of student self-assessment and teacher validation, that
makes this such a powerful tool.
Key
Principles
We designed this framework to help us ensure that at a minimum an EE student should be
progressing at the right rate (1 level per year). We would expect to see that EE students progress
above the rate of non-EE students, and identify and intervene with those students falling behind.
Gathering Inputs
To assess the change, assessments should be made
at the start and the end of year, also against a control
group:
The Outputs:
This new approach will create a wide range of
different tools to enhance and develop programmes:
(a) Impact Report as an overall
assessment of a course or programme
to share with stakeholders
(a) Student self-assessment
using an electronic
questionnaire.
+
(b) Teacher Validation to
verify the students’
assessments
(b) Student & School Plans
with shared reports to
support interventions
(c) Programme Development by using the results
for designing and improving programmes in the
future.
Getting involved
This updated Impact Framework will be an option on all Enabling Enterprise programmes
from September 2014.
How can Enabling Enterprise help?
As well as supporting your school’s curriculum to explicitly cover these
skills, we can help you to measure students’ skill development by:
• Sharing our level descriptors
• Delivering teacher training on how to use the framework.
• Providing student-friendly questionnaires for accurate self-assessment.
• Supporting schools to record and analyse their data.
How to get involved?
Please do get in touch if:
• You’d like to find out more about Enabling Enterprise’s range of lessontime projects and challenge days that support each of these areas of skill
development.
• You’d be interested in finding out more about this skills framework and
how it can support measurement of the impact of Pupil Premium
spending.
• You have any feedback on this paper.
Please contact:
Alice Faulkner | [email protected] | www.enablingenterprise.org
This White Paper is from
Enabling Enterprise
Enabling Enterprise brings enterprise into the
classroom through innovative programmes of
engaging lesson time projects and exciting
challenge days, in partnership with top businesses.
Contact us:
[email protected]
www.enablingenterprise.org
© Enabling Enterprise 2014 | all rights reserved