At a time when schools are increasingly expected to use research evidence to make decisions, the importance of monitoring what’s going on within the school alongside this shouldn’t be forgotten.
Done well, monitoring can be a powerful driver of improvement, learning and accountability. However, for many schools it can feel like just another task in already packed improvement plan. The key is to make it purposeful, proportionate and embedded into your leadership routines.
Monitoring and Evaluation, what’s the difference?
The terms often come as a pair, but they offer two distinct but interconnected purposes that can feed into one another:
- Monitoring is used for tracking progress in real time (think of it as formative, and using it to adjust as you go).
- Evaluation is about looking back and for reflecting on what’s happened (consider it as summative).
Why does monitoring matter for schools?
When it comes to implementing something new, we know that how it is done is just as important as what is implemented. By carefully monitoring implementation, schools and colleges can use their limited resources to flag any potential issues early on, and focus on approaches that will have the most impact for their individual settings.
Five practical tips on how to monitor well:
- Start with the question, not the data.
To keep it proportionate and effective, start with the question: What do we want to learn? This will help you to keep focused on whether you really need to collect each piece of data. You may wish to use this process to draft some research questions that will guide the process. - Use a ‘theory of change’.
This should give you a clear articulation of what you want to happen (outcomes), what you will do to support this change (activities/support) and why you think those activities will lead to change. This will help you to be clear about what you are hoping to see, and how, in order to know what is most important to measure. You might want to focus on the ‘earlier’ stages first to know if they are working, before looking at the outcomes which may come later. - Engage and unite your staff early on.
This is important to help build a culture of using data effectively. Staff are more likely to engage with M&E if they understand its purpose and feel ownership. There might already be people with skills in writing questionnaires or analysing data that you could bring onboard. - Triangulate your data.
There is very rarely just one piece of data that can sufficiently answer your research question(s), and it’s good to hear from different perspectives. This could include combining assessment data with teacher’s reflections, or hearing from teaching assistants as well as teachers about what’s happening in the classroom. - Build data reviews into leadership meetings.
Ensure that data isn’t just collected but used by making space for it in decision-making forums. The data at any point is likely to be partial so make sure you are considering the limitations of this too, but periodic glances of impartial data will help you to get a better sense of how things are being implemented and how you could improve.
When monitoring and evaluation is used effectively it can become part of your school’s culture, and business as usual for effective leadership by empowering staff, supporting better decision-making and, ultimately, improving outcomes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.