As you may have seen in the press, Ofsted this week announced their new proposed framework, which is the first change since 2015, and will no doubt filter through to independent school inspections in time. It covers a range of areas, such as behaviour, leaning, teaching and curriculum.  Encouragingly, not only did the framework for the first time attend to self-belief, resilience, character development and mental health, which have been a major part of our thinking for some time, but also included 27 pages of references to contemporary research. This appeared to mark a departure from previous regimes, which were perhaps too heavily influenced by political agenda, short-termism and passing fads.

I will return to some of the findings that caught my eye in later communications, but one aspect that illustrated Ofsted’s new approach was its conclusions about dual-coding.  Dual-coding theory “suggests that representing information both visually and verbally enhances learning and retrieval from memory. The principle underlying this is that visual and verbal information are processed through different channels in the brain, creating separate representations for information processed in each channel”(p.16). In school, teachers talk about ‘hanging information on different hooks in the brain’, for example.  An influential study on dual-coding found that students who revised with words and pictures performed twice as well in a subsequent test compared to those who had just revised with words. Pupils can use dual-coding by asking themselves “what words describe what are in these pictures?” or “what symbols can I make to reflect the key messages in this text?”.  Some visuals work better for different contexts of course.  For instance, a timeline may be more suitable in history, whereas a mind-map may be better suited to remembering different aspects of a geographical case study. Positively, I have lost count of the times I have observed teachers promoting and fostering such an approach in class, whether through specific study skills, or as part of the children’s learning more broadly.

I hope that this new Ofsted framework is part of a more wide-ranging change in the educational landscape. I am a huge advocate of the recent drive to become more research informed in our schools.  The Scottish poet Andrew Lange is quoted as stating, “Some individuals use statistics as a drunk man uses lamp-posts — for support rather than for illumination”.  For me, this can also be true of research findings, and it is also good to see Ofsted offering guidance about how people learn and develop, rather than seeking a definitive answer to justify their stance.
Well done, Ofsted!