The hunched shoulders and heads of three school leaders are fixed intently round a table – they are animatedly discussing 45 small dots plotted on a matrix. They then compare this with a similar matrix completed by the same group some three months earlier and challenge each other on why the dots have moved around the graph.
The dots represent 45 pupils who have all been part of a target group of 15 pupil premium students in three different schools over the period of a school year. The three staff are part of a Challenge the Gap Trio – a trio of schools, one of whom, the ‘Lead’ school, has been successful in closing the attainment gap between pupil premium and non-pupil premium students. The other two are ‘Accelerator’ schools committed to closing the attainment gap that exists in their institutions but also have a strong track record of partnership working.
What is Challenge the Gap?
The aim of Challenge the Gap is to provide schools with practical tools and strategies to break the link between poverty and poor outcomes and to drive long-term performance improvement. Working collaboratively, Challenge the Gap is about thinking big, starting small and scaling fast to have a far reaching impact and make a lasting difference.
The programme began in June 2012 when 15 pilot schools across the UK – all part of the Challenge Partners school improvement network – started to lead trios of schools working in partnership to share what they had learnt about successfully ‘closing the gap’.
At the core of this innovative programme, developed with funding from the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF), is a layered approach to learning more about why there is a gap and crucially, how that gap can be closed. This is done through a triune of school leaders, teachers and paraprofessionals. The mechanism of how this works in practice has been set out below. The Lead school drives the partnership with the two other schools, identified as Accelerator schools, working together over the period of an academic year. Each school identifies a target cohort of 15 students who are eligible for free school meals (FSM) – now pupil premium.
One of the ground-breaking elements of this programme is that it works on three levels. The first layer involves a senior leader from each school who leads on sharing and implementing whole-school strategies that raise attainment and, perhaps most importantly, awareness among all staff. The next level consists of between one and three teachers – depending on whether the school is primary or secondary – trialling, evaluating and sharing the most effective pedagogies that make a difference. Finally, there is the invaluable input of one or two paraprofessionals. This term has been used by Challenge the Gap to describe an adult working within a school as a teaching assistant (TA), pastoral or learning mentor or perhaps as a librarian or similar.