Why My Classes' Trajectory Stopped Surprising Me

I used to wait for results. Now I mostly already know.

There’s a feeling most teachers know in August. You wait. You’ve done everything you could and a lot of what you couldn’t, and now there’s nothing left to do but open the envelope and find out whether it worked. You hope. Some people pray. The results land and you’re either relieved or you’re gutted, and either way you weren’t really sure which it was going to be until it arrived.

I don’t get that feeling much anymore. The last set of mocks came back roughly where I thought they would before I’d marked a paper. That’s a strange thing to admit and I want to be careful how I say it, because it sounds like a boast and it honestly isn’t one. It’s nearly the opposite. The interesting thing isn’t that the results were good. It’s that they stopped surprising me.

For most of my career the only lever anyone reached for to lift results was more. More intervention. Lunchtime sessions, after-school sessions, Saturday school, booster groups, the spreadsheet of kids you’re going to pull out of their other lessons to sit in front of you again. If you want a department to do better you ask everyone to do more, and the amount of work being visibly poured in becomes the thing you point at when someone asks how it’s going. Effort stands in as the measure. We grind harder because grinding harder is the one thing we always know how to turn up.

And we do it because, underneath all of it, nobody actually has a method they trust. If you had a way of teaching that reliably put the thing in a child’s head and kept it there, you wouldn’t need to brute force it with hours. The hours are what you reach for when you haven’t got the method. They’re a way of buying results with effort because we don’t know how to get them any other way. It sort of works, at a huge cost to everyone, and it’s completely unpredictable, which is exactly why August is so frightening. You’re never sure how much of it held.

I think I’ve got a method. I want to be honest that I said think. What I’ve got is two things that only work as a pair. The first is atomisation, breaking a subject down into the actual pieces it’s made of so that nothing gets taught as a vague lump a kid sort of gets. The second is retrieval, the real kind, built into the whole structure instead of handed a five-minute slot at the start of a lesson. Get it, and then keep it. I’ve tried each one without the other. Retrieval on its own, sitting on top of material that was never properly broken down, doesn’t stick — I’ve watched it not stick in my own room. It’s the two together that do the work, and neither half on its own really tells you anything.

I don’t trust myself to be objective about my own classes, so I’ll let someone else hold the receipt. Kris Boulton, who I rate as highly as anyone writing about this, took my Year 11 second mock and put it next to the equivalent top set from the year before — same sort of kids, same banding — and looked at the shift. The effect sizes he got are, on paper, enormous. I’m not going to quote them at you as though they settle anything, and neither did he. He said it straight: you can’t really do this, it’s one class, there’s no control group, it’s a mock and not the real thing, and mocks always read higher than the finals do. He’s right on every count.

I’m putting it here anyway, with every one of those caveats stapled to it, because the number was never the point I’m making. The point is that it landed about where I expected it to. I didn’t open it and get the August feeling. I got the duller, quieter feeling you get when a thing you built does the thing you built it to do.

That’s the whole claim and it’s smaller and stranger than “my results are good.” Results being good can be luck, or a kind cohort, or a hundred late nights nobody can see. Results you can call before you’ve marked them are a different animal. They mean the outcome is tracking the method instead of the heroics. And if it’s tracking the method then it isn’t really mine to take much credit for, not in the way we usually mean it — it belongs to the system.

I might be wrong about all of it. August is the real test and I know it. If August comes back and disagrees with me I’ll write that down too, because a method you’ll only stand behind while it’s winning was never a method. But this is the first year the waiting stopped feeling like waiting. I used to hope the results would come. Now I mostly just expect them — and the expecting turned out to be the part worth writing down.