Delivering outstanding learning for all

Learning Quality Framework: captures the essence of learning

Aha! Now I see where I am going; it all makes sense. This gives me the big picture. We have been working in a small area of this and when you are working down in the detail you lose sight of the whole. This gives me a route map for so many aspects of school life.”

Secondary School DH, Birmingham

The Learning Quality Framework captures the essence of what a learning school does to ensure that all its people — staff and students — become better learners. It guides and progresses the long-term learning journey of a school that aspires to:

• build young peoples’ mental, emotional and social resources to enjoy challenge and cope well with uncertainty and complexities
• map, plan and validate its development as a vibrant, dynamic and confident learning organisation
• play a more expansive educational game

The fact that you are visiting this website probably means that your school is already working on some of the sentiments raised above. When implemented rigorously the Learning Quality Framework has a major effect on a school’s culture, systems and processes. Implementing the spirit as well as the letter of the Standard has the potential to generate profound change in the school.

The Learning Quality Standard blends the ideas of a ‘learning organisation’ with the latest ideas in the ‘how’ of learning, and provides a route map for the learning journey. Using the Standard does not tie the school to a single learning approach. It may be using a whole range or combination of learning approaches e.g. Assessment for Learning, Philosophy for Children, Habits of Mind, Personal Learning and Thinking Skills, Growth Mindsets, Building Learning Power. What is important is that the learning approaches being developed are rooted in the learning sciences, and the psychology of learning to nurture lifelong learning behaviours.

It gives us a very clear (but not easy) picture of the dynamic nature of learning. I know what classrooms need to be like now and we will gradually work towards this.”

Primary School DH

By taking on the Learning Quality Framework the school is embarking on possibly the most challenging but worthwhile change process it has ever encountered. It involves creating and strengthening a culture that is comfortable with change, incorporating robust structures and systems for planning and evaluating, radically adapting the learning process in classrooms and in professional development, and engaging students and parents more in learning.

It’s really useful but the best thing is that it’s not a tick the box framework. It stimulates thinking rather than doing all the thinking for you. It gets you curious to find out more. We’ve had enough of being told what to do. This framework treats us like professionals. It guides you to find your own way through a long and challenging process.”

Secondary School DH

The culture being created is one in which future innovation will thrive, improvement effort will be sustained and people will flourish.

A Learning Organisation… Where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, when new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.” 

Peter Senge 1990

The Learning Quality Framework embraces and applies the sentiments of a learning organisation to a school. Organisations become learning organisations because they want to ensure the quality of what they do; their products or their services. However, here the ideas apply not only to staff and organisational learning but, importantly, to how students learn.

The product of a school is not only their students’ performance in examinations but in how their students are as learners, as citizens, as potential employees.

“It made sense of my random thoughts. We have been struggling to think about what we needed to do next. We had lots of ideas but they were random and disorganised. The framework has drawn these all together. It’s the school’s plan for the future”

Secondary School DH, Solihull

People’s orientation to learning becomes the core purpose of the school; all are empowered to become better learners by using an understanding of the learning sciences. This affects how learning is understood as a process, how it is led and managed, how it is talked about and celebrated, how it is stretched and grown, how it is tracked and the results used to further enable individual and organisational learning.

Given that learning itself is a gradual, sometimes difficult, but hugely worthwhile process the framework depicts how each aspect of a learning school might be at different stages of growth. The stages are cumulative, each growing from the one before. The framework captures aspects of a school’s organisational culture which can be made hospitable, rather than unhelpful, to the development of learners.

It is increasingly evident that the educational methods we have been using for the past 70 years no longer suffice. They are based on the scientific assumptions about…..the learning process that have been eclipsed by new discoveries. Yet changing them has been slow because the nature of educational reform is largely one of tinkering with institutional arrangements. Rarely has reform penetrated the educational core.”

Lauren Resnick
Professor of Psychology PITTSBURGH University

The Learning Quality Framework will enable schools to reach their educational core – that of developing people as better learners; building their confidence, capacity and enthusiasm for learning throughout their lives.

We owe the next generation more than we give them now. This framework shows us how to do that.” Academy HT

The Learning Quality Framework guides school development towards the creation of a learning powered culture, offering pathways and stages to signpost and drive your development action. Using its twelve clearly defined principles the school can realise and authenticate its prime educational goal of developing better learners.

A serious learning challenge

It will probably save SLT about 100 hours of thinking time. This framework has organised so many things about learning into a format that we can use with all staff.”

Secondary School Assistant HT

The Framework is not a quick fix to raise examination results. Rather it is the basis for thoughtful planning, aimed at what will be, for most schools, a significant change in culture (‘the way we do things round here’). It is a deeply formative framework rather than a set of summative hoops to be jumped through. LQF shines a light on both the formal and informal learning processes of a school and shows how, when these are aligned, they work together to expand young people’s, and indeed the school’s, capacity and appetite to learn.

Blending culture change, habit change and learning formation

The school makes its own journey in its own way, but the supporting materials and consultancy are there as fuel and guidance to make the journey efficient, fruitful and rewarding. Getting it right, making it stick, and keeping it going need to be seen as a gradual, sometimes difficult, but hugely worthwhile process; a process that blends culture change in schools, habit change by teachers, and learning habit formation by students.

I didn’t know I was looking for this – now I’ve found it I don’t know how I could ever have functioned without it.”

Primary School HT, Warwickshire

Teaching that expands the capacity to learn

In many quality standards the work of change is undertaken by senior or middle leaders which then impacts positively on other staff. With the Learning Quality Standard (LQS) the major work of change lies with classroom practitioners in shifting their teaching style to that of a learning coach; assisting students to become more confident, curious and independent learners. This significant shift takes time. It is estimated that working purposefully through all the LQS levels could take a school between three and five years. So the LQF process is not a quick fix to raise examination results but rather a thoughtful culture change which expands young people’s capacity and appetite to learn, and expands the whole school’s organisational capacity to learn.

A long-term commitment

Timescales for making the journey are difficult to predict. Much will depend on how a school’s current practice matches up to the standard’s levels. A few schools will start their journey at about the Bronze stage and work first towards Silver; a very few will start close to Silver and work towards Gold. But most are likely to find that even the Bronze level will require a good measure of carefully planned action, and managing that journey securely could easily take a year. Progression beyond Bronze involves broadening, deepening and strengthening the LQF principles. For example, more teachers will be using expansive education techniques in more lessons, and with greater fluency and skill. These three aspects of progression — broader, deeper, stronger — are what makes the achievement of a level take time. In many schools, each level beyond Bronze might take a further two years to achieve. These time estimates reflect the scope of development, involved in meeting the Learning Quality Standard.

At first I thought “We’ll just use this very useful framework by ourselves quietly. We don’t need to go for any external assessment.” But then I revised that idea. I realised that having a level in view and working towards recognition would give added impetus and purpose to our endeavours. We wanted to become that Silver Level school and we wanted to be recognised for our effort and expertise. This award gives public recognition that we are a different sort of school. We are ‘nailing our learning colours to the mast.’

Primary School HT

Recognition

The planning and effort that will go into reaching any of the levels will well deserve public recognition, which the award of a Learning Quality Mark affords.

The Learning Quality Framework offers schools a rich view of learning and learners, unlocking the features of a learning school. At its heart is the Quality Standard that captures how key aspects of a school’s culture link and grow together to ensure it becomes hospitable, rather than unhelpful, to developing learning.

What the Standard looks like 

The Standard is structured around twelve principles and thirty three indicators.

The Principles

The twelve Principles of learning  are concerned with different aspects of a school’s culture. These include the school’s vision for education, its beliefs about learning, how leaders lead learning, how classroom practice, assessment and the curriculum are best designed to build learning habits, how staff are best enabled to develop their practice, and how the school itself acts on its own learning.

Here are a couple of the principles to give you a flavour of the power and precision of the of the Quality Standard.

The Indicators (statements of practice)

Each principle is described through Indicators, or statements of practice. These show how the principles are enacted in practice. And since the whole point of the standard is to describe a learning journey, the statements of practice are related to four stages of development; coherent staging points on the journey where you might take time to reflect and prepare for the next stage.

Weaving the threads of good practice

The standard offers criteria of good practice. Nothing is hidden. It describes best practice throughout the learning journey and thus ensures the school has all the components or threads in place to be able to move forward. Classroom practice won’t develop without appropriate professional development; the school is unlikely to make headway without sympathetic leadership characteristics; advances in classroom practice will stall without accompanying curriculum development; the learning philosophy of the school will face an uphill battle unless parents are brought on board. So the Learning Quality Standard weaves together all the threads a school needs to pay heed to on its journey in becoming a learning school.

Stages of Development

Support for your journey is offered through the rich online support package. It looks like this:

The rich online support package covers 6 steps in understanding, developing and securing a level of the Standard.

We will use this framework to guide our journey and we will want our progress validating. Going for assessment at various milestones or staging posts will be our way of celebrating that progress.”

Secondary School HT

This is my development plan for the next five years.”

Primary HT, Winchester