Of all the things that Covid-19 has made me miss, I never thought that assessment data would be one. Yet trying to lead a team without the usual level of data that I now rely on to inform my decisions has been a challenge in recent months.

In the past calendar year, many primary schools will have had just one assessment week, in the autumn - and that, of course, came within the context of students having spent months learning from home.

Instead of being able to fall back on familiar routines, senior leaders have been forced to look for other ways to inform how we lead our schools. But that hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. After all, amid adversity, necessity is often the mother of invention.

One of the more positive things to come out of this pandemic is that it has prompted school leaders to find innovative solutions to all kinds of new challenges. And one monumental shift has been in the way that performance data has been used.

Dealing with a lack of data

So, how can senior leaders plan to take their schools forwards when the present seems so uncertain and they don’t have data to guide the way? Here are some areas to focus on.

Development planning

Priorities for professional development, plans for performance management and areas of focus in pupil-progress meetings all hinge on what your school development plan highlights. The problem is that so much is likely to have changed since yours was written.

Ultimately, what you planned for in September will probably need to be replanned, given the scale of the changes that schools have faced. But change is not a problem. The best leaders recognise changing environments and adapt.

Usually, data would play a key role in informing development planning, and it still can - although it might not be data based on tests. You could use home-engagement data; staff, student and parent questionnaires; and teacher assessment narratives to help you determine what your priorities should be.

In a recent survey on Teacher Tapp, for example, many of the thousands of teaching staff who were polled said that their main concern was not the impact on children’s academic attainment, but on their social and emotional wellbeing. This might be something that you could make a focus, as you consider how to balance your catch-up efforts with the wider needs of the children in your school community.

Performance management

Performance-management targets often use pupil-progress data goals, where teachers are required to have a number of children reach a certain level to be considered “successful”. But now, with the lack of such data available, and with the expectation that performance-management measures still be in place, there are opportunities to be far more creative in this area.

One idea is to have performance management more focused on professional growth. Staff can be given time and space to thoroughly reflect on their skills, experience and practice, after which they can have an open discussion about areas in which they want to improve. Milestones can be put in place to help them map their journey through the year, so it is not a one-off discussion (as it often is with numerical data).

In such a model, you could hold an event at the end of the year, at which all the teachers get to meet in their teams and share a short presentation about the journey they have been on. This creates a level of accountability - which is required in a performance-management cycle - but sounds much more appealing to me than meeting my line manager at the end of the year to see if a group of children I picked out in September made the required rate of progress (when, let’s face it, I’ve been having those discussions about all my class through the year anyway).

Identifying gaps in pupil learning

Schools have previously used pupil-progress data to highlight key areas of concern and those children who may need extra support. But how can we spot the gaps now?

Looking at the engagement data from remote learning will be useful in the first instance. The Department for Education required all schools to have a system in place to track pupil engagement daily, so you can use this to identify who will require support first on whatever they have missed.

Looking further ahead, teachers will need to be trained and encouraged to use robust strategies for identifying where the gaps are in their classes and what can be done to fill them. This is just good teaching practice and something that they will be doing anyway, but the unprecedented break in education over the past year means it may be necessary to employ additional measures.

There are many resources out there for exactly this purpose. One example is Craig Barton’s excellent Diagnostic Questions for maths. I use these at the start of each lesson to identify who needs more guidance, and I use a set of them three weeks after I have taught a topic for retrieval practice and to encourage long-term embedding of this concept. There will be lots of strategies like this one for other subjects that you can share with colleagues, and reaching out on Twitter is not a bad place to start.

Ways forward

School leadership will undoubtedly look different over the coming months without the bedrock of data to rely on. And it’s likely that we will be glad when we can eventually have data back for some areas of our leadership. However, I also think that we may have stumbled on some areas where relying a little less on the pupil data may actually bring great advantages. Perhaps the way leaders use data will never quite return to normal - and maybe that’s something to be glad about.

Matt Roberts is senior leader at a primary school in the North of England

This article originally appeared in the 12 March 2021 issue