A direct train journey between the two great cities of Peterborough and London takes 48 minutes. While there is nothing remarkable about this, I have always found it amusing that the same journey used to take just 43 minutes.

There have been no significant changes to the railway and trains are not getting slower. So why does the journey now take five minutes longer than it used to?

The answer may be found through an unintended side effect of target setting, where operators were incentivised for the reliability of their service.

While the intention was to drive improvements for customers, there was no motivation for operators to aim for faster services. It was better for them to report a longer journey time, that they reliably meet.

A lesson to learn

There is a great lesson within this story for educators: chiefly that we need to question if a target we are setting ourselves - whether on attendance, behaviour or exams - is as high as it could be, or simply set at a level we are confident we can achieve and so feel successful.

At Bangkok Patana School, I used this train metaphor as motivation to redesign our target-setting approach for student assessment outcomes when I became principal in August 2021.

At the heart of this was putting students in charge of their own targets - something that came as a shock to some people when it was first suggested. It has now been in place for two years and as trust in the process has grown, we are starting to see the impact.

Understanding the data

It’s first worth explaining students are not left on their own to set their assessment targets - teachers work with them to set a starting point for their goals, informed by their baseline data, historical performance of the school, and our knowledge of the student. 

To help with this, it was essential to develop a shared understanding of data and terminology among our staff so that we could support our students appropriately.

To do this, we committed to a year-long programme of staff training around data and motivation, combining in-house training, with external support from Evidence Based Education. The programme started by ensuring that we all understood how baseline data is generated and what it can be used for.

Contextual learning

We then looked at how outputs can be adjusted for different school contexts, and we learned about individual pupil reports and the way they can inform teaching and learning.

We also investigated work around growth mindsets and motivation theory, and importantly, built trust through design of our processes to ensure teachers’ work was celebrated for how high they lifted their students above the baseline, rather than being judged if individuals fall short of their targets.

Teachers can then work with students to use all this information alongside chances graphs, which show the probability of same-ability students getting each grade in our context.

All this work ensures that students are in a position where they can set targets for themselves - it may be the same as the starting point, or it may be higher, but the key is for it to be a target that they want to set for themselves.

Differentiating 

As an example, if the evidence suggested that a B would be a great outcome for a particular student in our context, but they wanted to set themselves a target of an A*, the teacher should engage with the student and say, “It’s low probability but if you’re telling me that you’re committed to this and you really want to work on this, then let’s do this,” and they would sign off on that conversation.

The teacher’s role then shifts to working alongside the student to ensure they provide appropriate support and challenge that is tailored appropriately, something that we like to call a “boutique experience” for our students.

This personalised pathway for students aiming for particular grades is done through a variety of ways - from differentiation of task to different levels of reading lists.  

It will take several years for the impact of this work to be really understood; however, the reaction from the first two cohorts has been extremely positive.

Early signs of success

Our examination classes of 2022 were able to change their targets using this process, despite being halfway through their courses when this change was introduced.

Many students chose to aim for higher grades and went on to hit their new targets, and teachers felt liberated to help them work towards these targets with without a fear of this being used against them.

The examination classes of 2023, meanwhile, have just began writing their papers and are aiming for a set of very ambitious targets that are noticeably higher than previous cohorts. They are clearly motivated and have worked incredibly hard over the last two years with their teachers, as they strive to achieve their targets.

We’ll have to wait until results are unveiled in the summer to know the impact, and it’s only the second year of a long-term journey, but we are confident helping set ambitious goals gives our learners the best chance of success.

Matt Seddon is secondary principal at Bangkok Patana School in Thailand