How often do you teach a pupil for more than one year?
For secondary school teachers, the answer might be “fairly often”. For primary school teachers, it’s less likely. But at all stages, “teacher looping”, as it is known, is more likely to happen by chance than through deliberate decisions about how staff are allocated.
Research suggests this could be an oversight because when teachers work with the same class over consecutive years, it can have a positive effect on outcomes.
In a paper published this year, researchers from the University of Nottingham, Facundo Albornoz, David Contreras and Richard Upward, sought to explore the impact of teachers staying with pupils across year groups, and used national data from pupils in Chilean schools to do so.
In some countries around the world, “looping” is more common - and in Chile, more than 50 per cent of pupils who progress from Year 7 to Year 8 have the same teacher across these two years.
The researchers looked at how this practice affected pupils’ attainment in national tests, their attendance and their behaviour, as well as at the effects on teachers’ expectations and, in the longer term, on how pupils performed in university admissions exams. In all of these areas, looping appeared to have a positive effect.
It’s easy to see why this might be. The better you understand your pupils - their prior knowledge, interests, strengths and areas to improve - the more effectively you can teach them. And, so the argument goes, the longer you spend with them, the better you understand them.
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We know from other research that positive pupil-teacher relationships can have a good effect on school climate, and it’s plausible that this would have subsequent links to positive attendance, behaviour and broader engagement with school. Knowing your pupils from a previous year may also be a small but significant workload time-saver, as the better a teacher knows their class, the easier it is to plan for them.
However, it’s important to note that the Nottingham study was not a randomised controlled trial, and wasn’t based on UK data, so we should be cautious about how far we can apply the findings to schools in England.
And while previous research from the US has also found positive effects for teacher looping, we should be wary of unintended negative consequences that might come with the practice. For instance, if the relationship between a pupil and their teacher has soured, then more of the same is far from ideal.
In primary schools, meanwhile, if a teacher has to spend time getting to grips with the curriculum for a new year group in order to follow the same class, this may outweigh any gains that come from knowing the pupils’ needs. Overhauling the school timetable to allow for looping may also have the potential to trigger other (as yet unknown) consequences. All of this should give school leaders pause.
Yet, looping is still worth considering. Having the same teacher is not a simple panacea, but if that teacher translates their knowledge of their pupils into high-quality adaptive teaching and learning, we may have a low-cost solution to better outcomes on our hands.
Alex Quigley is the national content and engagement manager at the Education Endowment Foundation. He is a former teacher and author of Closing the Writing Gap, published by Routledge
