With the death of Professor Carol Taylor Fitz-Gibbon, the education world has lost one of its great champions; her influence went well beyond the people who had the privilege of knowing her and touched the professional lives of many thousands of teachers in the UK and across the world.
Prof Taylor Fitz-Gibbon was a statistician who worked in education, being one of the inventors of the concept of ”value-added” statistics and the head of the highly regarded CEM Centre in the University at Durham, now the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, which she brought with her from Newcastle University when she moved to a chair in education at Durham in 1996.
It was in 1983 that Prof Taylor Fitz-Gibbon developed the A-level Information System (Alis), which was to transform performance in the sixth form at Durham Johnston Comprehensive School, where I was head at the time, and hundreds of other secondary school sixth forms.
Working with Professor Peter Tymms, Professor Robert Coe and the CEM team, middle-year (MidYIS) and primary (PIPS) equivalent systems were later developed, enabling schools to take a much more informed and sophisticated view of data for the good of their pupils.
At Durham Johnston, we found it invaluable to have not only the thorough analysis, subject by subject and student by student, of A-level results, but also the results of the associated pupil attitude surveys and the Alis “chances graphs”, which we used to motivate sixth formers to increase their expectations of what they might be able to achieve.
Prof Taylor Fitz-Gibbon was providing for us a data-based approach to school improvement which was miles ahead of anything else available at the time.
As a headteacher in the North East, I worked closely with Prof Taylor Fitz-Gibbon and I recall an occasion in September 1993 when we had agreed to meet to discuss a development of Alis.
Unfortunately, on the day before the autumn term began, I had fallen off a ladder and broken both arms, with an incompetent surgeon necessitating several operations before my arms were set correctly. Prof Taylor Fitz-Gibbon was not to be put off and came to my house for the meeting, making her own sandwiches for lunch from the contents of our fridge.
A ‘grandmother from the North’
Prof Taylor Fitz-Gibbon was very down-to-earth and, as Professor Coe recalls in his tribute, she delighted in being a “grandmother from the North” when dealing with the Westminster elite.
They underestimated her at their peril, as her modesty belied an uncompromising, intelligent and evidence-based approach to issues of educational statistics and data.
She was a strong opponent of Ofsted’s approach to judging school performance, believing that Alis statistics should be confidential to the school and should not be used to compare the performance of schools. Instead, they should be used to support improvement in the individual school.
Indeed, she would not allow schools to use Alis data for comparative publicity.
Prof Taylor Fitz-Gibbon’s principled approach, intellectual integrity, wit and energy came across in her many public presentations, so that she was highly regarded not only by her academic peers but also by school leaders who saw in her an ally whose research had direct application in their school improvement work.
CEM has written its own tribute to Prof Taylor Fitz-Gibbon, and school leaders will undoubtedly be paying their respects to a great educationist at a UK memorial service for her in the Great Hall of Durham Castle on Monday 18 September 2017. Anyone interested in attending this should contact Gemma Harper at gemma.harper@cem.dur.ac.uk for details.
John Dunford is chair of Whole Education and a former secondary head, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and national pupil premium champion. His book, The School Leadership Journey, was published in November 2016. He tweets as @johndunford
For more TES columns by John, visit his back-catalogue.
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