A Completions Programme for Schools

This Completions Programme measures the weekly progress of individual students through a body of work in a range of subjects. This is useful to swiftly detect strengths and weaknesses in ongoing delivery, enabling quick action through the support of weaker classes or subjects and alignment of resources to boost strong classes and subjects. Its primary purpose is to make sure that the least possible time is wasted, for the sake of the students.

1. Develop a form which will enable swift and accurate reporting on Weekly Completions without being cumbersome or consuming more than a few minutes of each teacher’s working day.

2. Collect in the data each week as a running record of the school’s production. You can develop whatever administration around this that seems useful or appropriate. One basic step would be to add up the subject totals to get an overall school total. ___

3. Understand to a sufficient degree how each subject teacher has dealt with the requirement for a workable weekly Completions stat. This may require visiting a teacher and viewing their Progress Board material in operation. ___

4. Once the Completion statistic has been reported for two weeks, review it and see if any line or subject needs correction so that the statistic is reported as it has been defined. ___

5. Provide a plentiful supply of graph paper to each teacher in the school ___

6. Once the Completion stat has been reported for three weeks, have teachers graph the statistic of Completions for

1. their subject

2. each class

3. each individual student.

If their earlier administration is working, this graphing step should take no more than 15 minutes each week. ___

7. Check each teacher’s admin including graphs over the ensuing three weeks. (Note that you don’t have to check every subject, just the ones which you suspect might be having trouble.) ___

8. Correct anything found. ___

As a rough guide, each subject should be running at approximately 1 Completion per student in their class over a period of about 6 weeks. This allows time to even out any anomalies and also allows for varying abilities and speeds. The simple formula is:

Number of Students In A Class In Any Given Week = Number of Completions Per Week

For example, if Year 8 Geography has 19 students in it in a week, then the Completions reported for that week should be roughly 19. If the Completions is consistently reported as 2, or consistently reported as 37, you know that something is wrong.

If for some reason there is a wild variation in this formula after 6 weeks, you will need to investigate to make sure that the teacher understands what a Completion is and how to report it.

Given the above, by the end of the first half term the expectation would be that the total Number of Completions being reported in any given week was approximately (allowing for absenteeism, differing student speeds and so forth) the equivalent to the number of students in the school that week.

If the Completions is equal to or slightly above the number of students in the Senior School, then that’s OK. (It shouldn’t be too far above, otherwise something is not being reported correctly, per the above formula.)

If the Completions is markedly less than the number of students in the school, then something is wrong. Rather than apply a general remedy to the whole school, your task would be to find out which specific subject is performing below par and correct whatever is found.

This programme, coupled with the Value Added Programme described in an earlier blog article, should help tremendously to deliver an education stably and with results to a body of students.