A really interesting view of a mathematics ‘Deep Dive’. I’m indebted to my anonymous writer.
As maths lead I had my own inspector for 1 day out of 2 as part the schools inspection under the new framework in week 2/ 3 of Autumn term. I was new in the school and new in my position as maths lead. The focus of the deep dive comes from the outcomes of your earlier interview with the inspector. They confirm what is said in that interview via the deep dive, pupil voice and observation. This triangulation of evidence is used to determine the effectiveness of the maths leadership, policy, planning and outcomes. For the deep dive the inspector requested 10 books from across year 3, 4 and 5. We viewed the books together and she was very open about what she was looking for.
In the interview we discussed at length what procedures were in place to ensure that the school taught well planned systematic lessons in maths. She looked for evidence of this in books by considering the sequence of lessons, what learning was visible in books and whether there were gaps in sequences. She looked to see if teachers had followed the program of study which I said that they were all using and if the work done was of a level in line with curriculum expectations. We discussed presentation and layout. However I argued that as long as it is easy to see the sequence of learning from dates and the work produced, that I did not want staff spending unnecessary time on cutting, sticking and pointless presentation tasks if they were not directly bringing about learning. (Just brilliant! How to ‘Take Control’!) The inspector accepted this with good grace! I was very honest with her about the state of learning from the previous year and that the books reflected that (unfortunately) (so good, yet again, honesty, couched in the positive of accelerated, current progress is a very good tactic) but I signposted her back to where this is being addressed in the maths action plan and she was satisfied.
All in all it was a really interesting experience, if not completely exhausting!