Ramadan Mubaruk    رمضان مبروك

What is Ramadan?

Ramadan is the Islamic month of fasting, during which time Muslims do not eat or drink during daylight hours. During the winter months, fasting is not so bad, but in the summer months, Muslims fast for up to 19 hours a day and Ramadan lasts 29 or 30 days.

• Ramadan 2018 will most likely start on Tuesday 15th May and end on the Thursday 14th June. Here’s a Ramadan timetable from London’s Central Mosque

Here is an article from The Week which answers a few questions about the month of Ramadan.

The main aim of this post is to address the challenge students face during Ramadan and especially those about to sit for their GCSE’s, A levels and University exams.

Healthy Fasting

Students observing the fast should have at least two meals a day, the pre-dawn meal (Suhoor) and a meal at dusk when they break their fast (called Iftar).  Meals should be simple and not differ too much from a normal diet.  Students should avoid junk and sugary foods and aim to top up meals with fruits and lots of water.  Unfortunately, during the summer months, Suhoor which is about 3am and Iftar (around 9pm) are very close together which leave observers a very small window in which to take in all the nutrients their body needs.

Even if breakfast comes before dawn, it’s still the most important meal of your day. Drink at least two glasses of water at every suhoor and follow these tips from dietician Nour el Zibdeh on 27 Foods To Eat At Suhoor That Release Energy Throughout The Day During Ramadan

The NHS has published some useful advice on what to eat and what to avoid. One of the most important things is to try to keep a bottle of water which you should sip from Iftar (the time you break your fast) until Suhoor (the time you stop eating).

Things to Avoid

During Suhoor, try to have a bowl of porridge or other slow-burning foods that will keep you going for longer rather than biscuits or junk cereals like coco pops or frosties which burn very quickly.  You should also, aim to cut down your caffeine intake as much as possible and opt for water instead of fizzy drinks. More information on what to eat can be found HERE.

What should I do if I have an exam on the day?

This is a bit of a ‘grey’ area and ultimately up to the individual.  Teachers and schools would not wish to dictate to religious students how they should address this situation. However, in order to assist students, advice has been sought and the following two options have been identified:

• Some students may decide not to take any particular steps and to continue with their fast as usual.
• Some students, in consultation with their religious advisor (Imam), may consider that their examinations are sufficient justification to permit them not to Fast, either just on examination days or perhaps for the whole examination period.  The period of fasting can often be undertaken at a later time or some other arrangement could be considered.

If you decide to fast on the day you have an exam…

• Prepare the night before by mentally rehearsing the day ahead and note areas which may present difficulties.
• Ensure you are well rested – this may mean not attending ‘tarawih’ (night prayers in congregation).
• Make sure you have ‘suhoor’ (a pre-dawn meal) that has slow-release energy food (like porridge).
• If your exam is in the afternoon, take a short rest of 45 minutes before hand.
• If you feel lethargic or irritated, refresh your ‘wudu’ (ritual ablution) and go for a short walk.

I hope this post has helped in some way and if you have any questions, please send in your comments below.  If you are still unsure of what you should do, you should speak with your family members and the Imam at your mosque.  Oh, and the greeting during this month is ‘Ramadan Mubarak’ (written in Arabic as رمضان مبروك)

Oh, and no matter what, don’t forget to drink as much water as possible between iftari and suhoor

Further Reading and Useful Links

How schools and Parents can help children that are fasting – easy to follow practical advice for everyone involved in a child’s education including teachers, parents and carers.

Exams and Ramadan: How Can You Make the Best of Both?

Ramadhan Health Guide – supported by the NHS (and another HERE)

Should we tell students to break their fast? Is it up to schools?

Listen to celebrities and other muslims discuss Ramadan and Islam – BBC Asian Network

HOW were yours?  I have been thinking about how to look at my GCSE and A level data over the last couple of days and how to make sense of it all.  My instinct was to dive in and calculate the A* – C pass rate.  Done!  Now what?  bearing in mind I’m a bit of a novice in data analysis.  Knowing the A* – C pass rate was not enough, I needed to look at the data in more detail.  But where do we start? Or shall I do nothing and hold out for the RAISEonline report to come through and worry about things then?  As I am curious (and you are too no doubt otherwise you would not be reading this) I decided that just relying on the A* – C pass rate would make me as bad as the perpetrators of league tables and so I got onto Excel and started drawing up tables to make all sorts of comparisons

Warning! Do not try to do it all at once by yourself!

Warning! this is a time-consuming process, but worth the effort to get a better picture of your department.

The next step was to carry out Class by Class comparisons – I repeated the process above for individual teachers and sets.  Nothing taxing, just repetitive and pivot tables would probably be a better way of doing but I don’t know how.  If you want to know how watch this video.  This made interesting reading and the thing I needed to remind myself was this is not an exercise in looking for faults or pinning the blaming on anyone, but to find what the departments overall strengths are and what areas need improving and armed with this figure out a way in which to fix the areas that need improving.  What interests me about class by class comparisons are things like: variation in teaching, assessment and especially formative assessment including marking of students work, setting of homework and so on.  If there are inconsistencies within my department I would like to make that a focus this coming year.

Time for reflection – It is advisable to stop staring at the data for a day or two and reflect on what you have gathered so far.  I then compared the Higher paper versus the Foundation paper (refer to Table 3 below).  Would this reveal anything?  I was hoping that I had a whole bunch of students sitting on D grades which would make me question whether I should have entered them for the higher papers in order to help them secure that magical C grade (terrible I know).  But as you can see below, we only entered 34 students for the foundation papers and only 3 students managed to achieve a C or D grade.  This was a relief.  It confirms that we were correctly assessing our students and entering them for the papers at the level that was right for them.

Evaluation: Previous years Mathematics results at my school are: 2014: 72%; 2013: 73% my first set of results as HOD and the highest ever for our school (NB: the summer 2013 cohort sat multiple entries); 2012: 62%; 2011: 59%. There were more students at grade U this year, which I have yet to look into.

Next Steps: I have yet to look at what proportion of students met their end of KS4 targets (especially CATs predictions which have been shown to have 0.84 correlation) as well as our .  The other things I need to look at are:

• Actual versus Predicted- this will be based on the mocks we did in March 2014 (a pivot table is recommended for this)
• Look for outliers (e.g. predicted an E but got a B) and reasons for this
• The strengths of the department and that of individual teachers
• Areas for improvement including the C/D borderline intervention
• compare KS2 entry levels with final grade at GCSE and see if all students that achieved a level 4 (at KS2) gained a C or above (again, a pivot table can do this for you in no time)
• anything else you can think of.

Use this service to get the most out of where your students went wrong.

Wow, sounds like a lot of work for one person.  Correct.  But fear not, ResultsPlus is at hand and this is what I should have mentioned at the start(most exam boards have a similar service, see below).  ResultsPlus is a free service that provides detailed analysis of exam performance. It can help you identify topics and skills where students could benefit from further learning. It also helps in Identifying topics, skills and types of question where students may need to develop their learning further.  You can also see actual scores for each exam question for a student, class or group and understand how your students’ performance compares with national averages.  Take a look at this snapshot document which highlights the entire cohorts 10 best and worst questions as well as the 10 skills my department needs to focus on improving this year.

Conclusion:  Am I happy with these results? Yes.  I realize that the 5 A* – C is not a pure reflection of teaching quality as there are numerous factors at play outside our control that could result in a school or department not performing as well as it could have, namely: not being fully staffed, long term sickness, budgetary constraints for essential resources, lack of CPD, unqualified staff…the list goes on.  I haven’t taken free school meals (FSM) into consideration as I don’t think there is sufficient data to suggest that it is a reliable indicator of students performance in exams.  If you or your department did not perform as well as you wished, you may be able to find reasons for this by analyzing your data and hopefully you’ll be able to draw up an action plan for the coming year.  Good luck for 2015.

Further Reading and Information:

• Ofquals brief explanation of the summer 2014 GCSE results analysis is available to download HERE
• The results Collection consists of two related posts:  The #5MinResultsAnalysis co-authored by @TeacherToolkit and Academic Review: Don’t Blame, Find Out & Fix.
• AQA Enhanced Results Analysis Service – similar to Edexcel’s Results Plus
• OCR Active Results – similar to Edexcel’s Results Plus
• How useful an indicator is Free School Meals (FSM) in judging schools – this is just one article of hundreds published regarding the correlation between FSM and student performance.

When I took on the role as Head of maths, I wanted to do everything – all at once.
One of the first tasks I set myself was to re-write existing schemes of work (sow).
This obviously didn’t happen overnight. I trawled the net for days for ideas, examples, help and so on but got nowhere.  In the end, I decided to stick to a simple plan.  I asked myself, ‘what do we need to cover and by when?’ As a result, I decided to just have dates and topics on my template (which I learned later on is what we call a curriculum map) and I would leave finding resources up to the individual teachers (which was disputed an considered unfair – which is a debate for another day).
Of course I didn’t leave it at that – I kept going back and forth to the SOW day after day until I realized that sow’s can consume all your time and thats when my dearest and nearest pointed me to this lovely gem of a video by Joe Stilgoe.

Feel free to use any of the schemes on this blog and comment on them especially if you can find ways of improving them. I can send you word copies if you want so you can edit them to meet your learners needs. My advice is that don’t ever expect to see a finished article. A sow is always ‘work in progress’ and you will continually add to it and take things out (much like your wardrobe at home – you throw things out you never use and make space for new material). So don’t worry if it doesn’t always look complete.

I will upload up to date sow’s on this blog when I get a minute most likely in August 2014 before term starts.

here goes!