The Learning Quality Framework

Initial comments …more to self than anything else. This needs massive chopping. Needs a map of the module so its easy to find your way around.

Want to know what the LQF is, what its for, what it enables before getting into any of text below.

The Learning Quality Framework

A Learning Organisation:

Where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, when new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together. (Peter Senge 1990)

The Learning Quality Framework embraces and applies the sentiments of a learning organisation to a school. However, here the ideas apply not only to staff and organisational learning but, importantly, to how students learn. People’s orientation to learning becomes the core purpose of the school; all are empowered to become better learners by using an understanding of the learning sciences. This affects how learning is understood as a process, how it is led and managed, how it is talked about and celebrated, how it is stretched and grown, how it is tracked and the results used to further enable individual and organisational learning. Given that learning itself is a gradual, sometimes difficult, but hugely worthwhile process the framework depicts how each aspect of a learning school might be at different stages of growth. The stages are cumulative, each growing from the one before. The framework captures aspects of a school’s organisational culture which can be made hospitable, rather than unhelpful, to the development of learners.

It is increasingly evident that the educational methods we have been using for the past 70 years no longer suffice. They are based on the scientific assumptions about…..the learning process that have been eclipsed by new discoveries. Yet changing them has been slow because the nature of educational reform is largely one of tinkering with institutional arrangements. Rarely has reform penetrated the educational core. (Professor Lauren Resnick)

The Learning Quality Framework will enable schools to reach their educational core – that of developing people as better learners; building their confidence, capacity and enthusiasm for learning throughout their lives. Whatever your current approaches to learning — be they Philosophy for Children, Assessment for Learning, SEAL, PLTS, BLP, Habits of Mind, Visible Thinking, Successful Futures, and so on — The Learning Quality Framework guides school development towards the creation of a learning powered culture, offering pathways and stages to drive your development action. Using its twelve clearly defined principles the school can realise and authenticate its prime educational goal of developing better learners. You might think of LQF as a journey planner, a satnav, a Quality Standard. The school has to make the journey but the LQF shows you the whole journey, alerts you to hazards, guides your progression through its stages, and — through the award of a Quality Mark — recognises and rewards your foresight and effort.