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Evaluation of the Clackmannanshire MLPS Visiting Specialist Programme
1. INTRODUCTION
The present study arose from a request to Scottish CILT from SEED that, with the agreement of Clackmannanshire Council, we should undertake an evaluation of the Council's Visiting Specialist programme for Modern Languages at Primary School (MLPS). Since SEED was offering financial support to the Council for implementing the scheme, they considered it appropriate that there should be an independent evaluation which would complement the evaluation which the Council had already undertaken.
Characteristics of the VS scheme
On the Visiting Specialist programme, three Visiting Specialists (VS) have been appointed with the task of supporting MLPS in the Council's primary schools. An important characteristic of the scheme is that it is not compulsory. Head teachers in consultation with their staff are encouraged to form their own judgements as to whether or not the scheme would be needed. In a small number of cases they have judged that they themselves will be able to make appropriate provision for MLPS without VS support, and so they do not draw on the VS scheme. Most primary schools however decided to take advantage of the scheme, to a greater or lesser degree.
As staff of Scottish CILT we were pleased to accept the commission, in view of the interest which we knew it was generating across other local authorities. We are grateful to Sandy Wilson for providing us with detailed background information on the scheme, including the documentation from the Council's own well-designed evaluation which had already taken place. This proved useful to us in helping us form an initial sense of what the scheme was essentially about.
Main focus of the evaluation
SEED did not offer any additional funding for undertaking the commission. There was therefore an expectation that the evaluation would consist of a small-scale, light-touch study undertaken from the core-funding which Scottish CILT receives from SEED. Because of this, it was decided to concentrate on obtaining the perceptions of the key professional stakeholders in the scheme, i.e. primary school teachers and headteachers, visiting specialists, principal teachers of modern languages in the three secondary schools and senior management in the three secondary schools.
The evaluation is not designed to take direct account of arguably the most important stakeholder of all - the pupils. There is for example no experimental design in which an 'experimental' group of pupils (with VS support) is compared with a carefully matched 'control' group of pupils (with no VS support) in terms of the effects which these two modes might have on pupils' perceptions or pupils' attainments in the modern language they are learning. To implement an experimental design of this sort would have required a considerable degree of intervention by the evaluation team in the daily processes of the participating schools and would also have been very costly.
The approach adopted by the evaluation team was to elicit views from the key professional stakeholders associated with the scheme. This would tell us to what extent these different groups held convergent or divergent views.
Key questions addressed
Our study has sought to address two key questions:
- How successful is the VS scheme, as perceived by its key professional stakeholders?
- Are there any key issues which merit further discussion and decision-taking?
The ensuing Section 2 of our report provides our evidence, while Section 3 offers our conclusions in relation to the two questions which we have posed.
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