Given the choice of spending a few days over half-term digging the garden, or giving a keynote at a conference in Taiwan, which would you have chosen?
That’s the choice I made too, and found myself at a symposium for Taiwanese school principals in order to debate the merits of instructional leadership. And to sample the Taiwanese delicacy of “stinky tofu”, a kind of fermented beancurd. Think gorgonzola made with old socks.
There was a time when the word “leadership” could not be uttered unless accompanied by the adjective “transformational”. Just as Clark Kent pops into the telephone box and transforms himself into a superhero, so successful heads were lauded as superheads. The goal was to create inspiring visions, float around the school boosting morale, do things that mortal leaders found impossible like conjuring millions of pounds in funding from nowhere, building glassy empires and turning around failing schools. Which often failed again as soon as the superhead moved on to the next adventure.
“Instructional leadership” is just another name for what we often talk about as the leadership of teaching and learning. It sounds much more prosaic than being transformational, and yet Hattie, Robinson and many others identify far more impact from this kind of leadership. The head is not just spending time coaching teachers, but creating a culture where all leaders are focused on establishing an appropriate curriculum and a climate of learning for staff and pupils. Perhaps most crucially, instructional leaders create the space for teachers to reflect upon and evaluate the impact of their teaching on the learning of individual and groups of students, adjusting and adapting their teaching in the light of that analysis. This is truly evidence-based teaching.
Viewing our own country’s practice from afar brought into sharp focus the extent we have organised our whole system around instructional leadership. The whole school-led system is predicated on the assumption that it is teachers and leaders, not government, who know what works best for students. Power and responsibility over budget and pedagogy is with schools. Leaders and teachers are supported in their decision-making by a network of over 800 teaching schools. Research Schools, funded by the Education Endowment Fund, are accelerating an evidence-based approach to how to maximise the impact of teaching. We are not just advocating a particular approach, but organising our whole system around it.
So it was a great pleasure for me to be able to talk with pride about our school-led system and the quality of teaching that it is unleashing. And to share with you the outcome of my own piece of evidence-based reflection: leave the stinky tofu to others.
If you have any questions or feedback, please comment below. To keep up to date with this blog, you can sign up for email updates or follow NCTL on Twitter.
For more information or opportunities to get involved with our work, visit our pages on GOV.UK.
]]>If you need to supply impact evidence in support of funding or want to showcase the work of your school, these tips will help you to show evidence of impact to a wider audience.
Plan for impact
Producing the strongest impact evidence starts in the planning phase of your activity. Before you start the delivery phase you should ensure you have:
The Education Endowment Foundation has produced a DIY evaluation guide providing teachers with advice on how to conduct effective small-scale evaluations in schools.
Structure your writing
Use a clear structure to present your impact effectively. At a minimum you need to explain:
In addition, it’s often powerful to describe your own learning experiences from an activity: it’s important to talk about what didn’t work as well as what did. You should also include details of any resources or contacts that can be shared with other schools.
Writing is also an opportunity to explain elements that are valuable but harder to quantify. One example could be the impact you have had on culture and mindset in a school. With any subject that is harder to quantify, it is imperative to be really precise and avoid generic or woolly statements.
NCTL’s impact framework is one option for compiling a strong, structured impact statement.
Consider your audience
You are an expert in the field you are writing about but your audience may not be. Assuming knowledge risks making your writing inaccessible.
Avoid jargon – if you have a recurring acronym, write it out in full for the reader the first time you use it.
Pick out the best bits
Focus on writing about the most relevant and interesting information. This should include anything you did that was innovative or particularly effective in solving a problem other schools might have.
Schools are often operating with limited resources – so consider value for money and highlight activity that delivered the greatest return for investment.
Be concise
Make your text easy to scan for the busy reader. Using subheadings, highlighted keywords and bullet points effectively helps signpost readers to the most important information.
Less is more! Keep sentence lengths short and to the point where possible and the overall word count down.
Try writing in an active rather than passive tone. For example, “We produced a report about how we used the pupil premium”, is quicker and easier to read than the more passive, “It was decided that the alliance would commission a report about the alliance’s use of the pupil premium within our schools.”
Work offline
If you are working with an online portal or application form, prepare your answers in an offline document first.
This allows you to use functions such as spellcheck and word count before presenting a response. It will also guard against any IT issues such as an online portal timing out.
Before you submit your work, print it out and proofread from a hard copy. You’ll spot more typos, incomplete sentences and word repetitions this way.
]]>Roger Pope, Chair of NCTL, looks at some of the recent developments in a school-led system.
Today, Minister Gibb announced plans to combine staff at the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) with the Department for Education to help better align efforts to attract the best and brightest into the profession, and support teachers at every stage of their career. Read more about the changes on GOV.UK
Having worked with NCTL since October 2015, I have seen first-hand the benefits of the fantastic work by hard-working staff across the organisation. It is right that as the education sector changes, we adapt and this new approach will help ensure that all teachers get the support and recognition they deserve.
The school-led system continues to go from strength to strength. This term NCTL inducted an additional 83 new teaching school heads, 143 national leaders of education (NLEs) and 47 national leaders of governance (NLGs). There are now over 800 teaching schools working across 647 teaching school alliances, and over 1300 NLEs and almost 500 NLGs. These system leaders are making a huge contribution to the education and life chances of children across England.
There are now a record number of teachers in our schools – 15,500 more than in 2010 – and 50% of those new teachers are entering the profession through school-led routes. We must continue to attract the best and brightest into the profession, and to support their development throughout their careers.
This change is a positive step forward in response to feedback from the profession and builds upon the work of NCTL to empower schools and school leaders through establishing system leadership. Many of the functions associated with training leaders and supporting schools are now successfully led by school-led bodies such as the Teaching Schools Council and Teaching Schools themselves as well as NPQ providers, many of which are also school-led and in place across the country reducing the need for a separate executive agency.
Our shared aim is to ensure that every child, no matter who they are or where they come from, can get a world-class education and has the chance to go as far as their talent and hard work will allow.
Strategic School Improvement Fund
NCTL has been working alongside the new regional delivery teams at the DfE to deliver the Strategic School Improvement Fund (SSIF). This £140 million grant targets resources at the schools most in need of support to improve standards and pupil attainment.
Round 1 closed in June this year and almost £20m was awarded to 55 successful applicants, who will collectively provide support to just under 1,350 schools.
Round 2 closed on 20 October and another funding round due to open before Christmas, I would encourage system leaders and local partners to work together to make the most of this funding opportunity.
Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund
Of course, we cannot improve pupil outcomes without committing to the professional development of the teacher workforce. The Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund (TLIF) will provide up to £75 million, over 3 years, for the development of teachers and leaders.
We have recently named the projects that will help provide tailored training opportunities for teachers on both managing challenging pupil behaviour and developing leadership, so they can make the most of their talent in the classroom. Many of them will have a focus in the 12 Opportunity Areas announced by the Secretary of State last year, helping to tackle issues around social mobility.
This investment in the profession is part of the government’s drive to build an education system that creates clear and rewarding career pathways for the people entering and progressing in teaching.
You can find out more about TLIF on GOV.UK, including information for those thinking of enrolling in one of the programmes.
National Professional Qualifications
As we all know, excellent school leaders – from the outstanding middle leader in a standalone primary school to the high-performing CEO of a large multi-academy trust – are critical to ensuring that every child and young person can achieve their full potential.
To support the development of the next generation of strong school and system leaders, the Department for Education recently announced that 42 leading providers will be delivering new and improved National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) from this academic year.
Designed in partnership with the leading sector experts, the new, gold standard NPQs offer high quality training opportunities to aspirant and serving leaders at all levels of leadership.
Alongside enhanced National Professional Qualifications for Middle Leadership (NPQML), Senior Leadership (NPQSL), and Headship (NPQH), the reformed suite of NPQs includes, for the very first time, a National Professional Qualification for Executive Leadership (NPQEL) for MAT leaders and executive headteachers.
Read more about the new NPQs, including information on £10 million of funding to support the take-up of NPQs in Opportunity Areas and Category 5 and 6 areas.
Power in the hands of schools
By bringing teacher recruitment, leadership and development into the core of the Department for Education, we will together provide a more joined up and responsive service to the profession. It continues the direction of travel over recent years, which has been to put the resources and power into the hands of schools – the people who know what works best for pupils.
All over the country, schools are working in collaboration with others through teaching school alliances and MATs, drawing down funds in partnership with others, and training our future leaders through NPQ programmes. A school-led system has never been more important to help ensure that everyone, no matter who they are or where they come from, can get a world-class education and has the chance to go as far as their talent and hard work will allow.
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A dynamic professional development programme run by a teaching school alliance helps develop staff into leaders and drives school improvement in a large multi-academy trust in London.
Harris Federation comprises 19 primary, 22 secondary, 3 all through academies and a sixth form college in Greater London and Essex. The Harris Federation Teaching School Alliance (HFTSA) is made up of all Harris academies and other local schools and academies from Essex and 12 London boroughs. Underpinning their approach is that all schools in the alliance receive support.
The alliance is led by 2 designated teaching schools: Harris City Academy Crystal Palace in south London and Harris Academy Chafford Hundred in Thurrock, Essex. They use schools judged by Ofsted to be good and outstanding to lead the delivery of CPD and school-to-school support.
The teaching schools play a key role in driving professional development for all schools within the trust, as well as supporting school improvement through school-to-school support, deploying specialist leaders of education (SLEs) into alliance schools to share expertise, and training new teachers through its school-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) provision.
Creating new generations of school leaders is a priority for the Harris Federation. “With so many academies in our group we have an obligation to ensure there is a steady supply of exceptional leaders moving up through the profession,” says Director of Teaching School Sharie Omoragbon.
It is imperative that we continually upskill staff at all levels of teaching both within and beyond our federation. Because of this we bid for a licence to deliver the National Professional Qualifications to school leaders. We want to make a difference to schools through highly effective CPD.
The Harris culture of professional development has certainly helped Jordan Hollis, now entering his third year of teaching at Harris Primary Academy Haling Park in Croydon. Jordan completed a National Professional Qualification in Senior Leadership (NPQSL) in March 2017.
"As soon as I joined the academy the senior leadership team wanted to know my professional development aspirations,” he explains.
I completed a questionnaire that asked me where I thought I was in my development and where I saw myself going next. I had previously completed a middle leadership qualification so the next logical step was senior leadership training. The Executive Principal informed me that she wanted to put me forward for the NPQSL programme.
Part of the programme involved delivering a sustainable school-based improvement task linked to a whole school improvement priority within his academy. Jordan led a project to improve phonics at the academy and was able to make a significant improvement to the children’s performance.
Jordan says that the qualification has been a real boost to his career development too. As soon as he completed the programme he applied for and was promoted to an assistant principal post at his school, which he started recently.
The Harris Federation teaching school alliance has used Jordan’s experiences and feedback to inform the development of its new, reformed National Professional Qualifications which they will begin delivering this year. Jordan has a valuable role working with the alliance to shape the participant experience and content delivery for the programmes.
Jordan’s experience is typical, according to the teaching school’s impact data. Over 75% of participants were promoted after completing a leadership development programme with the teaching school alliance, confirming that the training helped secure promotion.
“I don’t think that I would have been promoted without the encouragement and the opportunities I’ve been offered through the NPQSL programme,” Jordan adds. “The programme has really showed me and the school that I can manage a senior leadership role effectively."
Central to the professional development approach within Harris is a professional learning network made up of professional learning leaders representing each academy. Learning leaders meet half-termly to share best practice and evidence-based learning between schools and often invite external organisations to present to the group.
“At the last network meeting we welcomed a representative from University College London (UCL) to talk to the group about the UCL professional learning network and free resource forum for teachers,” Sharie Omoragbon explains. “Several of our staff have since joined the network as a result and have fed back on how useful the resources are.’’
The meetings are also used to discuss key professional development priorities for different staff groups, such as subject specific priorities, support for NQTs, teaching assistants or non-teaching staff. Each year the teaching school alliance asks group members to survey their staff members to identify specific development needs. Feedback from the surveys then informs the teaching school CPD offer for that academic year.
There is also an annual conference that brings everyone from the alliance together for professional development. “It’s a great opportunity for colleagues to learn from each other, share ideas and network with other professionals beyond their own schools,” says Sharie. Workshops are organised based on the feedback from the CPD surveys.
Findings from the annual CPD audits and internal recruitment and retention research have revealed a need to provide greater support to newly qualified teachers beyond their NQT year so that they continue to feel fully supported after completing their NQT year. This has led to the creation of a bespoke programme designed to support recently qualified teachers, with 1 or 2 years’ experience. Trends in the teaching school’s research show that NQTs tend to leave the profession after their third year of teaching. “By providing continued support prior to year 3, we expect to improve retention among teachers in the early stages of their careers,” says Sharie.
She adds:
Traditionally new teachers receive a lot of support during their NQT year but it reduces significantly thereafter. Our recently qualified teacher programme will give teachers continued support and ongoing access to a network of peers for an extended period.
The programme launches this autumn and will be monitored closely for its impact.
Colleagues preparing to take on leadership positions have a good menu of high quality professional development opportunities to choose from, which includes a range of National Professional Qualifications. The programmes are managed by Sharie, and are overseen by a board of directors which, among others, includes 3 national leaders of education (NLEs): Executive Principal Nicola Graham, Regional Director for Secondary Education Dr Chris Tomlinson and Sir Daniel Moynihan, Harris Federation CEO.
The programmes on offer include the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH), Senior Leadership (NPQSL), Middle Leadership (NPQML) and Executive Leadership (NPQEL) – designed and delivered in conjunction with the federation’s most experienced leaders.
“Face-to-face sessions are facilitated by an experienced leader who must have a minimum of 2 years’ leadership experience and will ideally have experience as a specialist leader of education,” Sharie explains.
The programmes are rooted in school improvement and effective leadership and management. We use staff with SLE experience to facilitate training as one of our quality assurance indicators. Typically, SLEs will have achieved exceptional outcomes in their own schools and will have experience of achieving positive outcomes working with leaders from other schools. As facilitators, they will also coach and mentor aspiring leaders drawing on a wealth of experience using examples from different school settings.
The involvement of senior leaders from across the alliance is a valuable professional development opportunity in itself, says Nicola Graham, Executive Principal of Harris Academy Chafford Hundred, one of the designated teaching schools.
Headteachers and senior leaders are encouraged to help deliver these programmes at various levels. It’s a great opportunity for them to share their expertise and further develop their coaching skills. They are role models for less experienced leaders and are able to identify with the challenges colleagues face at middle and senior leadership levels.
Training programmes offered through the Harris teaching schools form leadership succession planning for many academies within the alliance, says Nicola. “This sort of professional development is vital,” she says. “We’ll regularly look at the leadership pipeline and work out who is ready to be developed for a leadership role. One of my assistant principals completed NPQSL, which was excellent preparation for joining our senior leadership team here, while several of my middle leaders have completed NPQML."
It’s good to encourage colleagues to undertake these programmes just before you think they are ready to operate at that level. It helps to bring them on, establish themselves and develop the leadership skills needed to perform well in new roles.
If you have any questions or feedback, please comment below. To keep up to date with this blog, you can sign up for email updates or follow NCTL on Twitter.
For more information or opportunities to get involved with our work, visit our pages on GOV.UK.
]]>We meet 2 educational psychologists working at the Bright Futures multi-academy trust in the north-west, Dr Adam Rumble and Dr George Thomas.
Adam
There are broadly 5 areas an educational psychologist might work in:
This work can be done at 3 different levels – individual casework, group work and across the school system.
We’re incredibly lucky, because working in a multi-academy trust, we are able to cover all of those areas and levels, but we aim to focus most of our time on strategic and systemic work that will make a greater impact on more students.
George
We’re on the ground day to day, so we do casework with individual students, as well as working on broader projects such as working with SENCOs and senior leadership teams towards long-term goals.
We hold regular planning meetings with schools on a termly basis, which enables us to have conversations with staff about particular issues or themes. This approach has far greater reach and impact than if we were just restricted to case work and helping individual children who are being referred to our team.
Adam
Often, the idea for a project can come directly from our casework. For instance, when I saw significant levels of casework relating to emotional health and wellbeing, I asked the senior leadership team, what is in place already? What else could we do as an educational psychology service to help you to support more children and young people? I was able to draw on casework to bring about a strategic approach to an issue across the whole trust.
George
We currently have 3 full-time educational psychologists working as part of a Targeted and Specialist Support Team (TASS) within Bright Futures, so we work across 8 schools in the trust, including 3 mainstream secondary schools, 3 mainstream primary schools, 1 sixth form college and 1 specialist secondary school.
We hold regular drop-in consultations that allow members of staff to talk to an educational psychologist or SENCO about any anonymous child – they don’t have to be on the SEN register – this is an opportunity to discuss any issues and potential strategies. We have around 6 drop-ins per year in each school and generally speak about 3 children each time, so we support around 18 children per year in each school without undertaking direct work.
We also conduct more traditional casework involving consultation, observation and direct assessment with children. This varies in volume but typically in a year, each educational psychologist might work with about 40 different children on an individual basis.
We work in a bespoke way with each school, looking at how we can support their school development plans. Some schools will want us to have a strategic focus, with training for staff that will have an indirect impact on many pupils. Other schools will need us to do more casework.
Adam
But now that we’ve built up close working relationships with schools, they expect us to work on joint initiatives rather than to have a narrower focus on casework. The strategic work we do is influenced by the casework that we see – so our broader work is led by the evidence and the outcomes we build up.
We can be very creative with the work that we do. I specifically applied to work here because of that autonomy – this role gives me the opportunity to apply all the skills and knowledge that I’ve built up during my doctorate training and allows me the flexibility to decide how best to apply that.
George
We are given a lot of responsibility to do systemic and strategic work, even though we’re only in our second and third years of practice. Often, working in a local authority, it takes time to be able to take on that level of responsibility and you’d first need to become a specialist or senior practitioner. But Adam and I are already the leads on specific strategies across groups of schools and these strategies, over a number of years, will ultimately help support many of the children that we serve.
George
The majority of educational psychologists are employed by a local authority and work as a local government employee for the educational psychology service. Local authorities may expect educational psychologists to be heavily involved in statutory assessment of children, which leads to devising individual education, health and care plans.
Schools used to be allocated a certain amount of time from a local authority educational psychologist per term but the landscape is changing. Now, many educational psychology services have to generate income to cover a proportion of their costs, so that means that the work done by an educational psychologist is directed by the particular services schools want to purchase. Schools tend to buy in casework because it leads to definite outcomes for individual pupils that are causing concern.
Adam
One of the biggest differences is that schools in our multi-academy trust have a guaranteed allocation of our time, which is paid for by a top slice off their budgets. This means we are embedded within the schools and although we are a small team, we actually have a high ratio of educational psychologists to pupils.
Being part of the trust in this way ensures that we can build really positive, long-term relationships. We get to know the staff and the context and we can build a strong level of trust.
George
Working in a trust means we have much more flexibility as we have a high level of autonomy in how we approach our work across all of the schools. I think that we definitely get more opportunities working in a trust than a local authority. We bring our specialist knowledge of educational psychology together with the knowledge schools have about their children to make a positive change for young people. This leads to creative and interesting solutions.
In a nutshell, we are trying to achieve the best possible outcomes for children and young people with special educational needs, and we’re seeking to build capacity within the trust’s schools.
We’re not an ‘add on’ service which Bright Futures buys in as a service for casework – our team of educational psychologists is very much a central part of Bright Futures and the approach Bright Futures takes towards education in all its academies. And the trust has a strong focus on special educational needs.
The majority of schools within our trust serve socially and economically deprived areas that have significantly above average levels of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Our approach is long-term rather than short-term, enabling us to get down to the root of problems.
We can work with senior leaders and SENCOs in our schools to look at SEND systems and to make sure we’re taking an early intervention and preventative approach. That means that in time, we’re only required to do direct casework with those children that have a very high level of need. This is because we’ve already helped other children at an early stage, often in groups or at a universal level, so they haven’t progressed to having a level of need that requires our individual intervention.
Adam
For example, we lead trust-wide initiatives. I’m the lead for the trust’s autism and sensory needs strategies along with a colleague from our specialist secondary school. As part of the autism strategy we’re currently training all members of staff including teaching assistants, learning mentors, lunchtime supervisors and office staff, as we’re aware that some children with complex needs, who are often very vulnerable, will come into contact with people in school who might not understand their needs or who haven’t had a high level of training.
Our training offer will give support staff an understanding of what autism is, so that from the moment a child with autism comes through the door, everybody in the school has a certain level of understanding. That means staff can make tiny adjustments, which can make a huge difference to that child’s day, like giving them extra processing time or supporting them with visual aids. Anything that will help to make their time in school easier to manage.
George
A key part of our role as educational psychologists is to conduct and use research. ‘Practice-based evidence’ entails using what you know is working and has worked in the past. Whereas, ‘evidence-based practice’ is much harder to produce, whereby you can demonstrate proven results on a large-scale basis.
Adam
Part of our model of working is that we work closely alongside the University of Manchester, which is where we both completed our doctorate studies. We have delivered seminars and training to students and have become involved in external examinations, and we’re currently co-supervising a Year 1 trainee.
It’s great to have that level of trust from the university, that they’re confident in our abilities at this early stage of our careers to be involved in the training of future practitioners. And it means we’ve also maintained that link with the most up-to-date evidence and research available.
George
The university uses a commissioning process to determine the research conducted by their students, so they will ask us if there are any questions that we need to be answered for our pupils and schools. We can then host trainees who are doing active research in our schools that directly benefits us.
Adam
Yes, a trainee last year did her research project on wellbeing and resilience at the same time that it was a priority for the school she was working in, so she was able to help shape and influence their provision at the same time, directly supporting the children.
George
I’m passionate about research and Bright Futures have supported this so I’ve been able to publish 2 papers based on my work here in conjunction with the University of Manchester. At the moment, I’m working with Adam on a paper that reflects on our role as educational psychologists within a multi-academy trust.
It’s fantastically rewarding because not only do we publish our research, we’re then expected to use our action-research skills on a day-to-day basis in our schools, looking at different interventions we could draw on and the evidence that supports them.
Read Adam and George's research paper on being educational psychologists.
Dr George Thomas is an educational psychologist who completed an undergraduate psychology degree and then trained as a teacher. He did his doctorate studies at the University of Manchester and completed his study placements at Bright Futures.
Dr Adam Rumble’s interest in SEN came from his goddaughter being diagnosed with autism. He worked as a teaching assistant with children with SEN and then completed a degree in forensic psychology and criminal justice. After university, he began working as an assistant psychologist at a residential school for children with severe and complex needs in the Midlands. Three years later, he applied for a doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Manchester, and has since worked as an educational psychologist at Bright Futures.
]]>Having worked with many different schools as a national leader of education (NLE) I’d say that the key ingredient of success has got to be relationship building – making sure that leaders and teachers feel supported and included, rather than being the recipient of an improvement plan that is being imposed on them.
I have been an NLE since 2012 and recently changed role from Executive Principal to Head of the Teaching School at St Patrick’s Secondary School in Salford. We have regularly been awarded funding by NCTL to work with other schools as part of school-to-school support funding. Schools are identified by the local authority or the local diocese, or sometimes schools approach us directly for help. Impacting on outcomes is the purpose of any deployment and is therefore essential.
I always start by working with the client school to create an action plan, ensuring that all parties agree it in detail, including the school governors, so that everyone is clear about the steps involved.
Most schools want to do better and achieve more for their pupils so it’s a question of tapping into this shared goal and offering an outsider’s perspective on the issues they’re finding most challenging. A headteacher at one of the client schools I’ve worked with said:
The NLE assessment was like a light bulb going on in the school.
The nature of the support provided will vary according to the needs of the client school. For one school, I organised the deployment of a deputy head from another school outside the local authority to work in the school for 2 days a week using a project-based approach. Whilst in another school, I brokered a whole team of system leaders including an NLE, 3 specialist leaders of education (SLEs) and a national leader of governance (NLG). The team all worked to their own agreed action plans and reported back on progress using a short template, which helped to ensure consistency and to maintain focus on specific outcomes.
I’ve also learned that it is important to watch out for ‘deployment creep’ as although you should remain flexible in approach when new issues unfold, it is vital that the support team remains focused on the reasons they were deployed in the first place to ensure that targeted progress can be made.
After meeting with a client school and putting together an improvement plan and a support package, my role is to oversee the progress being made and to offer support and challenge to the people involved.
Our school has a very experienced senior administration manager, which I think has been critical to the success of the deployments. Their ability to organise meetings, keep track of paperwork and oversee finances, has allowed me to concentrate on the brokerage and detail of the support offered to schools. I rely on this person to QA records of visits and like everyone on my team, they contribute to work which enables school improvement of the highest quality to be given, captured and evidenced.
It is my belief that as an outstanding school, we have a duty to support those that are not improving sufficiently, in order to ensure that every pupil has access to a good education. At St Patrick’s, we prioritise school-to-school support and over the last year we have restructured the senior leadership team to allow us more time to devote to this, without losing focus on being an outstanding school ourselves.
Training, recruitment and retention of outstanding teachers is a key aspect to being able to deliver high quality school-to-school support. Many of our teachers have been able to progress quickly to middle leadership because of the experience gained in client schools.
This is great for continuing professional development and the experience and knowledge they gain feeds back into St Patrick’s.
This work is rewarding on so many levels. I arrive in some schools and first of all need to rebuild confidence or relationships. They have usually been through a difficult time with everyone telling school leaders and governors that despite their best efforts they are not good enough. I feel privileged to work with people when they are at their most vulnerable and I know I have the knowledge and experience to make a difference. I can be their champion by ensuring that they are given time, knowledge and resources to make the required changes.
My advice to anyone thinking of becoming an NLE is to recognise the privilege and opportunity of making a difference as a system leader, impacting positively on the professional lives of other school leaders and together making an improvement to pupil outcomes.
If you have any questions or feedback, please comment below. To keep up to date with this blog, you can sign up for email updates or follow NCTL on Twitter.
For more information or opportunities to get involved with our work, visit our pages on GOV.UK.
]]>Roger Pope, NCTL Chair, gives his personal insight into how successful teaching school alliances operate.
As well as leading a teaching school myself, I have the enormous privilege of visiting others all over the country. They are brilliant at both creating new knowledge and transferring what they already know between their member schools. Below is some of what I have learned from the expert practice that I have seen – my top 10 tips for building a successful teaching school alliance.
You might find initial resistance to this, and you will need to build trust amongst your schools before they are willing to be truly open. This is not about naming and shaming. It is so that schools can benchmark their performance with others, and know which schools and which subjects have questions to ask in order to make things better.
The surgeon Atul Gawande in his book, ‘Better’, said that the first step to improving health outcomes was to start counting and measuring. Count the number of times you leave swabs in a patient. Count the number of cases of infection in a patient. Then you know when you are making an improvement. Decide what matters in your teaching school alliance and start counting. This gives your alliance purpose and shows schools what they are gaining from membership.
You will benefit from running or being a member of an alliance, but that is not the key driver. You are doing it because you want to improve the life chances of more pupils than just those in your own school. Never stop reminding people of this: it helps to get you through the tough times.
You need an educationalist who knows what needs to be done, how it needs to be done and who has credibility with school leaders and teachers. But you also need administrator and project management skills: they are different and just as important as education skills for building a successful organisation.
Belonging to an alliance is about mutual collaboration, not about service level agreements or buying and selling a product. There is no room for sponges or passengers.
How many times have you sat in a lecture about active learning? What a nonsense! Good teaching models the skills that you want your participants to learn. You want teachers to plan lessons that are engaging and actively involve students in their own learning. Model this with your training.
All teaching schools train new teachers, develop leaders and support schools in challenging circumstances. What makes your ethos and approach different from others? Discuss and celebrate this at your board meetings.
You must have been in some way an exceptional school to be designated as a teaching school. Never risk overstretching your own resources and staff in the service of your alliance – no one will forgive you if your own school goes backwards.
The recent changes to exam syllabuses at all levels have been an unprecedented challenge for teachers. How much better to meet those challenges in collaboration with others. There’s a simple test for the effectiveness of a subject network: are schools bothering to attend? You need to make sure that a school just cannot afford to miss the gold nuggets that they gain from the meetings.
You are a successful school. You can attract and train more teachers than you need. Schools in more challenging areas and circumstances find this much more difficult. What better way to raise standards for pupils everywhere in the country than to encourage your staff to work in more challenging schools?
If you have any questions or feedback, please comment below. To keep up to date with this blog, you can sign up for email updates or follow NCTL on Twitter.
For more information or opportunities to get involved with our work, visit our pages on GOV.UK.
]]>Roger Pope, Chair of NCTL, looks at the challenges and impact of school governance.
What do school governors mean to you? If you are a governor, why do you do it? If you are a headteacher, do you welcome governors as an essential part of your leadership? Or do you flatter them into docile submission, so that you can get your own way without interference?
The Ofsted framework rightly sees the connection between strong governance and outstanding schools. I never cease to marvel at the willingness of volunteers not just to give so freely of their time and expertise, but to place themselves in the position of being grilled and held to account by inspectors. And even more remarkable is the growing band of people who are prepared to give even more by becoming an NLG – a national leader of governance.
As highly effective chairs of governors, the main role of NLGs is to use their skills and experience to provide coaching and mentoring support to other chairs of governors to improve school performance. They can also undertake training to provide external reviews of governance for schools.
I talked to an NLG who has supported many schools by helping to improve the quality of their governance. It is striking the number of different ways in which she has done this.
Her first example was about supporting a governing body chair. Imagine the situation: your head is suspected of financial and professional misconduct. You are the volunteer. He is the professional, widely respected in the school and the community. You have to suspend him.
She acted as a coach and support to the chair, alongside him step-by-step as he made that difficult journey. The result was that he managed to suspend the head and instigate an investigation without any serious blunders that would scupper the process. He appointed an interim head, negotiated the school’s journey into a multi-academy trust (MAT) and successfully managed the removal of the head without undue drama and prolonged process.
As the NLG put it:
I’d like to think that having a quiet voice of counsel to turn to both helped him emotionally and assisted his decision making process.
But more surprising to me was hearing of what happened in another situation when it was the head who was suffering and the governors who were overstepping the mark. Things came to a showdown when the governing body resigned en masse; the NLG was brought in to build a new governing body from scratch.
The head had been emotionally traumatised by the whole experience,” she told me. “I had to provide support for him as well as train new governors.
Schools in special measures provide the most striking contrast between poor and good governance in the same school over a short period of time. The NLG I spoke to chaired an interim executive board (IEB) for a school in special measures. This was a school where over a decade of poor leadership and governance had led to problems across every aspect of the school.
The IEB undertook the role of reviewing the ethos, behaviours and leadership of the school. The introduction and embedding of strong governance was a complete change in the leadership of the school and the challenge resulted in a number of members of staff leaving the school. Parent and pupil confidence increased, and they began to support the remaining staff who stayed dedicated to improving outcomes for pupils.
The NLG I met has also had experience of joining a board of governors in a special measures school.
I helped them to provide strong governance as the school joined a MAT. This involved training the governors in holding the head to account, holding the governors themselves to account to their code of conduct, working with the pupil premium leads to close the gap, and implementing a new behaviour plan.
And the impact?
The result was that the school joined the MAT considerably further forward than it would otherwise have been.
This NLG is an inspiration. And she reminds us that her work as a national leader of governance is not about improving governance as an end in itself: it is to make things better for pupils.
Thanks go to her and to all her governor colleagues and fellow NLGs as well.
Read more about national leaders of governance.
You can find an NLG near you by looking on the school-to-school support directory where all 496 NLGs are listed.
]]>A guide to the roles and structures within the school-led system.
Teaching schools are good or outstanding schools that play an important role in a school-led system, working with others to provide high-quality training and support for school improvement in their local area. Launched in 2011, there are now more than 800 teaching schools across the country and their role includes:
To become a teaching school, a school must be judged at least good in their most recent Ofsted inspection and have a proven track record of delivering ITT and supporting other schools.
All teaching schools form alliances between themselves, their partners and the schools they support. Partner organisations vary, but often include a higher education institution, other schools and local authorities.
Alliances offer more than the sum of their parts. Their strength lies in all of the schools and staff in the alliance and the skills and experience they bring. The structure of alliances varies depending on the local situation: some are led by a single school, others by multiple schools or partnerships.
Alliances are organised in a range of different ways. Some alliances have found it effective to appoint a director or other senior leader to co-ordinate their work.
The Teaching Schools Council represents all teaching schools. It works with system leaders to promote an inclusive school-led system, as well as leading the designation of new teaching schools.
It is a peer-elected group made up of 17 regional and national representatives, all of whom are serving school leaders of designated teaching schools.
The Teaching School Council has 3 commitments. They want to ensure that every school in England is:
For more information visit www.tscouncil.org.uk.
System leaders work beyond their own school or setting, and can be senior or middle leaders in schools or other expert practitioners. Their work might include:
There are a number of system leader roles that are designated by NCTL or teaching schools:
Increasingly, school-to-school-support is co-ordinated by a teaching school, as they can draw upon a range of system leaders and partners to provide a comprehensive support package individually tailored to the school in need of support. There is usually a cost for system leader support, which is negotiated between the receiver of support and the system leader or their school. There are also specific funds that teaching schools can apply for to help groups of schools or a specific locality, such as the Strategic School Improvement Fund.
You can find more information on these roles and the other support available on our website.
You can also use the school-to-school support directory to find and contact teaching schools and system leaders in your area.
If you have any questions or feedback, please comment below. To keep up to date with this blog, you can sign up for email updates or follow NCTL on Twitter.
For more information or opportunities to get involved with our work, visit our pages on GOV.UK.
]]>We talk to an assistant headteacher about her career path in a primary teaching school and why she’s so passionate about training new teachers starting out in the classroom.
Becky Riley is assistant headteacher at Huntingdon Academy, a 300-pupil primary school in St Ann’s, Nottingham. Becky has spent her entire teaching career at Huntingdon, joining the school almost 15 years ago, after graduating from the University of Hull with a teaching degree.
I feel very supported here. That’s why I have always stayed. The role has never stayed the same so it’s kept things fresh for me. Change is good – it makes sure you don’t get complacent.
Traditionally, although teachers had a clear career path into headship, opportunities were limited, especially in primary schools, by the small number of senior posts available in any one school. When these roles were filled, a school couldn’t easily accommodate the progression of other talented staff.
However, Becky explains that she has been fortunate in working at a pioneering school, which has grown in size and ambition.
Huntingdon is 1 of 3 primaries that joined together in 2011 to form the L.E.A.D Academy Trust – ‘Lead, Empower, Achieve, Drive’. Huntingdon was then successful in achieving teaching school status in 2012, creating the L.E.A.D Teaching School Alliance. Warren Primary Academy became another teaching school in the same trust and alliance in 2015. The alliance aims to strengthen teaching, learning and school leadership in 28 schools across Nottingham and surrounding areas, many of them serving challenging urban areas.
This increased scope within the school-led system has created new career opportunities for high-performing and experienced teaching staff like Becky:
I feel very passionately about teaching and doing my best for the children of St Ann’s. If my school hadn’t become part of a teaching school alliance, I would probably still be here as a classroom teacher, but now I can offer more by leading the training of new entrants into the profession.
Becky was recognised by her school as an outstanding classroom teacher and they supported her progression by appointing her as a coach to other staff. When the L.E.A.D Teaching School Alliance grew to include other schools, Huntingdon’s headteacher became chief executive of L.E.A.D multi-academy trust, and the deputy head moved up to become the new head at Huntingdon. This created an opportunity for Becky to apply to become assistant headteacher.
These opportunities came along when the alliance developed. I have just been really fortunate that senior leaders were looking closely at what everyone’s skills were and they gave people opportunities to stretch and develop.
Becky feels lucky to be working in an alliance where she has been given opportunities to use her skills and passion to their fullest. In Becky’s new role she’s responsible for leading and facilitating primary initial teacher training (ITT) across the alliance. ITT is delivered through School Direct in partnership with the University of Nottingham. Each week, the trainees spend 4 days gaining practical experience in L.E.A.D schools and 1 day at university. Becky is currently working on the design and delivery of enrichment sessions, in conjunction with alliance schools, for the current cohort of 6 trainees.
I work with mentors and co-ordinators across L.E.A.D schools and in partnership with the University of Nottingham. We meet 6 times a year for training sessions, tailored to the needs of working in an urban context. Collaborative work is very rewarding, and encouraging staff to work together to share practice and support each other is L.E.A.D’s ethos.
Becky’s coaching skills are in high demand across the alliance. She enrolled onto the postgraduate certificate in Coaching and Mentoring at the University of Nottingham, and she studied part-time, juggling this alongside work and family life.
I really enjoy working with different teachers across our alliance at all stages of their career. I’m helping them stay and flourish in a profession that can be challenging but extremely rewarding.
As the lead practitioner for coaching across the alliance as well as ITT co-ordinator, Becky says her workload is her biggest challenge but she thinks workload is always a challenge for people who strive for more. She explains:
The structure and culture of the alliance has enabled me to deliver more each year – without compromising on L.E.A.D’s high quality standards.
Becky says she is comfortable delegating tasks to colleagues in different schools and she utilises resource across the alliance, as there are a number of colleagues who are eager to stretch and develop.
]]>The job can be demanding but I know that I am making a real difference. That’s what pushes me on. When you are training teachers you are having a big impact on schools in the future.