Author: David Crossley - Director of Strategy, Inspirational Schools
The contemporary watchword for the education sector is greater independence. What is important for schools across the country to realise is how this independence can support and revitalise the way they manage their own improvement.
In an interview with the TES shortly after the General Election, the Education Secretary Michael Gove emphasised the importance of ‘networks’ between schools to develop greater collaborative working. Traditionally, school improvement has been administered from the top down, but the growing movement to put educationalists in charge of day-to-day decisions offers schools the chance to choose how they want to improve, and what they want to improve. The top-down method will raise the floor, by helping the poor performers improve, but it will not raise the ceiling by making the ‘good’ great, or the ‘great’ outstanding. Most of the children who are underachieving are not in the worst-performing schools. The priority for those in the education sector is to ensure that every child, regardless of social or economic background, or a school’s overall rating, has access to excellent education and is able to achieve their full potential. Unless the ceiling is raised by resilient improvement, true educational excellence is simply not possible.
It is this notion of collaboration between schools that resonates so well with Tribal’s Inspirational Schools Partnership. Tribal believes that the knowledge to improve schools across the sector exists within the schools themselves. Rather than viewing improvement as a finite process, terminating when a school achieves an ‘outstanding’ rating from Ofsted, the real challenge is to create mechanisms through which schools can continue to challenge both their own practices and those of their peers over time, rather than retaining the status quo.
With the Inspirational Schools Partnership, schools are part of a public/private partnership that relies not on government subsidies, but on the existing expertise within the education system.
The Inspirational Schools Partnership combines people and technology to empower the whole school, and to ensure that improvement is informed by the people who know best – the schools’ leaders and managers. At the core is a philosophy that even in outstanding schools there is always margin for improvement – for new approaches to improve outcomes, save money or generate new opportunities for learning and extra-curricular development. There are pockets of brilliance across our school system – we can all think of the brilliant maths teacher or head of history who may be achieving results in their subject whilst working in a school that may be functioning well below the area or national average.
The Inspirational Schools Partnership is designed to provide an outlet or network for the most inspirational teachers to make a difference on a wider scale. Its goals are to professionalise the sharing and dissemination of schools’ skills and knowledge by providing both the technical environment in which this can happen, and personal support to maintain long-term progress.
In areas of continued educational under-performance, school improvement has arguably suffered in the past from a target-driven approach and a lack of expertise rather than resources per se – smaller local authorities, for example, may have the money but not the expertise in attracting high-quality educationists to support a local school wanting to improve its performance. This is why providing the tools for a school-to-school series of partnerships makes sense – the resources required to drive improvement are held within the partnership system.
Tribal created the Inspirational Schools Partnership project in 2008, working with over 50 ‘outstanding’ schools, headteachers, the Fischer Family Trust and leading academics to build a partnership that gives schools the best tools for the job. David Crossley, executive head of Wildern School is the Strategic Director. He previously designed and led the very successful Government-funded RATL (Raising Achievement Transforming Learning) programme while working for the Specialist Skills and Academies Trust (SSAT) which involved 700 secondary schools. The ISP framework allows a school to model its own improvement journey based on data gathered not only from exam results, but from the opinions of staff members, students and parents as they give their honest feedback on how they think the school is currently performing. Once areas for improvement have been identified, schools can then access the expertise of others to implement changes. To support this process, Tribal has created a cutting-edge online tools environment to identify students in need of extra support, whether that support is individual tuition to prevent a student from falling behind, building their confidence and social skills, or developing a budding talent. The system will also analyse why a student is performing well, looking at strengths and weaknesses as well as external influences such as parental input.
For schools, joining this partnership will mean more than just access to expertise and technology in a climate where the motto has become ‘do more with less’, as schools are encouraged to improve productivity and efficiency without increasing their spending. The framework of the partnership provides a cost-effective capacity for school improvement in an environment that also teaches schools how to turn their own talents into ‘products’.
By creating a cooperative marketplace and commercialising expertise, showing schools how to offer their educational expertise to another school in return for income, a virtuous cycle is born, which re-invests money from one school into another and keeps it within the system. Take, for example, a school with an underperforming science department. Without the budget to add new staff, a school must consider how it can up-skill existing staff, improve lesson plans, and motivate the department instead. Through the partnership, a school can access talented teachers from other schools who will coach their department and by benchmarking their science departments against those of other schools in the partnership, specific areas of under-development can be identified.
Such is the support and drive for collaboration, that the Association of College and School Leaders (ACSL), seen by many as the voice of school leaders, has appointed Tribal as its premier partner for school improvement.
Partnership in practice
Wakefield City High School is a founding member of the Inspirational Schools Partnership. In 1993, only 13% of the students were achieving five A* to C GCSE grades. By 2010, that same figure is now at 90%. Wakefield itself has a tax credit index of 76.1, marking the town out as an area that struggles with poverty and deprivation; so the turnaround of a local school proves the point that any child, from any socio-economic background, can succeed given the right teaching environment.
The executive head of Wakefield City High School, Alan Yellup, attributes this turnaround to years of collaboration with other schools. ‘Like many schools, we used to be beleaguered and inward-looking, but the moment we put our heads above the parapet and started to collaborate with other schools, that’s when we were able to raise our standards with dignity.’ Alan is a passionate advocate of working with other educationalists and schools to identify and solve problems. ‘There is no universal panacea for school improvement: all the more reason, then, to work with people to understand what the problem is on a school-by-school basis and ensure that everyone gets the support they need to maintain long-term improvement.’
Wakefield City High School now supports over 200 schools across the country, offering everything from the expertise of their mathematics department to hosting visitors eager to learn from the school’s success. One school in North-East Lincolnshire has achieved a 14% increase in Maths A* to C GCSEs thanks to support from Wakefield’s teachers. And Alan Yellup is keen to emphasise that the partnerships between his school and its peers are well-balanced: ‘there are ‘golden nuggets’ of expertise in very school – whenever we are supporting another school, there is always something we can learn from them. We never leave empty-handed.’
As we look ahead to an environment where schools are more autonomous but will be expected to deliver higher standards and real-term savings in return for greater freedoms, the ability of such schools to access the best expertise from pockets of brilliance across the country will be critical.