Still learning

As many will know I have worked in education since 1997. This has taken many forms and included a range of roles and I have certainly learned a lot over the years.

I am now lucky enough to have worked for the last year in my trust, a trust that began the year with 8 schools and now has 9. It differs from some of the bigger trusts, but serves a wide community with well over 3,000 pupils. It is a varied trust too, with mainstream, AP, special and a PRU and, while geographically close, have key variations in the demographic.

I am the School Improvement Lead (note- ‘the’) and I work closely with the Director of Education, and it is us who form that side of the central team. As you can see, we are not a team of many and it means the ways of working very much need to focus on building the capacity of leaders and staff in schools as opposed to having lots of centralised ways of doing things. That is the way I like to work and so far it has proven to be successful.

I was always expecting a steep learning curve in September, and steep it was. There was so much to learn about how these schools worked, the people who worked in or attended them, the wider community, the ways of working, their priorities and their values.

This means working with a wide range of leaders, from headteachers, and middle leaders, to those leading on attendance and behaviour, as well as classroom teachers and support staff. I have looked at every aspect of the school life, from what is happening in the lessons, to how break and lunchtimes are managed, to safeguarding, interventions and staff development.

I consider myself very lucky as every single person I’ve encountered through this learning journey have been open and welcoming. All are inevitably driven by the one key goal: improving things for our pupils, regardless of need or background, and provide them with the important learning they need for their next steps.

But this is different in different settings. I have heard some say that context is a sop to low expectations, but it really does matter. Alternative provisions and special schools are all very different in their structures, systems and types of pupils who walk through their doors. I knew this, but that is not the same as being immersed in the reality of this and knowing the people involved. Much like small primary schools, these schools are as vulnerable to the difficulties caused by funding, staffing changes and leaders who wear multiple hats. Added to this, is the fact that their pupils can be even more impacted by those difficulties, due to their past experiences and needs, some of which means they have been out of education for many years and may never have had a positive relationship with any adult in their lives before.

Similarly, larger schools, which may be more stable overall, have different areas to explore and differences with their pupils. For example, one day I can be in a school which is predominantly serving an Asian British community and in another one that is predominantly white working class. The next there may be more of a mix, but with larger numbers of services pupils, or pupils who are EAL as they have only just arrived in the UK. While providing the best education is the focus, there can be different considerations to explore in how you convey this and what additional support might be needed to make this happen.

But one thing is consistent and that is the relationships I see in school. These are something I have learned even more about over the last year and something I have tried to work hard at as a leader. School improvement in a local authority showed me how crucial it was to be able to ask the most pertinent questions and listen carefully to the responses, to really understand what is happening in a school and how best to help. You needed to be able to see it all in action to understand this even more. This was honed further on inspection, where finding out that information and making the most appropriate judgement on what was seen and heard, has even higher stakes. You can’t do this without quickly forming a rapport with those you are meeting. The barriers to this were obvious in both of these roles, but nevertheless, important to work on as quickly as possible.

However, working in a relatively small trust has given me more of the time needed to ensure that those barriers are removed. I may not be in the classroom with those pupils, day in day out, but I genuinely care about their outcomes, and I genuinely care about the staff. I think back to others I have worked with where I was left in doubt about this, often leaders I do not wish to emulate, and I don’t think this care is something you can fake. It takes work to build the trust needed which allows you to know and understand the staff, sometimes simply by just listening when they need to talk through and sometimes by advising or doing.

Forging relationship, it is also something I aim to do with the pupils who could see me as a relatively faceless representative of the trust. Seeing me around school really matter. I visit lessons, have taken cover, done duties, calmed distressed pupils and convinced some that following an instruction is by far the best choice. The most significant thing is to talk to them and showing the same interest I always did with pupils in the schools where I did teach everyday. I talk to them in the usual meetings, but also at lunch or break, at the start of the day or end of the day or passing in the corridors. In such a short space of time many of them have started to see me as part of the furniture, approaching me if they need something or just to say hello (a real win with a non-verbal pupil who ran to get my attention across the playground just so he could wave to me and get a hello- proper welling up moment) and they can then be as open and honest as staff are with me.

That is not to say there have not been challenges and there are always times when tough messages are needed. Feedback that can be hard to hear for me too, but I am always happy to receive it and actively encourage it. There are also inevitably tensions and issues that arise which nobody may have been expecting, but we know at least to expect the unexpected as we work in schools with human beings, who don’t always think or behave in simple ways. They are wonderfully complex.

Ultimately, what I wanted to really share was how much I have enjoyed this year of learning. I have found it interesting and challenging and thought-provoking. I have found a huge amount of joy, and I feel honoured to be able to share the joys and successes of these schools as we move forward into the next year.

I owe a huge debt to all of those I have worked with and encountered along the way and the expertise they have shared with me and the insights they have given. And of course that is not only from this year, but the 28 that preceded it too. But this will remain in my mind as a milestone, another year in education that helped to shape me and I really hope that I have helped to shape those I have come across too.