Effective change takes time

It can be a considerable challenge for a struggling school to transform good intentions into meaningful improvement, but with a clear plan and effective support, staff at Thorpe Greenways Junior School believe they are doing just that, as Jacob Stow explains...

In September 2012, the relatively safe waters of Ofsted’s ‘satisfactory’ rating became decidedly more choppy. Rebranded as the far less appealing ‘requires improvement’, the third tier of regulatory approval now brings with it the promise of a swift re-inspection, its recipients placed under greater pressure to raise standards lest they slip into special measures. With the prospect of wholesale changes in leadership and even forced academisation facing those unable to arrest their decline, there has never been a greater incentive to get better. But how can struggling schools transform a will to raise standards into a way?

Staff at Thorpe Greenways Junior School in Southend, Essex are in the midst of a journey that began when their institution was judged ‘satisfactory’ with ‘good’ elements in 2007 and 2010, and, most recently, ‘requires improvement’, again with ‘good’ elements, in December 2012. In short, the next step up the ladder has proved frustratingly hard to make.

“The message from Ofsted was, ‘We have confidence in the school’s leadership, but you need to make sure you sell enough feather dusters by the end of financial year. You need to get the results up,’” Dan Ager, assistant head, reflects of this most recent encounter with Her Majesty’s Inspectors. Whilst this outcome bought the school time, there is a renewed and necessary determination amongst staff to now get to ‘good’ and beyond.

The leadership team at Thorpe Greenways are taking a multi-pronged approach to improvement, encompassing far closer ties with next door Greenways Infant School (rated ‘good’ by Ofsted), the adoption of new approaches to appraising staff and Joint Practice Development, and the subsequent decision to sign up to the multi-faceted NAHT Aspire programme – the latter two both examples of a close relationship with EdisonLearning. Importantly, though, what comes across speaking to head of school, Debbie Croud, Dan Ager and members of the teaching team is that this is a now a school with a clear strategy for getting to where it and Ofsted want it to be.

* Working in partnership

Arguably, the process of change ongoing at Thorpe Greenways Juniors began some months prior to its most recent Ofsted inspection, when it federated with Thorpe Greenways Infants. Today, head of federation, Ashley Eastwood, presides over both schools, assisted by a single leadership team, overseen by a unified governing body. On one level, federation was a pragmatic response to the passing away of the infant school’s headteacher, but it has resulted in a new way of working and improvements in the quality of teaching on both sides of the key stage divide.

“The Infant and Junior schools, although part of the same building, were very separate,” Debbie reflects on the situation pre-federation. “There was an adjoining wall – a wall, not a door. There wasn’t a lot happening between the two schools, other than the transition from Year 2 to Year 3, where there would be a lot of activities to get children used to the ‘other side’.”

“Now,” Dan explains, “parents think of it as one school, rather than two, and transition doesn’t seem as pivotal as it was before. We have a joint staffroom, where before there were two at opposite ends of the school, and it’s made a real difference. We do everything together, including CPD. That’s really vital for the children, because it means they’re getting a consistent message from early years through to Year 6. Before, when they moved from Year 2 to Year 3, everything from the language used by the teachers to the playgrounds was different. We have a single assessment manager, who tracks progress across the whole
school.”

“There are new relationships forming, too,” Debbie continues. “We’re experimenting with paired classes across the federation, and it’s something we want to do more of. People will go and see practice in another year group for Joint Practice Development. They might go in to watch a specific thing for 10 minutes, or to work with another teacher.”

“We’ve been a federation for five terms now,” Dan concludes, “and when we think back on what we’ve done in that time, there’s been an amazing amount of change and progress.”

* Coaching improvement

The coming together of Junior and Infant schools set improvement in motion, but the leadership team at Thorpe Greenways were under no illusions that more needed to be done – the question was, what? “A lot of our work had centred on the federation; we’d focused on organising the new leadership team and the day-to-day running of events, but that meant we hadn’t paid enough attention to deciding on a key strategy,” Debbie explains. “After the inspection we knew something still wasn’t quite right, and that we needed to find an answer. That’s when the Edison coaching came along.”

The strategy Thorpe Greenways settled upon to drive the improvement in teaching and learning it needed was centred on EdisonLearning’s Quality Framework for Teaching and Learning: ‘Helping schools build a developmental and collaborative culture through a coaching model for teacher improvement’ is one of its principal selling points, and said coaching has become a fundamental part of professional development at the schools. “We changed our whole working practice,” Debbie says. “We stopped lesson observations outright, and even official observations became evaluation sessions with a coach. The process now is more of a partnership. There’s a discussion between coach and teacher the day before a visit to talk about the coming lesson. There’ll be questions from the coach to probe into a specific aspect of teaching that’s been agreed upon, or a particular group of children. The teacher and coach then go to the lesson together for 15 or 20 minutes, and the coaching as a result of that visit is discussed as soon as practically possible. The coach doesn’t make any judgements at all – it’s about questioning and getting teachers to self- reflect. It has shifted the culture from ‘this is us coming to judge you’ to ‘this is us coming to support you and we want to see your grades moving up because of what you’re doing for yourself’. Most people have lesson visits at least once a fortnight, and some once a week.

“Senior leaders were the first people to take on the coaching roles, but all members of staff have received the coaching training now,” she stresses – further evidence of the collaborative approach being adopted at Thorpe Greenways. “Over the longer term, there will be more and more opportunities to become a coach. And alongside the Joint Practice Development direction we’re taking, teachers can get together to coach each other in the same way.”

* Embedding success

“While coaching was having a positive effect, there were other elements of our practice that needed improvement – we needed something that would help us to develop our strategy,” Debbie says of Thorpe Greenways’ decision to commit itself to the three-year NAHT Aspire Programme (nahtaspire.co.uk), again developed by EdisonLearning. Aspire bills itself as a way for networks of schools to bring about ‘durable improvement’, whether that means progressing from ‘requires improvement’ to ‘good’, as in the case of Thorpe Greenways Juniors, or ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’. It incorporates the aforementioned Quality Framework for Learning and Teaching as part of its focus on leadership, while enabling schools to embed assessment for learning, and address student and family support, pedagogy and curriculum, and the learning environment, too. Importantly, it promises to work with schools, not impose an unwelcome structure upon them.

“It starts with what’s called a Collaborative Quality Analysis, which is a really powerful first step,” Dan tells us. “That helped us to draw a road map of where we wanted to go, looking at our strengths and weaknesses. It wasn’t just about the things we needed to improve – we looked at what we were already good at as well, and how we could make those things even better; what was underdeveloped, developing, proficient and exemplary. As an example, our parent forum came about from looking at our relationship with parents: we identified a gap, a need for something a bit more formal than what we had. Within a matter of weeks it had been evolved.”

Valuable lessons and approaches have already been put into practice at Thorpe Greenways, thanks to EdisonLearning’s methods and the framework provided by Aspire, despite the school being less than one year into the programme. These include simple tweaks to everyday aspects of school life such as the manner in which meetings are conducted – the aim being to ensure that whatever needs to be discussed and acted on is discussed and acted on, within a clearly defined time frame, to avoid progress slipping. They also include a rather more fundamental rethinking of the role of middle leaders, who are leading the programme’s five areas of development in pairs, a decision made both to empower them and disseminate good practice into every classroom, but one that has also required a new focus on improving communication from the SLT down.

* United we stand

Collaboration is key to the Aspire programme, a fact evident both in its coaching approach and in the way it brings schools together to share their experiences and challenges. “Aspire has given us a group of schools to work with that are in a similar situation to us,” Dan says. “There’s an openness and the opportunity to compare notes – we’ve done a lot on coaching, for instance, but there’s another school that’s done more on core learning values, so we’ll say, come on in, see how our coaching is working; do you mind if we come and see how your learning values are having an impact on the children? We’ve picked up lots interesting points. It’s nice to have a face-to-face chat with people who are in a similar boat.”

It’s a way of working that has come easily to Thorpe Greenways. Even before Aspire, the aim was to forge as many links as possible, both inside and outside school. “We’ve always worked as teacher learning communities, based on an idea by Dylan Wiliam, and we’re a school that gets involved in lots of partnerships,” Debbie tells us. “So, we’re part of a Southend Education Trust peer review scheme, in which groups of senior leadership teams go into each other’s schools and, in effect, do an Ofsted inspection for each other; it’s a really positive way of moving forward. And we’re part of a Shoebury cluster that’s working towards a more formal relationship – a multi- academy trust, though we’ve not signed up in full at this point.

“Recently, we also pulled together a group of six schools that want to recruit new teachers – getting good quality staff can be difficult here, so we paid for a big advert in the national press, organised a day at a local hotel for prospective candidates, and had tours at the schools. We had around 20 people who were involved in that and about 10 are moving through to the next stage of interview. It’s another example of how schools can work together.”

View from the classroom

A feature of the Aspire programme is the involvement of staff at all levels – Dan explains how EdisonLearning introduced their methods to the entire team before providing more in depth training for smaller groups on specific areas. The programme certainly seems to be popular: “I think we were quite apprehensive about the idea of someone coming to our classroom each week as a coach,” admits Year 5 teacher Anna Spence of the shift to coaching. “We thought it was going to be like having an observation every week, but now we’re a year into it it’s not like that at all. It’s been helpful for our teaching and it’s not scary when Debbie walks into our classrooms!”

Head of Year 5, Helen Pearson, agrees: “We’re more reflective,” she says. “We try new things and if they don’t work, it’s not the end of the world – we have the freedom to experiment and we feel more enthusiastic about putting changes into practice.”

Meet the staff

Debbie Croud, Head of School

“With Aspire we have a three-year school improvement plan, broken into phases. There’s a clear map of what we want to do by July, and ideas for next year, so we know what the journey is and we can tweak it along the way, but the only bit we cover in detail is the current phase. It’s effective because you’re not trying to do everything at once.”

Dan Ager, Assistant Head

“One of our governors is the head of an ‘outstanding’ school in London that’s gone down the Shirley Clarke route and they’ve introduced it to us. Staff have been bought the books, but it hasn’t been a prescriptive ‘read this and it’ll make you a better teacher’. Teachers have worked in small groups to discuss how it has improved their teaching and coaching.”

Helen Pearson, Head of Year 5

“We’ve had a big push with marking and giving children feedback during each lesson – not waiting until the next session when they will have forgotten about what they were doing. It’s quite a challenge to get round 30 children, but you might find that a child has sat there doing the wrong thing in class and you haven’t picked it up.”

Phil Hinds, Year 5 teacher

“We’re now better at getting all individuals making progress, rather than just most of the class. Most of them progressing is good; if they’re all on task, working hard, and they’re all progressing, that’s outstanding. The goal is to be an outstanding school. If Ofsted came in next week they’d find this a very different place from in 2012.”

Pupil voice

Alex, Year 6

“We have Talk Partners in class. Every week it’s someone different and we get to pick where we sit. Then at the end of the week we swap. You get to learn different things because your new partner might know things the person last week didn’t know.”

Amelie, Year 6

“Our Romans project was really fun – we learned about Boadicea and her battles, made our own shields and art, and went onto the field and tried different formations like the ‘turtle’ – then we charged at each other!”

Molly, Year 6

“My teacher is fun, but she doesn’t let you do whatever you want – She’s firm but fair! I think she’s best in maths; it’s my favourite lesson but she’ll always go over things for people who find it tricky.”

Maddy, Year 6

“I enjoyed doing our mountains project. We had to work in groups of five and six, and we had research books. We were allocated certain mountains and we had to find out facts about them. We looked at the
Alps.”