Outstanding schools: Hammond Academy

Great Expectations

Approaching education with the attitude that ‘only the best will do’, staff at Hammond Academy in Hemel Hempstead are taking a leading role in the drive to offer outstanding education to every child, says Jacob Stow…

It is an exciting time for Hammond Academy. One of the first 35 primary schools in the country chosen to be Teaching Schools, with a new block of classrooms freshly opened to accommodate its growing intake, its ‘outstanding’ practice is set to reach more students and trainee teachers than ever before. The secret to its success? Having relentlessly, unashamedly high expectations. Headteacher, Gail Porterfield, and her senior leadership team expect their staff to deliver outstanding teaching; they expect achievement across the school to be outstanding, and they expect their learning environment to be just as good too. Making these expectations explicit to all involved with the school has clearly had the desired effect, as Hammond has been basking in the glow of Ofsted’s official two thumbs up since 2009.

Behind the confidently worded intentions, of course, a lot of hard work has taken place. In conversation with headteacher Gail; head of education, Laura Gregory; assistant head, Kerry Lovell; and business manager, Natalie Dalvarez, what emerges is a system, shaped by the recent broadening of the school’s horizons, in which teachers and children are supported and pushed to improve in equal measure, standards are rigorously monitored and no room is left for complacency.

If you look at the Ofsted framework it’s all about leadership from the word go – even pupil leadership,” Gail says. “An NQT is leading their class, and if that leadership isn’t developed from the outset, then people who become school leaders are in trouble.” The comment is made in relation to Hammond’s new Teaching School responsibilities, but it also offers an insight into the philosophy behind the school’s own success. Taking on the training of future generations of teachers has had a significant impact on the way the Academy operates. At the helm of the West Hertfordshire Teaching School Partnership together with head of nearby Bovingdon

Academy, Martin Mangan, Gail has spent much of her time in 2012 getting to grips with the challenges posed by turning government policy into reality. But rather than weakening leadership, the necessary delegating of duties has accelerated a process by which it is being disseminated and strengthened throughout the school.

“Because of the way our jobs have changed, we have changed our management structure,” Gail explains. “So, for example, instead of having a deputy head, we now have a head of education. Her role is teaching and learning, which traditionally would be the head’s role.”

“It pre-empted where the school was heading,” Laura says of the change. “Last year when I was deputy head I was already beginning to oversee the curriculum and have the subject leaders come to me. I was on the middle leadership team, but now I’ve been able to step away and oversee things while Kerry runs it instead.”

With Kerry – at the time TP visited a Y6 classroom teacher, but as you read this a full time member of the senior leadership team herself – tasked with supporting a cadre of Phase leaders on the aforementioned middle leadership team, Hammond has no shortage of staff in positions of responsibility. But the key factor seems to be the way in which leaders at all levels are helped to improve themselves and those around them. “We’re given opportunities to take leadership throughout the school,” Kerry says, “and the support we need to do that – for example, the opportunity to shadow other members of staff. I shadowed Laura before taking over management of the middle leadership team and, in turn, I supported Karen [Year 5 teacher Karen Morley] to take on the Phase 3 leadership, which was my previous role. Next year, the new Year 6 teacher will need lots of support, so I’ll be overseeing that. It’s not just, ‘Over to you, you’re on your own’, it’s very much a team working together to support each other.”

Whilst times of transition between roles require a particular focus, Hammond Academy has been set up to continually scaffold staff development, to ensure the existing culture of ‘outstanding’ teaching is continued. “The school is very generous with release times,” Gail explains when asked how this development works in practice. “Teachers get PPA time, leadership time and subject leadership time each week. The middle leadership team, for example, come out of class on a Monday afternoon to meet and monitor the work in their phases. The phase leaders would have been into the individual classes and monitored teaching and learning; they will have done lesson observations, looked at the children’s books and spoken to the children about what they are doing. They then make a judgement about the quality of learning and teaching, feed that into their self-evaluation and discuss it with the members of their phase.

“We feed a lot of our data analysis into that as well,” Kerry adds, “so we’re not just looking at the results of lesson observations. It’s the whole picture.”

“Some teachers are better than others at performing when they’re being watched, some teachers find that quite difficult and don’t do their best lessons when being observed,” Gail agrees. “It comes down to personality, so it’s not just about watching them teach, it’s also about watching what the children are doing and looking at pupil progress.”

Sustained development

Further evidence of support for outstanding teaching comes in the form of Hammond’s approach to CPD, into which, Gail is happy to admit, a lot of time, effort and money has been poured. Interestingly, rather than the traditional sprinkling of pre- or post-holiday Inset days, Hammond’s training takes place over the course of a single week, the impact of which Gail is keen to highlight: “Having that time, where every member of school staff is involved – no matter what their status – means we can buy in some really great facilitators and providers,” she says. “It means that for a percentage of that week, every single person is working on something we think is important. For example, every member of staff, from our newest cleaner to myself and trustees, going back to look again at our learning and teaching policy. We wanted to get across to people that this is a learning environment, that everything we do is about learning – whether it’s answering the telephone or filling in a finance report, or cleaning the toilet, it’s about learning, and we’re all responsible for that.”

Learning, if it wasn’t clear already, is a serious business at Hammond. Children’s attainment in reading, writing, maths, science and ICT is examined in minute detail on a half-termly basis; if the expected standards aren’t reached, questions are asked and remedial measures put in place. With the information filtered up through the middle leadership team to the senior leadership team, the needs of every child in the school are known and being acted upon at the highest levels, at all times.

Unsurprisingly, progress is ‘outstanding’ across the board, but even completely satisfying Ofsted doesn’t seem to be enough. Across the year groups there are examples of children achieving beyond their years, with staff keen to help gifted students reach their full potential. “We adapt the existing frameworks to meet our children’s needs,” Laura says, “so although they’ll say what the expectation is at the end of Year 1, we will always be looking into Year 2 because we want accelerated progress for the children. We don’t want to stick to what the national aim is. We currently have two Reception children who did their Year 1 phonics screening test yesterday, and they scored higher than some of the Year 1 children. We don’t limit children to their age group – weseetheirpotentialandpush them on.”

“Laura brought in the idea of ICT GCSEs,” Gail continues. “We were looking at what was required of children in the National Curriculum and decided our Year 2 children could do it all, so we asked ourselves what we would be doing with them throughout KS2. If we’re looking at children in Year 6 working at Level 8, why aren’t they doing a GCSE? We brought it in and the children have loved it.”

“I had to teach myself the ICT curriculum,” Laura says, “and then the pupils in seven weeks, two afternoons a week. We had 16 pupils take the exam and a girl in Year 5 got the highest score – one mark away from a ‘B’.”

“And we’ve also had three children do maths GCSE too, who have already got a ‘C’ and have now gone back to do the higher paper,” Gail adds.

There is a lot more to say about the way Hammond Academy is going about its business: the way in which the absence of TAs from its KS2 classrooms helps to finance the provision of music and sports coaches to inspire children’s enthusiasm; the way it has adjusted its timetable to remedy children’s low attainment in literacy on arrival at the school, and provide a half-day window on Friday afternoons for further staff development. Gail notes that the school’s switch to Academy status has afforded her and her leadership team the flexibility to deliver ‘outstanding’ teaching whilst meeting the demands that Teaching School status has placed upon them. But without the high expectations, it is doubtful any of the above would have had the same impact on children’s learning. With them, many more students and teachers studying in the local area look certain to benefit.

1. LEADING FROM THE MIDDLE

“The way in which the school is organised and timetabled enables us to do our jobs properly,” phase leader Karen Morley says. “I’ve been to schools where teachers are scared to say what they’re thinking. We don’t have that culture here at all. If there’s an issue a teacher wants to bring up they can discuss it, it gets filtered back up and then comes back down again and is implemented in the classroom.

“In some schools,” she continues, “as a subject leader you’re encouraged to just be in charge of ordering resources, whereas here you’re encouraged to be an expert in your field. You’re encouraged to think ‘This is my baby, how can I make this good for the whole school?’. You talk about your ideas in staff meetings, then someone will try it and feed back to you. You feel that you can make a difference.”

2. BE THE BEST!

How do you find and develop ‘outstanding’ teachers? “It’s important to tell people what they’re walking into,” Gail says. “The majority of people will listen to that. You say things like, ‘Talk to the NQTs and let them tell you how hard they work. Listen to what they tell you’.”

“We do a speed dating set up where interviewees rotate around different groups of people,” Laura continues. “The NQTs are one of the stations they visit to both ask and answer questions. Even when applicants get through to the interview we are reinforcing that we’re an ‘outstanding’ schools and asking them whether they’re prepared to work in such an environment.”

“Teachers have to want to be ‘outstanding’,” Gail concludes. “If they don’t want to be, they won’t get there. We try to give NQTs the chance to come in and work with us for two weeks during the summer. It makes sure that September isn’t as big a shock!”

3. TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

As well as a head of education, Gail has the help of business manager Natalie Dalvarez, whose responsibilities stretch from finance and marketing to managing support staff, HR and health and safety. “I don’t see how a school can afford not to have a business manager,” Natalie says of her role. “How are you going to bring your school on if the headteacher is behind her desk all the time doing business tasks, rather than curriculum tasks?
“My being here has helped Gail to refocus on other aspects of development, such as the Teaching School,” she explains. “A lot of schools use a business manager as an expensive member of their admin team, but that’s not what the role was designed for. It’s about looking at the strategic business of the school, not just finance. It’s about everything other than curriculum and relieving the head of those responsibilities so they can focus.”

4. INSPIRATIONAL ICT

“We’ve been into ICT for a long time,” Gail says of a subject area that is at the heart of Hammond’s curriculum. “When I first came here it was a failing school with very, very poor attainment, and one of the ways we have addressed that is with ICT. Over a number of years we’ve introduced one-to-one ICT across KS2 so that every child has access to a computer all of the time. When we move to the new classrooms, I’m looking at how we will change and adapt this and, from next year, all the children in Year 5 and 6 are going to have iPads. The difference in the accessibility and the speed that you have with iPads is immense – it only takes a few seconds to get online. We could just stay with the same equipment, but that won’t be moving things forward and it won’t be preparing children for the future.”