Please note: Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) is now Lift Schools, this post may reference the name of the trust at time of posting.
When I was recently appointed as Secondary Regional Education Director for the Midlands, what excited me most was that a national academy trust held ‘localism’ as such a key tenet of its educational approach. Some of those factors included our overarching vision, a sense of ambition and aspiration for our staff and our students, AET490, and a commitment to contribute to ‘system generosity’, Project H.
Being born in Birmingham and residing in Staffordshire, I feel a real attachment to the schools in our Secondary Midlands Region, which comprises four schools between the two areas.
Before my time at AET, I was the Principal of Nishkam High School in Birmingham. The school’s cohorts were drawn from areas of social deprivation that are very similar to those in Tamworth, Castle Vale, and Quinton. A key driver of my work, then and now, is providing students with an understanding of the virtues that make us good people. This is harmonious with AET's values for our people to ‘be big hearted’, ‘be unusually brave’ and ‘push the limits’.
As the Secondary Regional Education Director, I am excited about the opportunity to empower our schools, leaders, teachers, and pupils to aspire for excellence through the lens of these virtues as well as academic success.
In so doing, we believe that our AET students can then go on to the next step of their journey as positive citizens who serve their families and their communities well. With these virtues serving as guiding principles in educational practices, fostering a positive and ethical learning environment, we can nurture character while also empowering our students to achieve academic excellence.
My own prior experience of leading a high-performing school that delivered Progress 8 scores of +1.0 with no disadvantage gap for vulnerable students has given me a clear roadmap of what excellence looks like.
But my work now is to look at scalable solutions for the challenges that permeate across all of our Midlands schools - attendance, the disadvantage gap, and post-Covid recovery are the three that spring to mind.
As important, though, is celebrating the accomplishments of everyone across our schools - adults and children - who are so heavily invested in achieving excellence from both personal and academic perspectives.
I have always regarded it a privilege to visit other schools, and my first few months in the post have involved investing time and thought in developing an even better understanding of all of the people working at Greenwood Academy, The Rawlett School, Tamworth Enterprise College, and Four Dwellings Academy.
Having knowledge of our schools and knowing our schools are different propositions, though. As Regional Education Directors, we are really clear about the pivotal importance of ‘localism’ - it opens up opportunities for everyone across all of our schools to have a voice.
Those narratives could include, for example, sharing the political strands that entwine Robert Peel and our local MP for the region; the geographical journey of the River Trent that wends its way from tributaries that include our local rivers, the Peel and the Tame; the much longer historical timelines that stretch back to life in Saxon Tamworth and come all the way forward to encompass the growth of Birmingham and the development of Quinton and Castle Vale.
These school experiences can provide a sense of place and belonging, shine a light on our shared heritage, and provide powerful memories that will remain long after our students have left our schools. We would all benefit from being reminded about our place in our local and regional area; our children should know, too, about their place in a national context and, indeed, the world.
I am deeply engaged in finding ways to activate the collective capacity present in the Midlands, allowing us to share powerful narratives focused on these themes and positively impacting the children in our schools. But I am sure that others will have even better ideas!
I look forward to working across our four schools and identifying, both within the statutory requirements of the national curriculum and beyond the classroom, what localism might look like in the Midlands Region.
Using our regional model, that is precisely what AET should serve to do: use the strength of a national network to support local identity and offer the excellent all-around education that our children richly deserve.
This is part of a series that takes an honest look at the priorities of each of the five regions at AET.
For more on our priorities in the Midlands, Ruth Murad, Primary Regional Education Director, sheds light on the importance of culture for school improvement.
As an introduction for this series, Rebecca Boomer-Clark, AET CEO, explains why we have revised our operating model and established five distinct regions.
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