If we are truthful, our education system is not always good at fostering sustained improvement. Many schools and trusts may have the capacity for rapid turnaround, but when it comes to sustaining improvement, we all are all too often vulnerable to the flow and eddy of changes in our environment, be it economic pressures, funding, or closer to home, a change in leadership.
And, of course, the very nature of our fast-paced academic year lends itself to a focus on immediate results at the expense of the bigger picture - the urgent rather than the important.
At AET, as a national trust, we are fortunate to have the capacity to unlock network-wide improvement. This is a different way of working: rather than one-to-one school improvement, we want to be more intentional and ambitious, acknowledging that all schools need to improve regardless of their baseline. And also recognising that every school has something they are great at.
With the vision of AET490, we have set out a minimum entitlement to an excellent education. By 2028, we want 90% of pupils in all of our schools achieving headlines measure - Chronological Reading Age (year-on-year), Phonics, Expected Standard in RWM, and Grade 4 in English and Maths GCSEs. This vision is a network-wide ambition that sees us tackling outcome variation within our network, which currently looks like this:
2022 results
The power of a school network is huge, but it has to go so much deeper than surface-level collaboration. We need clear intent in action to have a transformative long-term educational impact. To effectively address the needs of our schools, we must identify and monitor the specific needs and development areas of each of them, so that we can target resources toward improvement accordingly.
So, instead of having a ‘lowest common denominator' approach to improvement, we have introduced a more forensic, structured, and criteria-based framework for network improvement, inspired by the work of Sir David Carter: Quadrant analysis.
Quadrant characteristics offer everyone in our organisation a shared understanding of seven school improvement priorities:
Leadership.
Governance.
Staff development.
Staff morale.
Student attendance.
Student outcomes.
Behaviour.
Some AET schools are exceptional, others need more capacity, and some require some really quite intensive support. In the history of our trust, there hasn’t been a comprehensive improvement strategy for all of our schools. This is the number of schools we have assigned to each quadrant.
With a better understanding of our schools’ weaknesses and strengths through the quadrant framework, we are seeking to pinpoint areas for improvement network-wide, regionally, and peer-to-peer. Segmenting schools into different quadrants allows us to prioritise support where we know that there is an identifiable need.
Each region has its own priorities based on the current position of its schools, and our Regional Education Directors (REDs) are tasked with improving every school in its region by moving it up a quadrant per year. We have established a four-step improvement cycle for REDs to follow:
1. Defining the standard: quadrant categories define a school's position in its improvement journey. The model sets standards for evaluating schools and the broader frameworks for excellence.
2. Knowing how we measure up: schools will be evaluated against the quadrant categories, to determine their position on their improvement journey. Evaluation will identify "gaps" so that the schools can clearly understand how to move to the next quadrant.
3. Doing the work: targeted school improvement support will come from our regional structure, based on the school's quadrant as a framework for improvement work. This helps to calibrate excellence and develop leadership skills and expertise.
4. Reviewing for impact: the impact of the school improvement will be regularly reviewed using data from multiple sources, including the assessment cycle, RED insights, school reviews, and school visits from our CEO and Director of Education. Using these insights, the aim is to iterate for improvement.
As well as structuring improvement work, the quadrant framework allows us to define bespoke sets of interventions for schools depending on where they are in their journey. This sits alongside universal support and incentives.
To illustrate this approach, we will publish a series of blogs from one school in each of the quadrants, exemplifying the differences, but also similarities in the schools’ journey, and the areas that they are focussing on.
But principally, we are seeking to improve our schools through purposeful collaboration. To address the challenge of variation and unleash school improvement at scale, AET has also established network improvement groups to promote collaborative problem-solving. Together, schools can drive improvement with far greater pace and efficiency than if they were working alone, or if all work was driven from a central or regional team in a trust.
Excellence in all of our schools is a moral imperative - we want a sustainable, high-impact process that will take us there. With the quadrant approach and meaningful collaboration, we hope to have developed a strategy that lends to lasting improvement.
But, in line with the values of Project H, we will openly reflect on the success of this over the course of the next few years. We welcome challenge and debate on this approach because open dialogue and constructive challenge are essential to success - we won’t move forward without it.
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Explore the rest of this series to learn more about the improvement priorities of schools at AET. These posts written by leaders from different quadrants - stabilise, repair, improve and sustain - reveal the diversity and similarities of the school improvement journeys within our network.