As we move toward high performance at scale AET is committed to delivering sustainable excellence in every classroom of our 57 schools. At the secondary level, the phase that I oversee, we have some pretty hefty targets representing our ambition.
By 2028, we want 90% of our children to achieve at least grade 4 in English and Maths GCSEs. That's a significant 30% increase from our 2022 results over the summer.
This target is just one within our AET490 ambitions - the others relate to phonics, RWM and expected chronological reading age.
To achieve these goals we need to turn the network inside out. Turning the network inside out is not just a mantra at AET, it’s our commitment to establishing excellence through a culture which draws from a wide range of expertise and understanding.
AET 490 is not an individual pursuit or a competition - it's a team effort. Our network is our engine. And it’s powered by deep and sustained collaboration.
Over the past year - the first year of our journey to sustainable excellence - we developed structures that will enable a network focus to improve outcomes for the 33,000+ students attending an AET school.
Network groups of principals who have strategic responsibility for critical areas of school improvement are at the heart of this design. These network groups serve as an open forum to identify, find and share sustainable solutions to common challenges.
Allowing leaders to take responsibility for the implementation of different areas of our education strategy, we plan to turn their collective expertise into collective action. They will set the expectations and co-produce the necessary behaviours to reach AET490.
Ours is an academy trust with big ambitions. But while we have our sights firmly fixed on our 2028 aims we still have an immense and immediate duty to the cohorts who will take their exams in the coming years. Year-on-year, every step should accumulate to a gigantic leap to AET490.
One of the vital network groups we established over the past year is our raising achievement group, which has a clear focus on boosting outcomes for pupils in exam years - Year 6 and Year 11.
The scale and variance in the challenge across our trust are huge, from Clacton Coastal Academy in Essex with an average grade on entry of 100.7 to Richmond Park Academy in London with an average grade of 106.7.
Variance in performance is found even in schools with the same grade on entry. In 2022, both Bexleyheath Academy and New Forest Academy had an average grade on entry of 102.4 but the progress 8 variance was 0.7, with Bexleyheath Academy achieving 0.05 and New Forest Academy -0.65.
Last year across the trust 60% of our Year 11 cohort secured a 4+ attainment score in English and Maths. This means that 1,436 students did not.
Stark numbers.
But what is clear from the sharing of best practice across the network is that each academy has a huge amount to offer - regardless of circumstance or context.
At our most recent Principal’s Meeting, we gathered all our school and network leaders together. We separated them into groups by phase to discuss what raising achievement should look like in the context of both the unique and shared challenges of their schools.
We have distilled six essential components for a raising achievement strategy, which are:
Curriculum
Intervention
Quality First teaching
Motivation and attitude
Monitoring and accountability
Exam management
Our raising achievement group is also charged with closing gaps for disadvantaged pupils in these year groups, which, sadly, we know is too prominent in our trust. Both within schools and between.
Last summer’s results show that our disadvantage gap is three per cent smaller than the national average. But there is something morally uncomfortable about accepting national standards as our benchmark.
If we are serious in our commitment to provide an equitable and fair education with every child receiving their entitlement to an excellent education, then we have to ensure that those students who meet the pupil premium criteria achieve as well as those who do not.
And it's a real challenge for our trust, especially so, given the local contexts we work in.
Seventeen of our twenty-one secondary schools have free school meal-eligible cohorts above the national average. It’s all too easy to find yourself succumbing to the clear link between disadvantage and underachievement and to point to low performance as a direct result of the challenges within our most underserved communities.
What's much harder - yet absolutely essential - is redirecting our attention to what really matters: a lot has to change across our network. The nature of our local contexts is something we cannot control; we can only focus on ensuring that educational improvement is constant.
And network groups should help principals to accelerate progress simultaneously across our schools at a far greater pace and efficiency than if they were working alone.
The disadvantage gap that currently exists is a gap in provision. We must acknowledge that, own it, and then build so we can do better for this current cohort of pupils and for future cohorts.
And this can’t be about quick fixes either - however tempting they might be. We plan to do this the right way, with no shortcuts. A sustainable approach rooted in a long-term commitment to deliver educational excellence.
Our ambition is therefore a modest one this year. Primarily, we want to see all academies using the networks as a live and collaborative best practice resource for the benefit of our students.
If we get our architecture for collaboration right, then we believe 2022 outcomes should improve to 65% 4+ in 2023.
At our most recent meeting we reflected on a number of key aspects of school leadership to drive these improvements:
Attendance is king. Across our trust last year there was a clear link between attendance and academic success. Every child in the trust who attended over 95% of their time in year 11 alone secured a positive progress 8 score.
Academy Improvement Planning must extend beyond one year. To secure sustainable success, leaders need to plan coherently in two-year improvement cycles to retain fidelity to the mission.
All leaders need to forensically understand the profile of Year 7. To remove learning barriers for every student and to promote engagement.
Raising achievement for pupils, therefore, ensuring that no child goes unnoticed, requires doing the basics brilliantly in every one of our settings. Every incremental improvement should be to the benefit of our children - with AET490 as the end goal.
For a nationwide trust of our scale, we need all our schools to work together through a coordinated effort to secure these outcomes. This must come from relentless and meaningful collaboration so that every school is moving in the same forward direction.
In part two of this series, Craig Nicholson, Regional Education Director, reveals what raising achievement through collaboration looks like in practice at the primary phase.
In the final instalment, Gareth Howells, Executive Principal of Newlands Academy, shines a light on what achievement looks like for pupils in his special school and across AET.
Comments