Please note: Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) is now Lift Schools, this post may reference the name of the trust at time of posting.
In part one of this three part blog series, we explored our intent to re-calibrate around the vision of sustainable excellence. In the second part, Claire Heald, Director of Education, talks about the role of the leader in this mission.
If you have read part one of this three-part series, you will know that AET is embarking on something that has never been achieved in education before - a five year journey that will see every one of our schools purposefully align around a drive to deliver sustainable excellence by 2028.
We’re asking our schools to achieve some big and bold targets.
Through AET 490, our ambition is for 90% of our children to read at least at their chronological reading age, pass the phonics check, achieve the expected standard in RWM at Key Stage 2, and achieve grade 4 or above in English and maths GCSEs.
Regular attendance will be a key factor in reaching these outcomes. Our mindset shapes our actions and limits, which is why we’re asking all of our schools to target a 100% attendance rate from the start of the next academic year in September.
These figures aren’t just numbers on a page; they are the levels of ambition that we believe we have a duty to meet. This is about all of our pupils achieving their potential and being set up for life, enabling agency and choice.
As a trust, we’re acutely aware of the challenges we face on our journey. The harsh reality is that none of our schools have met these standards yet, let alone 57.
We must therefore do things differently. We need to deliberately work through how we gear up our day-to-day work to deliver sustainable excellence.
That means a renewed focus for and on school leaders.
At our most recent principals’ conference Mark Gregory, Director of Professional Development at ARK, introduced the fundamentals, theory and frameworks of instructional leadership.
Instructional leadership represents a new way of working for many of our principals. It requires school leaders to directly influence the quality of teaching in their settings: to be personally responsible for impact and improvement.
As true at AET as it would be anywhere else, instructional leaders are necessary for managing the culture and expertise of teaching. And crucially, the interplay between both.
Teachers need precise and candid feedback in an environment where they feel supported and valued, which requires a commitment from our leaders to be introspective about the quality of their school’s culture - so that they can strengthen teaching quality through honest and open dialogue.
One of the questions I asked principals to reflect on at the conference was ‘How much time do you spend actually directly improving teaching?’ It’s something our leaders need to think hard about and act on.
As our CEO, Becks Boomer-Clark, wrote in part one of this blog series, as we embark on an approach toward sustainable excellence a network minded approach across our trust is absolutely essential. Regardless of whether we’re focussing on teaching quality or the curriculum, our capacity comes from leveraging the power and scale of the expertise within our group of schools.
In the case of leadership, this requires principals to truly consider what it means to be a leader within one of the biggest MATs in the country.
At our conference, I set out some ways that we might approach that.
Firstly, as I’ve already mentioned, we need to get culture right. To borrow words from John C Maxwell. ‘People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care’.
Second, our leaders at AET need to have high levels of domain specific expertise. In teaching for example. Where they do not yet have the knowledge they need, they must approach their own development with high levels of intent. And we will support our leaders to do this.
Next, our leaders need to challenge the idea of ‘the possible’, redefining standards and assumptions. Alongside this, we must be honest and humble: when we do not have the answers, when standards are not good enough, when we get something wrong.
In addition, leaders need to know that schools are complex and that to achieve sustainable excellence we will need to embrace and understand that complexity. Finally, leaders must commit to the mantra that we are only as good as our weakest school, embracing alignment and taking collective responsibility. Our principals will need to work together while being conscious that the organisational aim of sustainable excellence is more important than any innate, competitive desire to be an outlier.
With these significant ambitions for all of our schools, it is essential that support structures are accessible to equip them with the expertise and capacity to reach these extraordinary heights. Our central trust team and regional education directors will be critical, providing training and support to our school leaders.
With our commitment to sustainable excellence we’ve undoubtedly raised the bar on standards. We need to do things differently, but for us that also means doing things together - which has not always been the case in the past. And as we embark on our mission to sustainable excellence, we’re eager to be a learning organisation which must come from our collective purpose.
Comentários