Michelle Hughes, Executive Principal of Tendring Technology College, shares insights into the journey of a 'stabilise' school. This is the first in a series of blogs from school leaders in each quadrant of AET’s network improvement framework.
Tendring Technology College (TTC) has an interesting history. Not long ago, this school was the pride of Frinton-On-Sea, a coastal town in Essex. Standards were well above the national average, and students’ attitudes to learning reflected in positive destinations.
But, after a series of questionable decisions and restructurings over the years, the school descended into near chaos. In November 2021, Ofsted identified that safeguarding was ineffective for pupils, especially those who are different or more vulnerable. Collectively, we let the pupils and our community down.
The school was in disarray. Kids set the culture and made the rules. It was like Peter Pan and the lost boys.
We are now in the process of stabilising the school. Last term, we started with behaviour and culture. Re-establishing an environment for learning behaviours. Creating an environment that allows us to have positive interactions with students.
And we have improved rapidly in a short space of time. You can see our staff's impact as soon as you walk through the door: more pupils say good morning, fewer students demonstrate challenging behaviour, and incidents are down.
Still, with rapid improvement, you can never be sure that areas of provision are secure. An area of weakness in a school as fragile as ours can have a domino effect elsewhere. We constantly scrutinise every aspect of our school culture - especially due to our context.
Schools in coastal communities come with unique challenges, and in many ways, our school's downfall over the years has mirrored the decline in the local context. The community has suffered from hard-felt deprivation.
We can control the parameters within the school, but the forces of coastal insulation can seep from the home life into our school. Pupils know how to behave at school now, but things can change when they enter the community.
Our improvement journey is, therefore, much more than controlling the school environment; working with our parents and the wider community to bring them with us is critical, and that will take time. Though, from a standing start, we are beginning to make small positive strides in this regard. I have listened to hundreds of parents to understand, apologise, and tell them that things will change - but have also given no prevarication that this will happen overnight.
Now that we have made strides in our behaviour and culture, this term, our attention is geared toward teaching and learning. The primary focus is returning to the basics of excellent practice. This may not be the most exciting approach, but innovation has no place in a school like ours - for now, at least.
Some teachers have either never known or forgotten what excellence in teaching looks like. So, deliberate practice has been an essential tool in our arsenal.
Over the past term, our senior leaders have spent around 40% of their time on the floor observing lessons and providing non-judgmental live coaching focussed on improvement. In coaching, we have been explicit about spotlighting the parts of the school that are a success for our staff to see. This work is very much ongoing. We repeat all our routines for students and staff at the start of each half-term.
But stabilising a school like TTC requires far more than a mechanical fix. An emotional blockage needs to be removed for everyone to move forward. With so much needing to change for all of our students to have the opportunity to succeed, it can be tempting to take a heavy-handed approach with staff. Yet, staff morale was at an all-time low due to change fatigue.
As leaders, we constantly look for ways to improve and create a culture of accountability around the basics. Accountability is not pointing fingers and placing blame; it's about creating an environment where everyone works towards a common goal and is supported for their actions.
We’ve created ‘how we’ handbooks so that everyone understands what it means to be a member of our school community, whether you are a student, a teacher, a member of support staff or a senior leader, to ensure consistency in expectations at every level.
We’re starting to create a more common identity which is particularly important at TTC because we are a turnaround school with some distinct characteristics.
As well as being one of the largest schools in local authority, we also have a split site which has added to the complexity of our turnaround effort. This isn’t a typical split site, syphoned one road down the middle of the campus; the school's lower and upper sites are separated by 4½ miles. Staff and parents have traditionally discussed the two different campuses as two different schools.
Turnaround would have been hard enough with a single site, but the challenge has been immense with a split site of this scale.
No stone can be left unturned in a school like TTC. Stabilising a school is ceaseless. There are no days off.
Unapologetically, even though we may be in special measures still, our vision is to be the best school in Essex. Not because we believe education is a competition but because it is an ambitious, tangible goal for our staff. A localised vision for all of us. These children and this community deserve a school they can be proud of once again.
**
Explore the rest of this series to learn more about the improvement priorities of schools at AET. Written by leaders from different quadrants - stabilise, repair, improve and sustain - of the trust's network improvement model, this series reveals the diversity and similarities of school improvement journeys.