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Obsessing over school improvement at scale is a distraction

I consider myself lucky. I have worked in education for over 30 years, more than 20 of those in the field of school improvement at scale – and I am not the only one! This area is not new; nor is it not well understood. You could be forgiven for thinking it was if you only listened to some voices.

Even more irksome to me is that it can sometimes feel, in the trust sector particularly, that school improvement at scale is more important, more sexy, more worthy of blogging about or ‘codifying’, than school improvement in a school.

I can bore you to death about how we work at scale at Greenwood Academies Trust. I think we are pretty good at it. We have a range of carefully developed systems, processes, activities and information, all underpinned by a large programme of professional learning and collaborative networks, and our implementation is efficient and precise.

We also do the boring but helpful slog in the background like interpreting the latest tome from our regulator or inspectorate. Our trust-level activities are valued (mostly), impactful and constantly evolving.

But this is all value-added, icing-on-the-cake’ stuff. The really, really important element is what happens in each academy.

This is what matters to children and to their families. What we do because we can work at scale does not trump ensuring that we effectively support, enable and challenge each academy to be the best they can be.

This is the big-ticket item. We can have the prettiest dashboards and offer cool CPD opportunities, but if individual schools are struggling, we don’t have the balance right.

And while that sounds obvious, I think there is a challenge lurking here when working at scale. You see, I don’t think the whole process of school improvement can be fully codified.

We can describe how to develop a strong curriculum and a high-quality, inclusive approach to teaching and learning.

We can explain how to develop systems and processes and how ‘other schools have done it’.

We can have a raft of criteria that tell us how good provision is and bags of experience of different crises so we can calmly advise about the oft-obscure things that happen on Friday afternoons.

It’s not quite ‘voodoo’ – but there is no exact blueprint

But the reality is that ‘next steps’ to get ‘there’ are different for every school, every day. Decisions about priorities, ways to effectively implement new approaches, the right people to lead strategies are all nuanced around each individual school’s ecosystem.

Add into the mix that even the best designed improvement strategy has to adapt when it meets ever-changing reality. Staff leave and new staff arrive. They have illnesses. They suffer tragedies. Pupil and family cohorts change. Their needs change.

And all of this means that improvement at the school level isn’t wholly codifiable. It’s not quite ‘voodoo’ – probably equal parts knowledge of the school, of human behaviour and of school improvement practice – but there is no exact blueprint.

Proper, sustainable school improvement reflects this. It is bespoke and requires agile resourcing. And it absolutely can be responsive and pragmatic while remaining ambitious and pacey.

Reflecting on the different schools that have been transformed within our trust, while what has been done overall has been reasonably similar, how it was done has been unique each time because of the people.

I think trust leaders in particular need to remember this. Let’s not fall into the trap that some public services have of focusing on ‘at scale’ processes to the detriment of delivery to individuals and by individuals.

It’s fine to be obsessed with ‘school improvement at scale’. But as a sector we must be just as obsessed with the nuanced, specialised, complex, human world of school improvement at a school-level and the people who deliver it.

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