One of England’s most influential academy trusts has transformed its heavily-cloned turnaround model – moving away “from a central view” of education, and will even temporarily stop taking on the toughest schools.
Outwood Grange Academies Trust was praised by ministers for its track record in improving the toughest schools in the most challenging regions, with strict behaviour policies and prescriptive rules.
The model has been replicated by other trusts. But speaking exclusively to Schools Week, OGAT’s new chief executive Lee Wilson has unveiled a “community-based” approach.
Staying local
He said this will allow the trust to “really understand the challenges individual schools face”.
The trust has been criticised in the past for having a franchise-style education model.
Now, the “big school improvement team” that sat centrally will be broken up and instead be assigned to one of the new 12 clusters of four schools. It means each will have a local specialist director in English, maths, science, languages and humanities.
The directors will spend the fifth day of each week focusing “on priorities for the entire trust”.
Within each of the 12 clusters, schools will also be identified as technology, creative arts, PE, careers and vocational education hubs. They will then support others with “high-quality provision” instead of receiving it “from a central view”.
While the “central aspect will always be there to drive and champion the very best outcomes”, Wilson said the trust will focus more on “building school-to-school support”.
This “creates something that’s much more empowering for the schools themselves”, he added.
The specialists will help their clusters establish their own priorities for focused support.
The new focus on “locality” will be symbolised by the logos of Outwood’s schools. The school’s name and its own imagery will now be the “biggest bit”, instead of the OGAT logo.
“You go through a phase where the nature of what you’re doing – turning around individual schools – comes to a point where you say ‘what does it look like when you’re mature’,” Wilson said.
“Holistically as a trust it’s about shifting your mind from the first 15 years has been about transformation, [and] the next 15 years has to be about the sustainability of the transformation.”
Growth slowdown
The CEO said the trust-wide curriculum would remain, along with consistent teaching and learning models.
“In the past, [central team] people have gone to where across the family [of schools] it’s felt they’re needed most. That’s what you do when you’re in that transformation stage,” he added.
“Now it’s about the equity of resource to make sure we’re always driving improvement but not [be] dependent on a central source.”
OGAT has also entered “a period of considered, careful growth”, Wilson said.
It has no plans to take on the typical turnaround school it is associated with.
He explained: “We can’t right now take a school that needs a high level of fixing because I want to make sure this new way of working is not just words on a page.
“It’s not a never [to growth] because if we have primary schools that feed into our secondaries, we of course would look at that sponsorship.
“But in terms of what we were in the past – there’s a school in special measures, ‘Outwood’s going to sponsor it’ – that’s what we’re going to slow down.”
Another big shift is placing more emphasis on “family and community engagement” within its schools.
Previous chief executive Sir Martyn Oliver, who left the role to run Ofsted, started work on the policy by getting primaries to emulate some of the functions of children’s centres.
Exclusions focus
Wilson has extended this to his secondaries. In each of the 12 clusters, schools will work with local authorities and police to run events on their premises. This will “allow parents to come in for different reasons, so the first call isn’t going to be ‘your child’s suspended today’”.
He said: “In one of our schools we run group therapy and parent counselling. We also have wellbeing events and healthy cooking, where a company sponsors a family having a slow cooker and we take them through a series of recipes for under £5 with the child there.”
Wilson said this has built “stronger relationships with families, particularly the most hard to reach” in his primaries and improved attendance, especially at Outwood Primary Academy Woodlands in Doncaster.
He hopes this will also reduce exclusion rates at his secondaries. Schools Week analysis last year showed the trust’s secondaries excluded twice as many pupils as other schools in some of their regions.
The trust has been criticised – including by Ofsted – over its exclusion and suspension rates.
Critics have said a turnaround model based on high exclusion rates is “not sustainable school improvement”.
Wilson said: “This is not me saying it’s a silver bullet, it will fix everything – it won’t… It will be part of ensuring our schools are really accessible to parents and the community and there’s a shared understanding.”
