Mission: possible

Teaching schools officially started work at the beginning of September. Nick Bannister spoke to two teaching school pioneers and finds that while the stakes are high, ambitions are even higher.

The urgent theme tune from the vintage TV series Mission: Impossible thumped out as heads from England’s first teaching schools settled in their conference room seats.

The heads – 120 in all – were gathered at the National College’s Learning and Conference Centre, Nottingham, in early September for an induction event that marked the official start of their work as teaching schools.

Anyone who didn’t get the obviously jokey reference and instead saw it as a terrible foreboding should probably have turned on their heels and sprinted back to the taxi rank.

But no one did, and Andy Buck, a former London headteacher who now leads for the College on this major new policy initiative, was quick to dismiss any concerns that there might have been about the feasibility of the teaching school mission.

“It’s felt a little like mission impossible but we’re here and it’s a great confirmation of the concept of teaching schools that we’ve got this far,” he told delegates.

Like a typical Mission: Impossible plotline, the stakes for teaching schools are high. The initiative was announced in the November 2010 education white paper, which envisaged a network of the best schools leading on the professional development of leaders and teachers in a local alliance of schools.

The emphasis is on the profession leading the profession in an endeavour open to all schools – a big next step in an approach that has been several years in the development and in which the College and its partners have played no small role.

The College has over the last four years developed a range of initiatives to put schools in the driving seat on leadership development. The national leader of education (NLE) and local leader of education (LLE) schemes, in which the best heads and their leadership teams moor alongside struggling schools, sharing their leadership expertise and support to help them to improve quickly, are a good example. Another is the Middle Leadership Development Programme (MLDP), which sees clusters of schools work together to deliver development for aspiring senior leaders.

The significance of teaching schools wasn’t lost on the academic David Hargreaves, who described them as the "critical event" in the creation of the truly self improving school system envisaged in last November’s schools white paper.

He said that teaching schools could herald in the first school system in the world which was based on "peer challenge" where schools held each other to account.

Teaching school leaders now needed to share a practical theory of the case of a self improving system, he said. “Most other systems around the world do not even know exactly how they are successful. I only have a hypothesis of the case. It’s down to you, the pioneers, to provide the theory.”

Self improvement was a strong theme of education secretary Michael Gove’s speech to the teaching schools leaders the evening before. “The biggest names in contemporary education, the most influential leaders, the bravest reformers are now, overwhelmingly, in the state sector, not the private,” he told leaders.

“So when people ask me the question – how will you improve our state schools - I always answer: ‘By relying on our state schools…and, specifically, by relying on you in this room.’”

Mead Community Primary School in Wiltshire is one of the first cohort of teaching schools. For headteacher Lyssy Bolton and colleagues, teaching school status will be a natural development of what they have been doing for some time.

The school is part of the Trowbridge Area Schools Collaborative (TASC) which comprises 22 secondary, primary and special schools in Wiltshire’s county town and its surrounding villages. Their aim is to work together to “inspire, challenge and engage learners” and the cluster will form the core of the teaching school alliance that Lyssy’s school will lead.

“We have a lot of experience of school-to-school work and that has involved a real mixed economy of work,” Lyssy said. “We have been partnering schools as a national support school, mooring alongside other schools to help them improve, and we also amalgamated with a school which was in special measures and moved it to outstanding in two years.”

In one scheme TASC is using PE to raise children’s engagement across the cluster.

“This has really worked for challenging classes where the children have not been working very well together and find it difficult to stay on task.

“PE of course has a strong physical element, promoting fitness, agility, balance and co-ordination, but it also has personal, social and cognitive elements, requiring reasoning and creativity. By personalising these pupils’ PE curriculum and giving them targets we’ve raised their motivation and engagement and helped them to access the curriculum,” said Lyssy.

”The whole cluster bought into this. Teaching schools status will give us the tools, the capacity and access to right people to evaluate this approach and develop it further,” she added.

The energy and innovation of Mead’s external work is matched internally. Developing enough leaders for the future will be a key job for teaching schools – and it’s a responsibility that has long been at the core of Mead. The school gives every member of staff, including recently qualified teachers and teaching assistants, a leadership responsibility covering curriculum, community and team areas which is enshrined in their job descriptions. Senior leaders are each responsible for a key aspect of leadership development across the school and a school governor is attached to them with the role of monitoring progress and outcomes.

The result is real leadership development, said Lyssy. “Leadership is so transferable in our school now. If a colleagues changes roles or the school needs them to move roles they just slot straight in.”

For Helen Storey, headteacher at Silverdale School in Sheffield, teaching school status will be a way of building on existing strong partnerships with local schools – and to extend their reach.

The 11-18 comprehensive is one of a number of teaching schools which will join with another to lead their alliance as a ‘job share’. In this case Silverdale will partner with Birley Spa Community Primary School, on the opposite side of Sheffield.

“This approach gives us more capacity and more ideas,” said Helen. “This makes it possible for us to communicate and have a dynamic relationship with many groups of schools around the city.

“We are both really encouraged by what has happened so far. It’s really exciting and there are lots of possibilities.”

Partnership working is part of the culture at Silverdale. Helen and her team have a track record of forming support partnerships with other secondary schools as part of her LLE designation.

And the school is at the centre of a family of schools made up of its feeder primaries.  Silverdale’s key role in encouraging language learning in its feeder primaries is, says Helen, a good example of the sort of work expected of the SLEs that all teaching schools will be expected to designate and match to local schools needing support..

“We are a language college and we have member of staff who works in our feeder primaries doing languages along with an advanced skills teacher working more broadly across the city in primary languages,” she said.

Silverdale also has a strong track record in the kinds of research based internal professional development that teaching schools are expected to promote. “We have tried to be quite imaginative in how we develop our own practices within our school. We do a lot of inquiry based training where our middle leaders carry out inquiry visits into an aspect of practice of their department, key stage or team.  

“Making it necessary for middle leaders to investigate practice on a regular basis is part of a quality assurance approach and it provides a model for research and development that can then move outstanding practice around the school.

“We are beginning to get the evidence that our approach is making a positive impact on the variation in performance between subjects so we are clearer about the reasons why this happening and that knowledge feeds into our school improvement planning. It adds more rigour to our quality measures.”

While 2011-12 is being seen as a development year when schools will work with the College to share, learn, develop and refine the detail of teaching school operation, teaching school leaders are already looking to the future and the potential impact of the programme.

Leaders attending the induction event wanted to know what effect teaching schools might have had on the system by 2015.  National College Deputy Chief Executive Toby Salt hoped that by then teaching school alliances would be affecting the quality and number of qualified teachers, quality of continuing professional development, and raising standards in the schools they supported.

“On a deeper level, we want to see a significant shift from what the focus of responsibility for standards is. By 2015 we want to see that the teaching profession is leading the teaching profession,” he told delegates.

Stephen Hillier, Chief Executive of the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), which is leading the teaching schools work with the College, echoed those ambitions. “It is a characteristic of every great profession that they do take charge of training each new generation and in the schools system you are very involved in that but there is even more you can do to lead that,” he said.

There will be challenges. The issue of persuading governors that the alliance approach was good for all schools involved was one, said National College Chief Executive Steve Munby.

”Governing bodies can be inward looking. They sometimes regard it as not necessary for a school to look outwards,” he said.

“We have to have much more robust challenge where schools are not performing well and governing bodies that understand the benefits of letting school leaders and teachers work beyond their own school. I do think that teaching school alliances, federations and chains are starting to shift that. There are really good examples of governance across more than one school.

“The good thing is that the National College has for the first time been given the role to work with chairs of governors.”

The Mission: Impossible reference may have raised a wry smile on the faces of many teaching school leaders, but some heads old enough to remember a plotline from the 1960s drama would have known that the goodies usually triumphed over their adversaries through the intelligent application of their skills and resources.

“This is really difficult to do because it is such complex stuff,” said Andy Buck. “We are going to need to work together, with our role enabling schools to take the lead.

“It is important that we keep learning lessons and we forgive each other when we make mistakes.

”The reason teaching schools won’t be mission impossible is because we have been listening to what you have been saying to us all along.”

For Lyssy Bolton and her colleagues teaching schools is an opportunity that they can’t wait to exploit.

“My senior team are really excited because they can see some real opportunities to be at the cutting edge of really good practice, refine and evaluate what we are doing and share it with other schools,” she said.

“This is a really inspiring agenda and a logical next step.”