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Challenge in the cities

A year after the City Challenge programme was expanded into the Black Country and Greater Manchester, Dorothy Lepwkowska looks at its impact on school leadership.

If someone had said to me that we are going to work in creative collaboration with another school, I would not have considered pairing us up with a secondary like Canon Slade, because we are just so different.”

Phil Fitzpatrick took over as headteacher of Parklands High School, in Manchester, two years ago. The secondary had had five heads in six years and was on a notice to improve. In March, this year, Ofsted observed that 100 per cent of teaching was now satisfactory and three-quarters was good or outstanding, and the notice was withdrawn.

One of the main reasons for the school’s turn-around has been its involvement in the Greater Manchester Challenge Leadership Strategy, one of two spin-offs from the successful London City Challenge.

The scheme pairs up headteachers, from neighbouring local authorities or within the same one in a partnership that is based on mutual support, but where one – the headteacher from the higher-achieving school – plays the role of “critical friend”.

“I was not looking for someone to save us, but I wanted to see what we could learn from Canon Slade,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.

“We started from the premise of equality and how we could help each other so that we both offer the best we possibly can for our pupils. The scheme challenges the norms of collaboration, but in our case it has worked.”

The partnership began in September 2008, with the heads jointly agreeing a strategic plan of support. “The first thing we needed to establish was that neither me nor my school were the font of all knowledge and that our relationship was a quid pro quo,” Philip Williamson, head of Canon Slade, in Bolton and the Local Leader of Education (LLE), said. “Even though we are on different rungs of the attainment ladder, there is no room for any school to be complacent and we are all, hopefully, on a trajectory of improvement.

“When the partnership began, Phil had already brought about a lot of improvements and created a calm and purposeful environment, with a redesigned curriculum to meet pupils’ needs. But we both recognised that more still needed to be done.”

Heads of department at Canon Slade acted as peer mentors to less experienced staff at Parklands, working together on aspects such as curriculum planning, strategies for raising standards and the use of data and assessment.

One of Canon Slade’s deputy heads helped senior leaders at Parklands to use student attainment data to raise achievement.

But the relationship was not all one-sided. Parklands has a strong policy on inclusion, and teachers from Canon Slade observed how the school used teaching assistants as part of pastoral care to meet pupils’ emotional development.

“There might be an assumption that pupils at Canon Slade are all fine because they are high achievers, but they are still children with all the problems and difficulties that childhood brings,” Mr Fitzgerald said.

“As a school, they still have to ensure that every child matters.” The literacy co-ordinator at Canon Slade has also picked up ideas from Parklands’ special needs department on raising literacy standards among some of its least academically able pupils.

“The problems of Greater Manchester include a lack of aspiration and high unemployment,” Mr Williamson said. “In some homes, children heading to school are the only ones in their family who have a reason to get up in the morning. Schools therefore need to offer a quality of education that such youngsters want to buy into. Parklands has made enormous progress on this front.”

Eighty miles down the M6, in the West Midlands, similar models of school partnership are developing under the Black Country Challenge Leadership Strategy, made up of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton local authorities.

Similarly modelled on the experience of London, the scheme is bringing huge benefits to schools. For Tony James, head of Holyhead Primary School, in Wednesbury (Sandwell LEA), it has opened up new perspectives on old problems.

He took over the school in April 2005, when it was expected to go into special measures, but actually got a notice to improve. Today, it is deemed by Ofsted to be a good school with some outstanding features.

“When I arrived there was a lot of underachievement, with low SATs results, very little devolved leadership, and the quality of teaching was not what it should be,” Tony said.

The school has been partnered with Bloxwich CE Primary School, in Walsall, where the headteacher and LLE, Martyn Blunt, is also the Primary Director of the Black Country Challenge.

“The scheme offers the opportunity for heads to do it for themselves, rather than being part of a topdown approach,” said Martyn. “It is school leaders working beyond their own institutions for the greater good and improvement of the whole school system.

“The partnerships reflect the growing sense of moral duty and purpose among heads to support one another.”

The Black Country faces a school leadership challenge within the next five years. Up to half of all heads are due to retire and better succession planning is needed to develop new leaders.

“The LLE system allows us to work together to improve the system rather than asking schools to try this or that by initiative overload,” Martyn added.

Bloxwich has helped Holyhead to redesign its management models, particularly among middle managers. Staff now have a greater understanding of their roles through the concept of distributed leadership and moving leadership roles, which go beyond the remit of the senior leadership team.

“The programme has given a small school like ours the chance to work with one in a different authority, where things are done very differently,” Tony James said. “It was useful to have someone look at what we were doing with fresh eyes and a different perspective.

“Working with neighbouring schools in the same authority can be quite insular, and we have benefited from that outside view and perspective.

“The fact that Martyn’s school was deemed to be outstanding also helped to reassure me that much of what we were already doing was on the right track, because we were tackling problems in similar ways.”

Tony added: “My senior staff have benefited particularly from the City Challenge scheme because they have reconsidered their roles within the school.

“It has given them the confidence to tackle things they might not otherwise have had the confidence to do.”

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