School-to-school support: a recipe for success?

The best school leaders and their teams will carry more responsibility for school improvement in the vision of the new Schools White Paper. But what approaches lie behind successful school-to-school partnerships? Nick Bannister finds out.

Headteacher Peter Maunder is very clear about the reasons why he spends a lot of his time supporting other schools to improve.

“Rather than being in competition with the school down the road why not work together?” he says.

“As a head you want to do the very best for your pupils, but that doesn’t have to be at the expense of the children down the road. In any society that’s not particularly helpful.

“It also keeps all my teachers at the cutting edge. It keeps them at the top of their game.”

For half the week he’s in school, leading the outstanding Oldway Primary School in Paignton, Devon. For the rest of the week he heads up school leadership development for Torbay Schools’ Improvement Partnership.

He’s also a national leader of education (NLE) who, with his leadership colleagues at Oldway – designated a national support school (NSS) – has helped several underperforming schools in the Torbay area to rapidly improve.

Peter Maunder is one of a growing band of leaders who are taking the reins of school improvement away from the centre and leading it for themselves.

It’s an approach enthusiastically endorsed in the government’s new Schools White Paper, unveiled in November (see Backgrounder: rise of the NLEs). As well as placing a lot of emphasis on the best schools leading school improvement through initiatives such as teaching schools – which will be led by headteachers who meet NLE criteria or who are already NLEs – it also sees an expanded role for the sort of school-to-school support that Peter and his colleagues are already doing.

It appears to be a simple process. Talented head and team pull alongside a struggling school and use their leadership expertise and tried and tested approaches to support their counterparts, helping them rapidly improve the school.

“As a head you want to do the very best for your pupils, but that doesn’t have to be at the expense of the children down the road.”

A simple process because it is, says Shropshire primary headteacher Ian Nurser. He’s head of the outstanding 400-pupil St Peter’s Primary School in Wem in the rural north of the county and an NLE with an impressive track record of helping schools.

“It’s important that people understand what the basics and the priorities are,” he says. “Focus on one or two main priorities and get some quick wins is my approach.

“Often heads feel that there are too many priorities… too often teachers try to please too many people. But with that you often can’t see the wood for the trees. I hope that I can come in and help to bring focus.”

But trust needs to come first before the process of stripping things down to key priorities begins, says Ian.

“The old approach of getting experts and subject specialists in from outside doesn’t always work,” he says. “That’s about imposing solutions from the outside without input and ideas – and support – from within. Teachers don’t like being done to. They are professionals and you need to partner them and help them find their own solutions to a situation.

“You need to establish this professional trust. You need to ask them where they want to be,” he says. “Everyone knows what their job is. All heads and teachers want is the best for their children.”

Ian has put this philosophy into practice in his work as an NLE supporting several struggling schools. One was Cleobury Mortimer Primary in south Shropshire. Headteacher Bavita Williams joined the school after a very successful headship in Bridgenorth, but it was clear soon after she started the post that the school was struggling. An Ofsted report confirmed her fears.

“We were teetering on the edge of being put into category,” says Bavita, who sought out Ian’s help after she had learned about his success supporting another school in the local press. “I thought that I was not going to wait until we were served with a notice to improve. It was a case of prevention rather than waiting to respond to a crisis.”

Ian and his team met with Bavita and her colleagues for an initial conversation about concerns and aims and then there was a customary look at data. “It usually only ever raises more questions than answers,” says Ian, “but it was clear that Key Stage 2 progress was too slow."

The basic approach agreed by Ian and Bavita was to get conversations going – on every level. “My deputy head spoke to Bavita’s deputy head,” says Ian. “My teachers spoke to their teachers… I spoke to Bavita. There was a sense that we were all working on this and that it wasn’t something that just comes down from the leadership.”

“Teachers don’t like being done to. They are professionals and you need to partner them and help them find their own solutions to a situation.”

“It’s vital to the partnership approach because it gives all my staff an outside perspective and a means of comparing their role to their peers in other schools, and vice versa.”

The process also helps his school strengthen its own leadership capacity. Ian’s deputy head, Fiona Russell, now deputises for Ian on the two days a week he works as an associate for the National College. “She runs the school on a day-to-day basis. I’m in danger of being made obsolete,” he jokes.

The school has had its best results yet and an Ofsted leadership inspection gave it a excellent report. Results are on a rapid upward climb at Cleobury Mortimer too, but it’s just one of a number of big changes that the partnership has affected.

“It helped that my colleagues saw that I wasn’t afraid to get support and that I wasn’t afraid to learn,” says Bavita. “I think it reassured staff that it was OK to learn and get outside input. It brought us close together as a team.”

The stakes couldn’t have been higher for Whitefield School in Barnet when headteacher Martin Lavelle and his team started working with NLE Teresa Tunnadine and colleagues.

Martin had been appointed to the post following a difficult time for the school, which was being affected by falling rolls.

The school faced possible closure unless it became a National Challenge trust school, so Teresa, head of the outstanding Compton School, worked closely with Martin to steer the school through the process, which was completed last spring.

“My role has been three fold. As an NLE supporting school improvements, mentoring a brand new head and as a head of a new trust arrangements,” she explains.

“Predominantly we have been looking at staffing and budget. My business manager is working with a person newly appointed to the post at Whitefield to sort out budget issues. I have also been working with Martin on major staffing issues. At the beginning of our partnership much of the work was around staffing issues and capability issues. It was about getting the right people in the right place in school and helping Martin identify the talent he needed in his senior team.”

“We also looked at systems that were not in place or were very much ad hoc, such as performance management. This has involved one of Compton’s senior team partnering and supporting a colleague at Whitefield in the writing of a new performance management framework based on Compton’s approach.”

The partnership has changed dramatically over the past year, says Teresa. “I was much more direct to start with,” she says. “It had helped that we had worked together before but we didn’t have time to make mistakes or try different things out. We had to address some key issues very quickly and I was there to support Martin in doing that.”

It helped that Martin taught at Compton before he left to start his school leadership career, so there was a firm foundation of trust that the two could work with.

“I knew Teresa from Compton and she was my mentor when I was first appointed a head and she was there for me when we became a National Challenge school as well.“

Teresa was a key supporter for Martin as he brought about a “difficult and painful restructure”.

“I couldn’t have done it without her,” he says. “There were a lot of late night and early morning calls. A lot of emotional and strategic support. She came with me to difficult meetings and she helped me think about the difficult process of becoming a trust.

“Now the school is in a different place. I am older and a lot wiser. We have a trust school improvement plan. I am talking business with Teresa probably once a week or fortnight now. It’s now more a meeting of equals but she’s always there for support and ideas.”

The impact of the partnership can be seen in the fact that Whitefield is now in the top one per cent of most improved schools in the country. Since 2008 results have gone from 54 per cent to 86 per cent five A*-C GCSEs.

It’s not just headteachers and their teams who are adamant about the value of the school-to-school approach to improvement. There’s a growing consensus amongst leading education thinkers too. Academic David Hargreaves sees school-to-school support, or system leadership, as playing an important part in a self-improving school system, in a thinkpiece penned for the National College, published last autumn.

“In an era of diminishing centralisation, accelerating the rate and depth of school improvement and reducing the number of underperforming schools requires a new vision,” he said.

“Since the birth of school improvement in the 1980s, the quality of school leadership has increased sharply and most schools have gained experience of working in partnerships and networks of many kinds. Increased decentralisation offers an opportunity for the school system to build on these and become self improving.”

David Hargreaves sees a new era “in which the school system becomes the major agent of its own improvement and does so at a rate and to a depth that has hitherto been no more than an aspiration.”

And Sir Michael Barber, writing for ldr in November, says there is a growing international consensus that schools can drive their own improvement. “Headteachers learn best on the job and from peers. In the best systems, they support each other and exchange best practice, and higher performing headteachers provide support to weaker schools,” he says.

For National College chief executive Steve Munby, school-to-school support in school improvement is enshrined in the recent White Paper, with its emphasis on schemes like NLEs and teaching schools.

He says: “If we are to make sure that more young people, in more schools, are getting the opportunities and chances they deserve, we need to carry on building on the very best leadership development and sharing it across the system.

“The teaching schools initiative announced in November’s White Paper will, I think, amplify and accelerate this approach.”