Capital Academy: a new inner-city school

Case study

Summary

Starting from scratch this inner-city academy recruited a leadership team with specialist knowledge and created a structure where responsibilities are distributed effectively amongst teaching and non-teaching professionals.

Key learning/outcomes

The governing body is not accountable to a single individual or company, or committed to one faith. This is because Capital Academy is sponsored by a corporate body that is also a local education authority.
Capital Academy was able to start with a clean slate and methodically expand a leadership team of proven competence.
‘System leadership’ and joining with colleagues and other academies in the locality to share responsibility for the outcomes for young people across more than one institution is an important theme for leaders at all levels.
The independence of the school made it easier to employ staff without qualified teacher status, notably the director of finance and ‘pastoral managers’ from other professional backgrounds.
Effective distributed leadership means that senior and middle leaders are confident in their responsibilities and accountabilities in their field. This school runs efficiently in the absence of the principal.
Efficient management meetings with the principle focus on high level reporting and are made possible by the governing body being conducted in two sub-committees: ‘finance and premises’ led by the finance director and ‘curriculum and community’ led by the two vice principals.

Background

Capital Academy, a publicly funded independent secondary school first opened in 2003 and moved into its new, purpose built buildings in 2005. Growth has been phased and it will eventually accommodate 1200 students from a wide range of ethnic groups which reflects the inner London location. Specialising in business, enterprise and sports it is hugely over-subscribed and purposefully recruits a full ability range of pupils, 95% from within 1.5km of the school. There is a small and growing sixth form and a deaf resource for up to 20 pupils.

Capital Academy Ltd, a charitable trust company, owns and maintains the building. The trust has a board of directors that acts as the governing body of the school and as a state-maintained, independent school the trust is also the staff employer. The school’s professional staff are led by an executive leadership team - the principal working closely with the two vice-principals and the finance director. The wider management team includes assistant headteachers, the head of learning, the director of inclusion, heads of faculty and heads of year.

Key challenges and issues

There has been some reluctance to regard Capital Academy as a member of the local ‘family’ of schools.
The longer school day at the academy has prevented some staff from joining local professional development organised around more traditional school hours.
Awareness of and interest in governance are greatest with the executive leadership team and reduce at each level of the school’s hierarchy.
Trust partners and academy sponsors are represented on the governing body and stakeholder management differs from a normal school, so it is a challenge to ensure the leadership model is fit for purpose.
Some staff feel that the governors are around the school less than ‘traditional’ governors might be, and think this may impact on their ability to support and hold the school to account.
Overall, outside the executive leadership team, the practical consequences of being an academy are not recognised and although staff are aware of the quality of the academy’s resources, they are not connecting this with the school’s status and governance.

Solution or approach

Connecting with the community

The academy is working to allay fears that policy reduces accountability to the local community. The sponsors chose the location of the new building in part because of its commitment to neighbouring communities. There is parental and other community representation on the governing body, extensive community use of the premises and the school is a significant local employer.

Distributed leadership

For the professional staff, the distinctive feature of leadership and management at Capital Academy is the distributed responsibility. The model appears to echo the successful relationship between the principal and the governors. The principal reports that he can readily approach – or be approached by – individual members of the governing body to share ideas, concerns or ambitions. He describes the relationship with the governing body as something that has improved the quality of his work/life balance.

Innovative recruitment and staff development

The school’s expansion over the past five years has provided many opportunities for internal promotions and it has recruited staff who are not qualified teachers but who have backgrounds in social services and child protection to work as ‘pastoral managers’ (carrying out aspects of a traditional head of year role).

Expert and diverse governance

The work of the governing body and its relationship with the professionals is described as ‘supportive and well informed’ by Ofsted, providing specialist advice especially on financial matters. The governing body contains representatives from the school, the wider community and the City

Seeing the bigger picture

The governors’ main priority is to hold the executive leadership team to account; symbolic support for the school is a secondary matter. At Capital, the majority argue that that this means professional staff can get on with their work without governors ‘obsessing’ over detail.

Next steps

The experience of Capital’s executive team is that the process of establishing and sustaining a new academy could benefit from a collaborative approach. Governance, curriculum and resource management were all areas cited as offering potential economies of scale and collaborative advantage. Bureaucracy, constraints and “re-invention of a local authority” were described as the risks.
As an academy, the executive leadership team made repeated references to opportunities for collaboration that might be offered by their sponsorship of two new academies in neighbouring local authorities.
The work of the pastoral managers is well regarded and some are interested in exploring the possibilities of a career in school leadership.