Leadership Focus September/October 2011

Issue 50 September/October 2011

£5

THE BI-MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR ALL SCHOOL LEADERS PLUS PENSIONS DISPUTE FLEXI-SCHOOLING FORCES CHILDREN

A GAME OF HIGH STAKES SHOULD PRIMARY LEADERS PLAY THE ACADEMY CARD?

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22/8/11 11:37:45

Accept Visa payments to make your life easier.

It’s quicker than banking a cheque and better for cash flow as funds are usually received within 2-4 business days. It also offers parents more payment choice and flexibility, allowing them to pay in person, over the phone or online 24/7. So to make payments for school fees, uniforms, trips or clubs easier for everyone, swot up on how Visa could help you and your school.

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LEADERSHIP FOCUS ● SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

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ROBERT SANDERS EDITORIAL

Rebels with a just cause?

As I write this, Libyan rebel armies are asserting their presence in Tripoli. At home a spontaneous protest snowballed into riots that have no meaning or message – and it would seem that this is all your fault (page 10).

For good or ill, rebellion is in the air. Certainly, school leaders and teachers are bound to be feeling pugnacious when the Government appears to be going around with the same collective head-in-the-sand approach over pensions that it has used on Sats and league tables (page 7). With a ballot for strike action likely in September, Russell Hobby says: “It would be an overwhelming indictment of how the pensions issue has been handled by the Government if NAHT members went on national strike.” (See page 20.)

But what about becoming an academy? Is doing so a form of rebellion, or of conformity? Are schools bravely going it alone in order to innovate or are they unwitting participants in a divide-and-conquer strategy where the standards agenda will ultimately keep them on the straight and narrow?

The Government would seem to have legitimised rebellion under the guise of enabling more innovation via the extension of the academies programme (page 24).

Meanwhile, Steve Munby from the National College is keen to promote the importance of school leaders working as a team (page 15) – the heroic leader is an outdated model, he says. But do academies really promote working together when schools can choose to partner with those with few problems in preference to those in challenging circumstances? Or is the programme yet another means of segregating society?

Happily, there is no shortage of innovation at individual school level. School leaders are continuing to invent new concepts in education that help to restore community and individual ambitions – projects such as Ruskin Mill Educational Trust (page 30) with its alternative curriculum for young people who have been failed by mainstream education; and Hollinsclough Primary, saved from closure by its offer of support to children whose own parents have rebelled by sidestepping the education system entirely through homeschooling. Effectively the ‘flexi-school’ seeks to absorb the rebels back into society.

The moral of all this? Maybe it’s ‘value your union’ and encourage others to join (page 9). Where the voice of school leaders is being diluted or even muted, the best chance that you have of making the world a better place (see the General Secretary’s column on page 13) is by being an active member of an organisation that has your needs at its heart.

‘The Government appears to be going around with the same head-in-thesand approach over pensions that it has used on Sats and league tables’

redactive publishing limited EDITORIAL & ASSOCIATION ENQUIRIES NAHT, 1 Heath Square, Boltro Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 1BL www.naht.org.uk Tel: 01444 472 472 Editor: Robert Sanders Editorial board: Russell Hobby, Chris Howard, Mike Welsh, Chris Harrison and Robert Sanders Leadership Focus is published by Redactive Publishing Limited on behalf of the NAHT

17 Britton Street, London EC1M 5TP www.redactive.co.uk Tel: 020 7880 6200 Email: naht@redactive.co.uk

EDITORIAL TEAM Managing editor: Steve Smethurst Assistant editors: Rebecca Grant and Sarah Campbell News and features reporter: Hollie Ewers Designer: Adrian Taylor Senior picture editor: Claire Echavarry Production manager: Jane Easterman Cover illustration: Francesco Bongiorni Printed by: Wyndeham Heron

ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES Advertisement sales: Stephen Fontana Sales director: Jason Grant

Member of the Audit Bureau of Circulation: 27,577 (July 2009-June 2010)

ISSN: 1472–6181 © Copyright 2011 NAHT All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be copied or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. While every care has been taken in the compilation of this publication, neither the publisher nor the NAHT can accept responsibility for any inaccuracies or changes since compilation, or for consequential loss arising from such changes or inaccuracies, or for any other loss, direct or consequential, arising in connection with information in this publication. Acceptance of advertisements does not imply recommendation by the publishers.

The views herein are not necessarily those of the publisher, the editor or the NAHT.

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CONTENTS

COVER STORY PAGE

24

PASS? OR ALL IN?

Academy status for primaries: for some, the freedom to run their school as they want to.

For others, a dangerous step towards the privatisation of state education

BY SARAH CAMPBELL

30 18

10 NEWS FOCUS 6 PENSIONS: NAHT POISED FOR ACTION Negotiations with ministers are ongoing but the Association stands on the brink of balloting on industrial action. If members strike, it will be for the first time in NAHT history.

7 ASSESSMENT REFORM UPDATE Public pressure over Sats mounts as the Bew Review and TV’s Carol Vorderman highlight significant flaws.

7 NEWS IN BRIEF Exclusions on the wane; the National College is on the lookout for a new generation of NLEs and teaching schools; and a report on professionalism in Early Years teaching.

8 SCHOOL SCRUTINY SITES ‘TO BOOM’ Comparison websites such as Schooloscope might be only the first in a wave of unmoderated education analysis.

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8 CHARITY OF THE YEAR: SHELTERBOX The NAHT has chosen to support disaster-relief charity ShelterBox this year. LF finds more about the partnership.

9 RICH PICKINGS FOR RECRUITERS Now is the perfect time get colleagues to join the NAHT, especially considering some recent campaign successes.

9 BEST OF THE BLOGS Who could have predicted a riot? Plus, an update from Rona Tutt on the SEND Green Paper consultation.

10 RIOTS: SCHOOLS UNDER ATTACK No one was short of an opinion as to what caused civil unrest this summer, with many people blaming a lack of discipline in schools and the education system in general.

10 NEW-LOOK WEBSITE The Association’s website (www.naht.org.uk) has been given a revamp in response to feedback from members.

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FEATURES 30 TURNING LIVES AROUND

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The thriving Ruskin Mill Educational Trust provides an alternative curriculum for young people who struggle in mainstream education. Rebecca Grant visits its flagship college to understand what makes it special.

36 FLEXING A SCHOOL’S MUSCLES Hollinsclough Primary in the Peak District offers services to home-educated children, on top of a conventional curriculum for its full-time pupils. Steve Smethurst asks whether ‘flexi-schooling’ is the future of education.

40 ARE THEY BEING SERVED? How do the children of members of the armed forces – and their schools – cope with the turbulence of service life? Sarah Campbell speaks to school leaders to find out.

REGULARS 13 RUSSELL HOBBY’S COLUMN At the end of his first year in office – one that began with the ‘big society’ and ended in riots – the General Secretary outlines how the NAHT is placing itself ahead of policy.

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15 STEVE MUNBY’S COLUMN ‘Resonant leadership’ is what school heads should be striving towards, says the National College chief.

16 TEN THINGS WE’VE LEARNED This issue: teachers should be issued with shin pads, and parents should be discouraged from wearing PJs to school.

18 HEADS UP Three school leaders take the magazine’s big question challenge by telling us about their favourite biscuits, guilty secrets and the biggest challenge of all... their best joke.

20 BEHIND THE HEADLINES: PENSIONS Anna Scott gets into the nitty gritty behind the debate, outlining the views of pensions experts and school leaders.

46 WHAT’S WHA NEW? WH All th the he latest books and educational resources.

49 LETTERS LET TT With h the t riots and talk of strikes, there’s been plenty for m me members to get their teeth into this issue.

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AND FINALLY: SUSAN YOUNG Happy new academic year!

What better time to start planning your end-of-term activities?

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NEWS FOCUS

‘Future of profession is at stake’ The NAHT is poised to ballot members on industrial action over pensions, which may lead to the first strike in the union’s history.

The National Executive is intending to go to ballot in September, although as LF went to press no date had been set. Lesley Gannon, the NAHT’s head of campaigns, said this was because all efforts were still being ploughed into negotiations and discussions with ministers and members in an attempt to avert the need for action.

She said: “We’re going forward with this in sorrow as much as anger. No one wants a strike. We want sensible negotiations and a recognition of the sacrifices members have already made to make the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) affordable.”

This includes the change last year to link pensions to the consumer prices index rather than the retail prices index, and reforms to the TPS made in 2007-08.

Lesley added that maintaining a dialogue with the Government was crucial. “We want to feel that these are genuine

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Negotiations with Government are ongoing but the Association stands on the brink of action

negotiations. At the moment all we’ve got on the table is ‘work longer, pay more, get less’. We are prepared to look at the acceptability of those aspects individually, but if the Treasury simply sets the terms with no intention of changing them, that’s not a negotiation,” she said.

There is ‘heartfelt concern’ among members about the impact these pension changes will have on the future of school leadership, Lesley said. “People are now

‘We’re going forward with this in sorrow as much as anger. No one wants a strike; we want negotiation’

coming out of university in massive amounts of debt, which they’re going to be struggling to pay back for longer.

“Either they’re going to feel that the package that school leadership offers is not enough to attract them, leading to a loss of talent, or they will come into the profession and opt out of the TPS because they can’t afford the contributions, leaving them vulnerable in their retirement.”

See also Behind the headlines, page 20.

To keep abreast of progress, visit www.naht.org.uk and click on ‘Pensions campaign’. Also, please ensure your contact details are up to date on the website or by contacting the membership department: 01444 472470; membership@naht.org.uk

School funding debate moves up a gear The DfE’s consultation on school revenue funding could represent a turning point in the way school budgets are determined, according to the NAHT. A proposed new system will introduce a national formula to allocate money more consistently across the country, while allowing a degree of local flexibility to meet specific needs where agreed by schools.

Funding is notoriously complex, expecially where

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support for small schools and meeting the cost of pupils with special educational needs are concerned.

However, NAHT General Secretary Russell Hobby said: “For too long, schools have suffered with inconsistent and unclear funding. Inexplicable differences across local authority boundaries have led to similar schools receiving levels of funding that differ by more than £1,000 per pupil, which is completely untenable.”

Ivan Ould (pictured), chairman of the f40 group, which represents the lowestfunded education authorities in England, also approved of the consultation. He said: “The current ‘spend-plus’ system is opaque, full of anomalies and unfair. These proposals look promising although there is some disappointment that the change may be slow.”

Consultation closes on 11 October.

To participate, visit tinyurl.com/ fundform

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NEWS IN BRIEF EXCLUSIONS ON THE WANE

WENN

Carol Vorderman criticised Sats in a report on maths education.

Pressure mounts over assessment The Bew Review findings into KS2 assessment are ‘a milestone, but not a finishing post’ on the way to wholesale reform, the NAHT said.

General Secretary Russell Hobby broadly welcomed Lord Bew’s recommendations. He said: “The report reflected the strong stance NAHT members took on this issue and there is much to be pleased with: some good ideas on mobility, absence and volatility, for example.”

However, three areas of concern remain for the Association. “We do not see the need for a new test of spelling, punctuation and grammar; members want the changes implemented as soon as is practical, particularly on writing; and we want to be sure that all parts of Government honour the spirit and direction, as well as the letter, of the proposals,” Russell said.

Head of campaigns Lesley Gannon said the NAHT is continuing to put pressure on the Government as it decides what to do with Lord Bew’s recommendations. “We don’t want members to think the campaign is over, and we’re pleased to see that even more voices are coming

forward to agree that Sats are outdated,” she said. TV presenter Carol Vorderman is the latest wellknown public figure to oppose the tests, in a report on maths education she led for the Conservatives.

The Association is also involved in discussions with the DfE about the English baccalaureate (Ebacc).

Over the summer the Education Select Committee published a report which criticised the Government’s failure to consult on the implementation of the Ebacc and the retrospective application of the measure to the 2010 performance tables. The NAHT was pleased with the outcome of the report, which ‘reflected explicitly’ the concerns of members.

“However, it’s a shame these discussions are taking place after the event,” Lesley said. “On the issue of assessment we’d reached a point where the uniformity of criticism had become overwhelming. But we could have been at this stage a lot sooner.”

Bew Review: www.education.gov.uk/ ks2review Carol Vorderman report: tinyurl.com/ vordermanmathsreport

Temporary and permanent exclusions from primary, secondary and special schools fell significantly last year (2009-10). DfE figures show a decrease in permanent exclusions from 6,550 in 2008-09 to 5,740 in 2009-10 and a decrease in temporary exclusions from 363,280 in 2008-09 to 331,380 in 2009-10.

NAHT General Secretary Russell Hobby attributed the fall to the hard work of heads and teachers in managing behaviour. He said: “Fewer and fewer schools now need to resort to the ultimate sanction of permanent exclusion, a fact that should be celebrated.” Nearly 900 children are suspended from school every day.

CALL FOR NLEs AND TEACHING SCHOOLS The National College for School Leadership is looking to expand its team of National Leaders of Education. Successful candidates will support schools and academies in challenging circumstances and have the opportunity to advise ministers and the National College. For more information visit www.nationalcollege.org.uk/nle The National College is also looking to appoint a second cohort of teaching schools, having already designated their first 100. For more information visit www.nationalcollege.org.uk/teachingschools Recruitment rounds for both programmes open on 23 September.

THE TEACHING OF TODDLERS The NAHT’s view that the quality of Early Years teaching should be comparable to all other stages of education was given a boost with the publication of a DfE report into the impact of Early Years Professional Status. The report, Evaluation of the Graduate Leader Fund, found “positive evidence that the use of specialised Early Years graduate training pathways can lead to improvements in quality within the private, voluntary and independent sector”. Read the full report at tinyurl.com/gradleaderfundreport

THE POPULAR PROFESSION? Contrary to what you might think, children don’t want to be reality TV stars and models but apparently aspire to be teachers instead. A survey of more than 1,000 UK pupils aged between six and 15 found that nearly a third selected teaching as their profession of choice, compared with eight per cent who wanted to be a doctor or nurse, four per cent who wanted to be reality TV stars and only two per cent who wanted to be bankers.

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NEWS FOCUS

School scrutiny sites ‘to boom’ The recently-defunct school comparison website Schooloscope (schooloscope.com) may be only the first of a wave of such school information portals set up by people with no specialist education knowledge, the NAHT has warned.

Members had previously raised concerns about the accuracy of the information on Schooloscope, which has shut down because of a lack of funding. Siôn Humphreys, policy adviser at the NAHT, said that, having met the website’s administrators in August, he believed that the lack of rigour came from naivety rather than malice.

“There was no political agenda other than a vague view that data should be public. They got their data from the Ofsted website and from performance tables on the DfE website – then drew their own conclusions about schools,” he said.

However, Siôn added that as the Government strives to become more transparent and more raw data makes its way into the public domain, “it’s going to

ISTOCKPHOTO

Glut of education data in public domain creates gap in market for well-meaning but flawed analysis

be increasingly difficult for parents to interpret. So there is a gap in the market for websites that offer to make sense of data on schools.”

Siôn also emphasised that schools need to be capable of making sense of their own data internally, as this is likely to be a major component of the new Ofsted framework.

“The key thing is turning data into information. For example, Ofsted will probably want more information on the

‘There was no political agenda other than a vague view that data should be public. They got hold of figures then drew their own conclusions about schools’

progress of different groups – for primary schools this shouldn’t be a problem because they’re good at this sort of analysis. But a lot of secondaries aren’t up to speed,” he said.

He added that schools should remember that, although the Ofsted self-evaluation form has been scrapped, self-evaluation itself is still a statutory requirement.

• In response to members reporting an increase in malicious campaigns against them on social networking websites, the NAHT is offering a course on relationship management, which aims to give school leaders the tools and confidence deal with such situations. Details will be published in the next issue of Professional Development.

ShelterBox to enjoy year of NAHT support Disaster relief charity ShelterBox has teamed up with the NAHT as part of its campaign to raise awareness of its work. The NAHT will support the charity’s work for a year through fundraising and publicity. At National Conference in May, NAHT partner Schools Advisory Service presented ShelterBox with a cheque for £10,000.

ShelterBox sends big green boxes containing a tent, cooking equipment, clothes,

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blankets and other essentials to disaster and conflict-struck areas such as Ethiopia and Libya. The link-up with the NAHT is the second strand of the charity’s campaign to help young people understand how disasters affect families around the world, and how they can help. The first phase was setting up a website,Young ShelterBox, including a set of teaching resources, explained Emma Nicholls, project manager for Young ShelterBox.

She said: “This is not just about asking schools to donate money. It’s raising awareness of disaster relief too. Children in the UK see a lot of this on the TV and they might find it distressing, but they probably also feel helpless. Through this campaign we’re helping them have a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding the disaster, and showing them how to respond if they want to.” www.shelterbox.org www.youngshelterbox.org

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THE BEST OF THE BLOGS

TEMPEST PHOTOGRAPHY

WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED A RIOT?

NAHT members at this year’s Annual Conference in Brighton.

Rich pickings for union recruiters The new academic year not only sees a new intake of pupils but for many schools it also means new members of staff joining the leadership team.

This therefore presents an ideal opportunity to recruit senior colleagues into membership, said John Randall, the NAHT’s head of marketing and communications.

“We know that when a trusted colleague recommends something, we are more likely to act upon that recommendation.

The same is true when deciding which union to belong to. As a trade union and professional association we campaign exclusively on behalf of all senior leaders in education,” he said.

He urged members to point out to their colleagues some recent NAHT successes, including: • the scrapping of the Sats written test; • stopping the Government publishing salaries of head teachers; • winning some concessions on pensions, although the campaign continues (see page 6);

• supporting members against false allegations on social networking websites; • and getting the Government to publish revised guidelines on teacher capability procedures.

“Show your colleagues the advert on page 45 of this issue of LF. And let them know that we guarantee no increase in the subscription rate until January 2013,” John said.

Enclosed with this issue of LF is an application form (with subscription rates on the reverse). John added: “Make sure you add your name and membership number in the space under the logo, so we can acknowledge your support.

“Also, don’t forget to make sure they complete and sign the bank direct debit mandate form.

Once they’ve returned the form, we’ll do the rest.”

For every new member application the NAHT receives with your details, you will receive a £10 M&S voucher.

If you need more application forms, send an email to the membership recruitment team at joinus@naht.org.uk or call 01444 472 414.

In the wake of this summer’s riots, and the Prime Minister’s pledges to fix ‘broken’ Britain, Susan Young wonders what happened to make so many young people feel disconnected to the rest of society.

“Schools and discipline are clearly going to be on the Government’s frontline of restoring order in our cities in the next term and for the next few years,” she writes.

“But it strikes me that this is only one tiny piece of the bigger picture in the way we as a society bring up children. Recent years and decades have seen many separate changes, which have come together in the past few years to create a very new way of child-rearing.” www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/susan-young

THE WRONG RESULTS? The riots also feature in former TES journalist Warwick Mansell’s latest blog. While his initial reaction was to brand those involved in the looting and arson attacks ‘idiots’, Warwick argues that you need to dig deeper to understand what has driven young people to take such action. He cites the education system as one reason why this generation feels let down by society – especially now so much emphasis is put on exam results. Warwick writes: “We have had a system in which success has been very narrowly measured and accredited, with repeated messages inevitably sent to children as to which of them are meant to be viewed as the successes, and which, the failures.

“A system that has become so obsessed with raising grades almost as ends in themselves might be in danger of losing sight of the big picture of what, surely, really matters in the end: helping all children lead fulfilling, rewarding and, yes, law-abiding lives.” www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/ warwick-mansells-blog

PAPER GETS THE GREEN LIGHT It’s been six months since the SEND Green Paper was published, and in that time the paper’s consultation group has received more than 2,300 responses. Dr Rona Tutt, the NAHT’s SEN consultant, was at Capita’s conference on 11 July to hear a report on the progress so far, which included an overview of the responses received – a majority of which were in agreement to the paper’s vision – and a report on the next steps.

Rona also offers an update on behaviour issues – which is high on Ofsted’s list of priorities, she reports – and the progress of teaching schools. www.naht.org.uk/welcome/comment/blogs/ special-needs-blog

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NEWS FOCUS

Riots: schools under attack School leaders are unlikely to be surprised, but schools took much of the blame for the riots in English cities this summer.

Emma Jones, a former teacher, summed it up neatly in The Guardian: “It took two hours for the first people to start saying it, blaming ‘a lack of discipline in schools these days’.

Predictable oversimplification.”

Her view was that teachers in urban areas are among the few who understand these young people and could find a solution. One of her suggestions was for schools to work together more closely.

“They can ensure that sport,

music, drama and other activities are enjoyed together.

This builds mutual respect and understanding, and a sense of community,” she said.

For David Price, senior associate at think-tank the Innovation Unit, it was all about education. He wrote: “David Cameron’s vision of a ‘big society’ went up in smoke this week. We’ll need a big ‘post-riot’ idea and I would like to nominate a national education debate.”

His argument was that the disengagement displayed by the young rioters begins in school, “when their interest in learning is sacrificed in pursuit of high-stakes testing”.

However, some commentators did pick on other targets. Enver Solomon, policy director at The

‘It took two hours for people to blame a lack of discipline in schools these days. Predictable oversimplification’

Looters at an electronics store in Birmingham.

PA

No one was short of an opinion following the riots – and schools were soon in the firing line

Children’s Society, felt financial cutbacks were largely to blame.

“Funding for youth services has been cut. Local authority (LA) spending on services for young people has been slashed. And not only are LAs cutting support for those who are not in education, employment or training, they are also cutting services for youth crime prevention.”

And an open letter to the Prime Minister from Sean

Vernell and Tom Hickey (from the University and College Union) and MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell blamed, in part, the rise in university tuition fees. “Universities have been allowed to triple tuition fees, making it almost impossible for working class people to attend,” they complained.

What solutions would you propose?

Email us at naht@redactive.co.uk

NAHT website gets revamp for new year Members are returning to a new term – and to a new-look NAHT website (www.naht.org.uk).

In response to feedback, the web team has brought together advice, model policies and guidance in one place. The documents can be browsed on the advice home page, which has a new, modern feel. The NAHT advice teams are also working on new advice and policies.

In addition, a new tool on the advice pages allows you to select documents to

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download and print: look for the red PDF icons at the top right of every advice page.

The search function on the site is also being redesigned. Results will be clearer and can be sorted in date or relevance order. If you are still unable to find what you want, a “Can’t find it?” button will allow you to report your search and provide additional information.

If, however, you need urgent help, contact the advice team at specialistadvice@ naht.org.uk or 01444 472 475/477.

If you have comments or suggestions for the site please let us know via the feedback form (the link is at the bottom right of every page) or by email at webteam@naht.org.uk

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MEMBER BENEFITS FROM OUR SELECTED PARTNERS MESSAGE FROM A SCHOOL PARTNER

The NAHT is committed to negotiating a wide range of high-quality, value-added benefits and services for its members.

If you have any comments on the services provided by our affinity partners, please email John Randall, the NAHT’s Head of Marketing and Communications, at johnr@naht.org.uk

SERVICES FOR SCHOOLS ETEACH Online staff recruitment 0845 226 1906 www.eteach.com Email: support@eteach.com TEMPEST SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPHY 0800 328 1041 (quote ‘NAHT’) www.tempest-schoolphotography.co.uk GL ASSESSMENT Pupil wellbeing assessment 0845 602 1937 www.gl-assessment.co.uk GL PERFORMANCE Kirkland Rowell stakeholder surveys 0845 602 1937 www.kirkland-rowell.com SCHOOLS ADVISORY SERVICE Staff-absence insurance 01623 643 555 www.schooladvice.co.uk

SERVICES FOR MEMBERS

GL Assessment is a leading provider of integrated assessments for children’s education, mental health and wellbeing.

Our rigorous and high-quality assessments have been used by education, health and psychology professionals for three decades.

Today, we lead literacy, numeracy and ability testing in UK schools and have delivered 2.2 million online tests to children.

GL Assessment has recently been joined

by W3 Insights, the creators of the Pupil Attitudes to Self and School (PASS), an allage pupil questionnaire that provides a robust, standardised measurement of pupil attitudes.

GL Assessment is a division of the Granada Learning Group. Together with GL Performance, our school improvement division, we provide teachers with the tools they require to help ensure all children and young people fulfil their potential.

A credit to your profession To apply, call 0800 028 2440 quoting ‘National Association of Head Teachers’.

The credit card is issued by MBNA Europe Bank Limited,

AVIVA Home, contents and motor insurance 0800 046 6389 www.fromyourassociation.co.uk/NAHT

LFC GRAYBROOK Professional-indemnity and public-liability cover 01245 321 185 www.lfcgraybrook.co.uk/naht Email: enquiry@lfcgraybrook.co.uk MBNA Credit-card services 0800 028 2440 www.mbna.co.uk SKIPTON FINANCIAL SERVICES Independent financial advice 0800 012 1248 www.skiptonfs-naht.co.uk Email: sfsnaht@skipton.co.uk

Address: 9th Floor East, 389 Chiswick High Road, Chiswick, London W4 4AL Tel: 0845 602 1937 Email: info@gl-assessment.co.uk Website: www.gl-assessment.co.uk

MESSAGE FROM A MEMBER PARTNER

ROCK Travel insurance 0844 482 3390 www.nahttravelinsurance.co.uk

CS HEALTHCARE Private medical insurance 0800 917 4325 www.cshealthcare.co.uk (please use promotional code 147)

ISTOCK

Partner contacts Dab hands at wellbeing surveys

a Bank of America company. Registered Office: Stansfield House, Chester Business Park, Chester CH4 9QQ. Registered in England number 2783251. Credit is

Be proud of your profession with the NAHT credit card programme that provides outstanding benefits, service and convenience.You’ll benefit from all the features you would expect from a premiumservice credit card.

• 0% for 12 months* on balance transfers made in the first 90 days (3% handling fee) • 0% for three months on card purchases from the date your account is opened†.

A representative example is 16.9% pa (variable) on card purchases. This is the equivalent to 16.9% APR representative (variable) based on a credit limit of £1,200.

• No annual fee.

• 24-hour helpline • Online account management

available, subject to status, only to UK residents aged 18 or over. You cannot transfer balances from another MBNA account. We will monitor or record some phone calls. MBNA’s consumer credit activities are licensed by the Office of Fair Trading and MBNA’s general insurance activities are authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. * From the date your account is opened. † If you have two or more promotional offers at the same rate, we will use your payments to reduce any promotional balance with the lowest standard rate last, even if this offer ends first. This could mean that any such balance may not have been reduced by the time the standard rate applies to it.

Promotional rates will no longer apply from the beginning of any statement period during which you have breached your terms and conditions.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS

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LEADERSHIP FOCUS ● SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

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E:info@gl-assessment.co.uk 24/8/11 14:34:18

VIEWPOINT

RUSSELL HOBBY R Columnist C

Which way now?

Mere reaction is no longer enough – we need to be ahead of policy

T

his is the end of my first year at the NAHT: a year that began with the ‘big society’ and ended in riots. We also saw a number of other trends which profoundly affect our future.

Cuts mean that services schools rely upon are fading away. Autonomy means that leadership must come from schools themselves.

Fragmentation makes national approaches increasingly precarious. Freedom of information will switch the focus from Government to parents.

Some predictions for a few years hence: • You will be choosing rather than just receiving more services.

• There will be more prescription on the ‘basics’ and less prescription elsewhere.

• You will have more authority but greater accountability.

• You will be spending more time on external relations.

• You will be competing more with other schools, who will be more diverse.

• Your pay and conditions will be more flexible, as will your staff ’s.

• You may be responsible for more than one school.

These are not necessarily good or bad. Choosing the services you want would be good, poor quality would be bad. Freedom is good, but it comes with greater exposure. Community engagement is good, a focus on PR less so. Competition can be healthy, but if it reduces collaboration it would be disastrous.

Local pay bargaining could mean pay rises or insecurity. I really think it is a question of choosing which of these futures we want.

For the NAHT, it means emphasising our leadership role. Playing defence, trying to take the edge off the latest change, is a weak proposition.

Prevention is better than cure, and we protect our members best when we stop trouble occurring in the first place, when we make policy rather than just criticise policy.

If you take a look at our website (www.naht.org. uk), you will see that we have increased and updated the range of management advice we offer. We are also returning to the practice of publishing policies.

ISTOCKPHOTO

Assurance from NAHT We are addressing new threats. In a few years’ time, Facebook will outweigh Ofsted in impact on schools, and media relations will be an increasing part of school leadership. It is part of our job to protect members from these threats, as well as the

13 RH column.indd 13

traditional ones of grievances and redundancy. And, already, many members have sought the guidance of our new press office.

In a world of a hundred league tables, and a torrent of data, no single league table or statistic will dominate.

This helps, but it will be up to schools to find the data that supports the story they want to tell.

We know that bad HR advice is a major stumbling block, particularly the sort that seems to disappear just when the going gets tough.

We see it as part of our duty to protect members and ensure that they have access to high-quality, accountable services. Our Assure project, launching in the autumn term, offers traded services that are quality-assured by NAHT, including HR advice delivered in the interests of school leaders.

We protect our members best when we stop trouble occurring in the first place – when we make policy rather than just criticise it

A vision of education We will need to debate how we respond to weaker national pay bargaining – whether from greater flexibility, more academies or an end to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document. Can we advise on substantial numbers of individual contracts, for example?

In 2010-11 we sped up our response to policy. In 2011-12 we need to go further – we need to precede rather than respond.

Our relationship with parents and the public will be critical to this enterprise. School leaders are trusted and respected; they are important influences in the daily lives of families. To what degree have we used this asset?

If we get these things right, the NAHT could be a source of direction in turbulent times.

Increasingly we will prepare and prevent as well as defend.

Russell Hobby is NAHT General Secretary

23/8/11 16:07:15

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24/8/11 14:34:41

VIEWPOINT

STEVE MUNBY ST Columnist Co

All together now Forget the model of heroic school leaders – we need to work as a team

O

ver the past 12 months, I have become convinced that what is needed now is what I call ‘resonant leadership’.

Resonant leaders are tuned into themselves and those they are privileged to lead, and they focus on improvement and achieve that through collaborating with others. In short, they are able to strike a pure note, so they, their teams and their organisations ‘resonate’.

There are five ways to spot a resonant leader: 1. They know themselves The key is to be aware of what kind of leader you are – to know your strengths and weaknesses – to develop the leadership that works for you in your context. It’s not what worked for someone else in a different context.

2. They motivate and energise others Like the conductor of an orchestra, the role of the resonant leader is to help those they lead to understand their connection to the bigger picture and the part they play in it. If we are to give the best of ourselves as leaders we have to make judgments as to where our presence is needed. And once we have made that judgment we need to make sure we are 100 per cent there.

DREAMSTIME

3. They focus on improvement Leadership is not for its own sake but to make a difference to the lives of children and young people. That is how our leadership should be judged. In a system where transformation has so often grabbed the headlines we need to focus on the hard slog of improvement. We need more evidencebased policy development founded on things that have been proven to work. That is why I am so excited about the development of teaching-school alliances.

The idea is that developments in the future will be led by practitioners, based on what works – grounded in practitioner-led research, continuing professional development and leadership development. We also need to ask ourselves how seriously we are taking teacher development in our schools – are we too easily sidetracked? There is a balance to be struck but we must continue to look for new ways to solve problems, and there will be times when dramatic transformation is the only sensible and reasonable solution.

4. They collaborate Leadership is a tough job and collaboration helps us to be personally and professionally resilient. Also, resonant leaders recognise that working with others will ultimately make their organisations stronger and more effective in the face

15 SM column.indd 15

of challenges. The growing number of chains of academies and hard federations offer great opportunities. They tend to lead to stronger governance and can open up exciting opportunities for succession planning and career progression, as well as helping secure efficiencies in the system. My hope is that more National Leaders of Education and academy converters will consider sponsoring an academy as this agenda develops.

I worry that some leaders are waiting for someone else to create the new collaborative culture for them, but it is no use waiting for it to happen. It is time to be proactive – although we need to choose the kind of collaboration that will work in our context. The interests of young people need to be at the centre of such collaboration.

Like the conductor of an orchestra, the role of the resonant leader is to help those they lead understand the bigger picture

5. They create a narrative others can believe in Colleagues must believe that your leadership can take them to a better place. That requires a narrative that is positive, achievable and makes sense to those you lead. For leaders, it requires us to see the changes that are coming, to look again at our context and our community and to create a vision which provides real meaning. The narrative must ust create resonance out of potential dissonance. e. In complex, fast-moving times, leadership hip has never been more important, but the lone one leader forging ahead in a heroic manner is unlikely to meet the challenge. It’s the leaders rs who energise, motivate, collaborate and bring their organisations along with them who offer the leadership we need. It’s time for leadership that connects rather than goes it alone. It’s time for resonant leaders.

Steve Munby is chief executive tive of the National College for School Leadership www.nationalcollege.org.uk k

23/8/11 08:21:32

STRANGE BUT TRUE

THINGS WE’VE LEARNED Since the last LF, we’ve learned that teachers should wear shin pads, parents should wear suitable clothing and students can spend the night in a museum Boys more confident – or less modest – communicators Research from the National Literacy Trust and the Communication Trust reveals that 69 per cent of boys (compared with 57 per cent of girls) said they were either ‘confident’ or ‘very confident’ when speaking in front of classmates. Boys were also more confident in talking with teachers (81 per cent compared with 78 per cent).

Parents get dressing down over dressing gowns Eleven primary heads in East Middlesbrough have ave agreed a common policy – that parents should be requested to show decency and respect when attending school premises. The policy follows a number of parents wearing their nightwear at meetings or when dropping off and picking up their children. Pallister Park Primary School head Chris Wain reported: “Parents have respected our wishes. We no longer have a pyjama problem.”

Teachers should d be issued with shin pads The GMB union, which represents school support ing staff, has called for teachers and teaching assistants to be issued with shin pads. More than 800 pupils are excluded every day for physical and verbal attacks on staff. This includes abuse, intimidation, kicking, punching and biting. The GMB’s Sharon Holder said: “If a school knows of a particularly unruly pupil who is prone to lash out, then why shouldn’t teachers be provided with shin pads?”

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Japanese pupils are world’s best behaved According to a study, teenagers’ cclassroom behaviour in global terms is g getting better and Japan is top of the le league table. The report by economic forum OECD used statistics gathered as part of its PISA study and looked at how long teachers had to wait for 15-year-olds to quieten down during lessons. It then compared behaviour with the results from 2000. UK pupils (joint 28th) are above average, but Asian countries dominate.

LEADERSHIP FOCUS ● SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

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A parent could buy your school When The Mill School in Potterne,Wiltshire, faced closure at the end of last term, most parents were upset. But one parent, Matt Hill, was so devastated that his three-year-old daughter would have to go elsewhere that instead of looking for a space at other local schools, he offered to buy The Mill. He secured its future with a £1 million deal. Along with his business partner, Mr Hill now has joint ownership of the school and has pledged that all members of staff and 65 pupils aged between two and 11 will remain there.

Apparently, it is safe to let under-eights read Heat magazine According to a survey of 178 men working in nurseries and primary schools, children under eight years old are not influenced byy role models. Simon Brownhill of rby said the University of Derby the research indicatedd that o be young children are more likely to influenced by people their own age who share the same experiences and who live close by, such as friends and family, rather than by actors or sports stars in the public eye. He also found no de evidence that male teachers made better role models for boys.

Praise costs nothing but buys success Cornish students enjoy sleepover with Night at the Museum 4 For the fourth consecutive year, girls from Truro High Prep School have enjoyed a special end-of-term treat with a sleepover at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. The Year Six girls made and raced model boats and went on a torchlit tour before bedding down. Head teacher Alison Miller said the girls loved being able to wander at will through the museum.

ALAMY/ISTOCK/DREAMSTIME

Higher education awaits for believers. Atheists may nott believe this In a survey of 13,000 13,000 young people per cent of those for the DfE, 77 per describing themselves as Hindu went on to ared with 45 per higher education, compared cent of Christians and 322 per cent of those hree per cent of with no religion. Sixty-three er cent of Muslims Sikh teenagers and 53 per rend could went to university. The trend be attributed to differingg attitudes ng white towards education among and Asian working-class families.

Positive teacher comments are more effective in raising grades than smaller classes, homework or uniforms, according to a Durham University study. The summary of evidence found that giving pupils clear and effective feedback was considered ‘high impact for low cost’. Researchers said comments should be specific, related to challenging tasks, given sparingly so they are meaningful, and encourage self-esteem by focusing on the positive.

Streaming is making a comeback Crown Woods College in Eltham places its pupils into one of three ‘mini schools’ according to ‘aptitude, skills and experiences’ when they join in Year Seven. The students have uniforms that set them apart, with the ‘gifted and talented’ wearing purple badges in the ‘Delamere’ school. Each school functions independently and has 450 students. “If you have a really hard-nosed view and want your school to succeed, this is what you have to do,” said head teacher Michael Murphy.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS

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22/8/11 10:36:21

QUESTION CORNER

VICTORIA PURCELL Deputy head teacher, St Andrew’s CE High School for Boys, Worthing

WHAT TYPE OF PERSON ARE YOU? In five words? Focused, ambitious, caring, listener, alternative.

Most prized possession? A Northampton Saints rugby union shirt signed by Carlos Spencer, the New Zealand fly half.

Favourite biscuit? Jaffa Cakes.

Unmissable TV? Any live rugby match. But also Ghost Hunters and Casualty – my second career is diagnosing people’s illnesses.

Top film? Dirty Dancing.

Favourite song? Feeling Good by Nina Simone.

Best book? The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

Which celebrity would play you in the film of your life?

Anastacia – she is simply beautiful.

Guilty secret? The gym. Although it’s not that much of a secret.

HEADS

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES

UP If you would like to take the LF questionnaire, email us at naht@redactive.co.uk

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DREAMSTIME/ALAMY/REX

Three school leaders take up the Leadership Focus challenge to describe their leadership style and then tell us a joke

I went into teaching because I want to equip young people with the skills to be successful.

My own schooling was quite interesting. I was ‘written off ’ at the age of five when my infant school teachers tried to convince my parents that I needed to attend a special school rather than mainstream. They continued to treat my education in the same way throughout KS1 and KS2 and that memory of feeling like a failure still lives with me today. I think that is why I fight so hard for my students to have a ‘can-do’ attitude.

My most embarrassing moment as a teacher was falling down the stairs in front of Years 10 and 11. I ended up in a heap at the bottom with a round of applause from those standing at the top.

My leadership style is one of mutual respect and teamwork where the staff work together to benefit students. I believe that I lead by example – I am hard-working and enjoy leading others through change to see a tangible impact upon learners.

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s to think before you speak – it saves so much of the aftermath.

If I were the PM, I’d make class sizes small, give teachers the power to teach, let students do what they are good at while remaining literate and numerate, ensure languages are taught from five and teach children to be enterprising.

I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I have always dreamed of being the Education Secretary.

Tell us your best joke A boy head went into a pub and asked for a pint to celebrate his 18th birthday. As he took his first swig, a torso appeared. The boy head exclaimed with delight and quickly took another gulp. Two legs appeared. He could not believe his luck and took one more drink – two arms sprung out of his body. He was so happy he ran out of the door and straight into the road where he was hit by a bus. The barman said: “That boy should have quit while he was a head.”

LEADERSHIP FOCUS ● SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

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22/8/11 10:36:45

RICHARD BENSON R

ANN HENDERSON AN

H Head teacher, SSpringfield Lower School, K Kempston, Bedford

He teacher, Head Wo Woodlands School, Blackpool

WHAT TYPE OF PERSON ARE YOU? In five words? Enthusiastic, passionate, impulsive, fidgety, talkative.

Most prized possession? My golf clubs – and of course my children.

Favourite biscuit? Fig rolls.

Unmissable TV? Waking the Dead.

Top film? The Shawshank Redemption.

Favourite song? At the River by Groove Armada.

Best book? Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Who would play you in the film of your life? I would choose Zac Efron, but more realistically Jim Carrey.

Guilty secret? I never miss an episode of Glee.

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES I went into teaching because I wanted to make a difference.

I had done work experience in offices and knew that I didn’t want to do that. I wanted a job where I would never wake up in the morning and think, “Oh, not again,” and so far I never have.

My own schooling was chequered. I loved my primary experience and always loved playing sport. I remember three teachers above all others who didn’t find my constant talking annoying and disruptive, and helped me direct my enthusiasm in the right direction.

My most embarrassing moment as a teacher was sitting in front of 300 children and having my head shaved for Comic Relief. We challenged the children to raise £400 to make it happen and they raised over £800. As you can see from the photo, it has never grown back.

My leadership style is (I think) leading by example. I won’t ask anyone to do something that I wouldn’t do and I trust people to carry out tasks effectively. I am very lucky to be able to delegate roles to the staff in the school and know that they will complete them usually far better than I could.

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s don’t make the same mistake twice and always hold up your hands and apologise if you have messed up.

It’s okay to make mistakes but you must learn from them, otherwise people lose faith.

If I were the PM, I’d keep my nose out of the majority of schools.

We know what we are doing so let us get on with it. I would also make golf a core subject.

I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I am really scared of spiders.

When I taught a class full-time I always made sure I had a child in the class who was on ‘spider duty’ and could remove the offending arachnid when required.

Tell us your best joke Why are pirates called pirates? Because they aarrgh! (You have to do a pirate-style fist shake. My three-year-old son Harry loves this joke.)

WHAT TYPE OF PERSON ARE YOU? In five words? Driven, obsessive, child-centred, caring, calm.

Most prized possession? My husband.

Favourite biscuit? Lemon puffs.

Unmissable TV? Outnumbered.

Top film? Schindler’s List.

Favourite song? Imagine by John Lennon.

Best book? The Diary of Anne Frank.

Who would play you in the film of your life?

Angelina Jolie – because she is a bit of a rebel.

Guilty secret? I once ate half of my sister’s Easter egg and then wrapped it back up. She was so upset.This is the first time I’ve owned up.

COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES I went into teaching because from personal experience I know how easy it is to demotivate a young person and switch them off from learning. English was the only GCSE I passed first time.

My own schooling was not very successful, but it made me want to make learning fun and successful for all.

My most embarrassing moment as a teacher was when a student in Year One explained that he was bored with the lesson while an inspector was observing.

So I got him to assist with the rest of the numeracy lesson and he taught some of his peers, a great experience which raised his self-esteem.

My leadership style is participative, with lots of coaching. I bite my tongue and sit on my hands a lot because others learn best from doing and problem-solving for themselves. Sometimes it takes longer to get the result, but the learning is more sustained.

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you can never assume because something is written down in a procedure that staff will do it.

If I were the PM, I’d ensure that we focus more energy on the teaching and learning of the most vulnerable and deprived. If we cannot build tolerance and acceptance in a local community we have absolutely no chance of any global harmony.

I shouldn’t be telling you this, but in my first week as head of a new school we were inspected by Ofsted. I produced evidence of everything that was outstanding – but the truth was that I didn’t know where the bodies were buried!

Tell us your best joke As mum returned from the supermarket, her small son pulled out the box of animal crackers. Then he spread the crackers all over the kitchen counter. “What are you doing?” his mum said. “The box says you can’t eat them if the seal is broken,” the boy explained. “I’m looking for the seal.”

English was the only GCSE I passed first time

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS

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BEHIND THE HEADLINES PENSIONS

Pension deficit disorder No one wants to walk out over pensions – but the argument for doing so is strong, finds Anna Scott

D

isruption could mark the start of this year’s autumn term as the NAHT ballots its members on industrial action over the planned reforms to public sector pensions (see news, page 6).

Proposals to replace the finalsalary scheme, increase member contributions from April 2012 and raise the retirement age have been met with anger from school leaders, who will vote in September on whether to strike for the first time in the union’s 114-year history.

The Government’s plans to start formal consultations with teaching unions on changes to the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) were announced in a written ministerial statement from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, published in July. Consultations on the first phase of contribution increases due in April 2012 will be completed by the end of October.

In his statement, the Chief Secretary wrote: “The Government remains committed to securing the full Spending Review savings

20

of £2.3 billion in 2013-14 and £2.8 billion in 2014-15, requiring each scheme to find savings equivalent to a 3.2 percentage-point increase in member contributions.”

The changes are likely to affect the highest earners most, with their contributions increasing by up to six percentage points before tax by 2014-15. The proposed ‘Care’ scheme – ‘career-average revalued earnings’ – means pensions would be based on average earnings rather than the final two years of salary before retirement.

However, NAHT General Secretary Russell Hobby says that while the TPS is overdue a revaluation, it’s not unaffordable. Using it to reduce the deficit means school leaders are effectively making amends for other peoples’ mistakes. “The banking sector is not being taxed to the same degree,” he adds.

He points to a report from the Public Accounts Committee on the impact of the 2007-08 changes to public sector pensions, published in May. These reforms included an increase in retirement age for new members to 60, and an increase of 0.4 per cent for teachers’ contributions. These changes,

LORD HUTTON’S RECOMMENDATIONS Former Labour Work and Pensions Secretary Lord Hutton of Furness was asked by Chancellor George Osborne to chair the Independent Public Services Pension Commission in June 2010. The key recommendations of its report are: • Moving members of the current final salary pension scheme for school leaders to one related to their career-average revalued earnings (Care), ‘as soon as is practical’.

• Maintaining the final salary link for past service for current members.

• Linking the teachers’ normal pension age to the state pension age, which is currently 65. From April 2034 the state pension age will increase again to 67, and from April 2044 to 68, for both men and women.

• Setting an upper limit on the amount contributed by the Government.

If this is exceeded there may be an automatic default.

• Implementing the new schemes before the end of this Parliament in 2015.

as well as the move in 2010 to link pensions to the consumer prices index rather than the retail prices index, have ‘substantially reduced’ the cost of public service pensions – by £67 billion over 50 years, according to the Treasury.

By targeting head teachers, and those considering becoming school leaders, the proposals will exacerbate the already serious problem of recruitment and retention of head teachers, the NAHT says. Furthermore, cutting pensions will have an impact on educational improvements, such as the flagship academies programme.

The NAHT is considering joint action with other teaching unions to challenge the Government over pension cuts. Russell says: “I have not met a single school leader who is keen to take industrial action. It would be an overwhelming indictment of how the pensions issue has been handled by the Government if NAHT members went on national strike.”

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PIQTURED

The primary school head STEPHEN WATKINS Head teacher of Millfield Primary School in Leeds HIS VIEWS

Stephen’s immediate reaction to the Hutton report was disappointment.

“I can comprehend having to pay more to get the same, and I can comprehend paying the same amount to get less,” he says. “But to pay more, get less and work longer, I felt betrayed after all the years of working in teaching. It’s a sad deal really.”

Raising the retirement age will have an impact, he says. The constant interaction with children is

physically wearing. “As a head teacher I don’t think I could work until I’m 68, and as a classroom teacher I definitely couldn’t.”

He believes the Government should have an actuarial review of public service pensions to establish whether or not they are actually affordable.

“There are all sorts of issues that I don’t think they’ve looked at,” he says.

Stephen also believes that the review of public service pensions missed out a key segment of the public sector workforce: MPs. “They are some of the most recognisable public servants, yet their pensions are not looked at.”

Putting head teachers’ pension contributions into an investment fund that members could track, in the way that defined contribution scheme members can, would be a possible alternative to current suggestions, Stephen says. “With the final salary scheme we can’t see where the money is going, and can’t make decisions about our finances,” he says.

MPs are the most recognisable public servants, yet their pensions are not looked at

He is prepared to take industrial action over the pension proposals, but says striking is very difficult for a head teacher to contemplate. “The only people being punished are pupils and parents,” he says. “It’s not the Government that suffers.

“I’m cynical enough to think that nothing will change the Government’s mind – but, then again, it has announced things and then gone back on them in the past.”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 22 ➧ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS 21

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BEHIND THE HEADLINES PENSIONS

The pensions expert STEVE SIMKINS UK head of pensions at KPMG. Steve was seconded from the professional services firm to work on the Independent Public Services Pension Commission’s report. He is an actuary by training. The views are his own and not necessarily those of KPMG HIS VIEWS

There are two aspects to the pensions reform, Steve says: overall affordability and fairness. “It is necessary to do something that is affordable nationally,” he says. “Public sector debt is going to grow with national debt. But if you have got a certain level of reserves, how will you divvy up the pot? Final-salary schemes favour high fliers.”

However, Steve suggests that introducing benefit reductions at the same time as contribution increases has ‘muddied the waters’. Instead, the benefit changes should be brought in before employee contributions are increased. “These two issues have become intertwined,” he says. “At the moment people don’t know what they are going to be paying for. Is it necessary to reform the amount of benefits people get? Yes it is. Is it necessary to ask people to pay almost straight away? No.” Steve also believes that pensions and public sector pay should have been examined together, rather than having two separate reviews – John Hutton’s pensions report and the confusingly similarly named Will Hutton’s Fair Pay Review. “If you think about pensions as part of overall reward then ideally pay and pensions would be reviewed together,” he says.

As the Government has now pushed the proposals to the individual pension schemes, the TPS is considering John Hutton’s proposals. “Someone in the Department for Education is starting to beaver away to add all this together and make sure it comes under the cost

22

Now is the time to get the pressure on before a decision is made and it may be too late

The retired head ERIC SPEAR Retired primary school head teacher and Past President of the NAHT

ceiling,” Steve says. “So as far as unions are concerned, now is the time to get the pressure on and get the messages across before a decision is made and it may be too late.”

But he also points out that the risk for the Government over all of this is of members pulling out of public sector pension schemes. “This is yet to be tested,” he says.

HIS VIEWS

The TPS has not been particularly generous, Eric says. Teachers paid money in and the Government took it out – but would just add on a few extra per cent rather than keep it in line with interest rates and inflation.

“By the 1960s and 1970s – when I started teaching – we thought the TPS was very poor,” he says.

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The union campaigner KATHY JAMES Director of policy and campaigns at the NAHT

REUTERS

HER VIEWS

He also describes the ‘scandals of the TPS in the 1970s’, when people were retired early with no loss of earnings when local authorities wanted to make redundancies. “Those abuses have stopped now but we’ll be continuing to pay for them for some years to come.”

Eric believes that a lot of hype around pensions from the Government is false – there is no evidence that pensions are unsustainable. “While we concede that there needs to be a careful look at the contribution rates, some of these suggestions that teachers’ pensions are unfair are not right,” he says. “We have to recognise that employers’ contributions to pensions are deferred pay. It’s wrong for individuals to increase their pension contributions without employers increasing theirs.”

But he believes that no one would disagree that contributions need to go up. “Teachers are conservatively minded

people when it comes to money. We are looking for a secure scheme and this will cost more.”

And he’s not sure strike action will help. “I think the Government knows that all it has to do is sit it out. The public realise that teaching is a hard job, particularly when they see children on the television rioting, but a long-term strike that costs parents money will just produce a loss of sympathy.”

But there may be another way of looking at calculating pensions which might help them cost less, he says.

“There is currently no mechanism for stepping back from a tough and demanding job without sacrificing your pension entitlement,” he says. “The last two years of your work as a head teacher go towards your pension, but if people step down to a lower-paid job before retirement without losing benefits, it may help pensions cost less.”

Like Stephen Watkins, the NAHT does not want its members to have to pay more to work longer and be paid less, Kathy says. The career-average scheme could be quite difficult to manage for school leaders, she says. Furthermore, the raising of the retirement age is a cause for concern. She points out that it hardly seems fair to expect a 68-year-old to run around after a class of three-year-olds.

“If we compare the teaching profession with an office situation, people with careers based in offices can move to a different structure or job. Teachers always have to work in classrooms,” she says.

Kathy concedes that there were some ‘wonderful noises made in John Hutton’s report’. “Hutton said that all the talk of public service pensions being gold-plated was nonsense, which we agree with, and he said private sector employees being let down over pensions is not a reason to let public sector workers down,” she adds. “But when you get down to the reality in schemes, it looks quite different.”

One problem is that the Government won’t talk ‘realistically’ about pensions, Kathy says. “It won’t share a valuation of the scheme, so we don’t know what needs to be changed. If we knew what the losses were, we could sit down and have a hardcore discussion about how we might be able to change the scheme.”

There is some negotiation going on between the NAHT and the Government over these proposals, but it’s in its early stages, Kathy says. “We’re trying to talk to the Government, because if we get to a place where we don’t have to ballot for industrial action, it’s better all round.”

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With the passing of the Academies Act last year, the door opened for primary schools to apply for academy status. Sarah Campbell explores the pros and cons of the decision

Primary concern ILLUSTRATION: FRANCESCO BONGIORNI

L

ike it or not, there’s no getting away from academies. Since Tony Blair introduced the concept in 2000, more than 800 have come into existence. Most of these are secondaries, but primaries are starting to catch up now that they too are allowed to convert. At the time of writing, 124 primaries had converted, with 200 more in the pipeline for September 2011.

The first academies were secondaries with a sponsor: a business or a charity that funds the school. However, through the Academies Act passed last year the current Government opened up the opportunity to all high-performing schools – including primaries – to convert to academy status without a sponsor and become directly funded

24

by the state. This meant that for the first time, primary head teachers could consider turning their schools into independent state schools.

As with any big change in the educational landscape, there is plenty of opposition to academies.

This comes often from campaign groups and unions such as the NUT concerned about the erosion of the state education system and a lack of public accountability. Many head teachers, too, worry about the impact on surrounding schools as funds that would once have been pooled with and distributed by the local authority (LA) go directly to the academy.

But, when it comes down to it, many leaders will admit that their first duty is to the children in their own school. And if academy status CONTINUED ON PAGE 27 ➧

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A big decision was whether we wanted to wait and see how academy conversion went for others.

But we decided to go ahead and make it work for us

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GOVERNANCE

will benefit the children and school, why wouldn’t they consider it, whatever their beliefs about the system?

Tammie Prince, the principal of Green Lane Primary Academy in Garforth, Leeds, had few qualms about becoming an academy. She was already familiar with the set-up: four years ago her school became a member of the School Partnership Trust (SPT), a local chain incorporating six primary schools and three secondary academies. The trust had become the sponsor for two of those academies after the schools they replaced went into special measures, so the trust already had an academy support team.

Green Lane’s conversion wasn’t a foregone conclusion, though. Tammie says: “There was a lot of discussion around whether a primary school should become an academy, how the SPT could support that transition and how beneficial working in a chain of schools would be to us. Another big decision we had to take was whether we wanted to wait and see how academy conversion went for others.”

She goes on to say that the ethos of the school has been to get in there ‘to make it work for us’, so the decision was made and Green Lane opened as an academy in September last year.

Decision time At the same time, the head teacher and staff of Goddard Park Community Primary School in Swindon were coming to a similar conclusion. Unlike Green Lane, this school has gone it alone and is not part of a chain or federation.

For head teacher and NAHT Past President Mike Welsh, it was all about the money and the freedoms. He gives an example of the action the school has taken recently on attendance.

“In urban areas attendance is always an issue with families that are under economic and social pressure. In the past, the LA welfare officer would just send a message to parents if there was an issue regarding attendance.” But with the LA Spend Equivalent Grant – the money that goes directly to academies instead of via the LA – he has employed a family support worker for three hours a week.

“The support worker meets the parents on their territory. We’ve seen a direct

THE ‘PROS’ OF ACADEMY STATUS… There are five ‘headline freedoms’, as outlined by Bill Watkin, operational director of partnerships and performance networks at the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust – although it’s fair to say not all educationalists will see these as ‘pros’: 1. Freedom from the LA. “Some schools don’t want to be involved with their LA – others think theirs is brilliant. But you can decide how much you want to engage with it,” Bill says.

2. Ability to set pay and conditions. Bill says: “The point has to be made that if you want to recruit the best staff you have to offer attractive packages.

No school leader is going to impose workhouse conditions.” However, this remains a point of huge concern for unions such as the NUT. The NAHT also worries about the downside of this in terms of workforce management.

3. Freedom from the National Curriculum, although what this will mean will depend on the outcome of the curriculum review.

4. Flexibility in the length of terms and school days. Academies are not obliged to stick to 190 teaching days.

5. The LA Spend Equivalent Grant. Bill points out: “This is not additional money; it’s freedom to deploy your money in a different way.”

… AND THE CONS 1. Purchasing power. Alasdair Smith, the national secretary of the Anti-Academies Alliance, says this is one of the biggest concerns for primary schools. He says: “They don’t have economies of scale, so they have to build a business with other academies. It’s taking money out of the LA’s pot, and constructing a market in education for schools to compete with each other.”

2. Opposition. While the head teachers that LF spoke to were supported by their governing bodies and trusted by parents, not all academies convert unopposed. In July, councillors in Otley, Leeds, formally declared their opposition to the conversion of a local grammar school, and pupils at Kingsbury High School in north-west London held a protest against their school’s proposal to become an academy.

3. Other schools could lose out. While academies must agree to help another school to raise its standards, the choice of school is largely down to the academy. In a letter to The Guardian in June, John Eglin, a primary head teacher and parent from Maesbrook, Shropshire, said: “In the case of my own local school they have chosen a feeder primary with few serious difficulties and not one of the county’s more difficult secondary schools. As the new academies cherry-pick the easy schools to support, problems will be left flapping in the wind. This massive hole in education policy needs to be exposed.”

improvement in attendance and therefore in the attainment of those children.”

Not all head teachers find the decision to ‘go academy’ so straightforward. Kevin McPartland, the head teacher of St Bartholomew’s Catholic Primary School in Swanley, Kent, is still soul-searching.

On the one hand, he has calculated that by becoming an academy he could free up £117,000 from his budget to put towards the cost of building a library – a project he has had on the go for three years.

On the other… “I’m concerned about the sustainability of it. If I’m going to

be in a position where I’m adrift from the LA and I’m having to buy all my services, after I get my bonus at the beginning can I sustain my good school without the back-up support?” he says.

A second worry for him is the requirement for converter schools to support struggling neighbouring schools. “We didn’t want to be forced into clustering with anybody. My agenda as a head is to improve my school. That’s what I’m appointed to do – not to improve other schools,” he says.

Not all heads will agree with this view, but Kevin explains that he is also concerned not to lose the ability to cluster with the schools he has always worked with, and it’s more a case that he would prefer to plough any spare capacity back into his own school CONTINUED ON PAGE 28 ➧ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS

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than into someone else’s. And upon further questioning, he does believe he can sustain his school financially after the first year of conversion. His worry is more indicative of his general concerns about the whole academy system.

He is so concerned, in fact, that he wrote a letter to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, after the announcement that the 200 worst-performing primary schools would be closed and reopened as academies.

“Please advise us why we should now proceed with a time-consuming exercise which may produce no extra funding, deprive us of LA support on standards and associate us with 200 under-performing schools,” he wrote in his letter. Elaborating on this, he told LF: “I’ve not got faith that the Department for Education really knows where it’s going with academies.”

Opposition campaign He’s by no means the only one. The AntiAcademies Alliance has been campaigning since 2005 to halt the academies programme. Its national secretary, Alasdair Smith, sums up the Academies Act as an example of ‘the depraved way politicians treat education’. “We’ve got an education policy that is being driven by a narrow ideology of neo-liberalism. If I could have any wish granted it is that politicians would look at the cold evidence of whether this is going to benefit children in the long run.

The Education Select Committee hasn’t even done this,” he says.

He adds that the media gets worked up about the ‘privatisation’ of the NHS, but it’s shameful that they ignore the ‘privatisation’ of state education. He also points to the recent riots in cities across England as a symptom of a segregated society – which he says the academies programme is creating.

Funding for special educational needs (SEN) is also causing concern. The local picture remains confused, with parts of funding coming through the LA and others directly from the Government.

Funding for deaf children’s services, for example, still comes from the LA, but

28

CO-OPs: AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL? The Department for Education approved a co-operative model for converter academies at the end of May. Co-operative schools have been around since the 1830s. At the moment, 150 schools of varying sizes and types operate under co-operative trusts – bodies whose members are parents, pupils, staff and community representatives. The trusts are run democratically by the members, and members adhere to the values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others.

Mervyn Wilson, chief executive and principal of the Co-operative College, a charity that promotes co-operative values, ideas and principles, says that he and his colleagues wanted to develop a co-operative model for academies as “a democratic alternative to the top-down models with minimal stakeholder involvement that we’re seeing”. He is referring to the chains taking over numerous schools, which he worries are predatory and undemocratic.

Several clusters of primary schools have already registered interest in converting to academy status using the co-operative model, although the first group of 12 opening by the end of this year are secondaries.

To find out more, visit www.co-op.ac.uk

I wish that politicians would look for evidence of whether this is going to benefit children in the long run

with local agencies to get assessments and reports done in order to access funding is easier directly through the LA,” she says.

This is an instance where working with the LA benefits the academy, although in general Tammie buys her services elsewhere.

In particular, she says that where she used to have 10 per cent of her budget top-sliced by the LA for central services such as HR and payroll, she now spends only 3.8 per cent buying these services from the SPT – and she says the service itself is better.

Changing landscape after the Government’s changes to school funding currently being thrashed out, this could change.

Jo Campion, deputy director of policy and campaigns at the National Deaf Children’s Society, says that at the moment LAs can fund each child irrespective of the school they attend. “But if SEN funding were to be divided up equally between academies, we could end up with a situation where an academy would get its share of funding but not get a deaf child, and another academy gets a deaf child but with not enough money to buy the support for that child,” she adds. This is particularly of concern for primary school children with hearing problems because this is when they learn the language of the classroom.

Tammie at Green Lane gets funding for statemented children and for School Action Plus through the LA, and School Action funding from central Government. For her, for now, this works. “Being able to work

Tammie remembers a lot of ‘difficult conversations’ with the LA around the conversion to academy status. “Over the years – and I think this has happened in most LAs – statutory provision and what the LA provides as part of your top-slice have been muddled together. To unravel that has been quite challenging,” she says.

For primary school heads considering the academy route there appear to be two main considerations: first, the impact on the children and the school; second, the implications of being part of a movement away from LA control. While many heads relish the opportunities and freedoms that academy status will give them, the long-term impact of this change to the educational landscape is far from certain.

The NAHT and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust are holding a joint conference on primary school academies on 4 November in Central London.

To find out more, contact Bill Watkin: 020 7802 0710; bill.watkin@ssatrust.org.uk

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SPECIAL NEEDS

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Thirty years ago, Aonghus Gordon turned a derelict mill into a college offering an alternative curriculum for young people who had been failed by mainstream education. Today, it’s a thriving educational trust.

By Rebecca Grant

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KAREN ROBINSON

Turning lives around

A

onghus Gordon, founder of the Ruskin Mill Educational Trust, hadn’t even completed his teacher-training course when it dawned on him that he would never be happy working in a mainstream school.

He had this moment of clarity while on a placement at a secondary school. While he was there he witnessed some boys behaving inappropriately towards teaching staff and decided to take action. “I was shocked that the teachers had no response,” he says. “My diagnosis of the situation was that the curriculum didn’t serve the context for which they were coming to school every day, so I suggested an outdoor curriculum.”

However, his suggestion caused a ‘dustbomb’ when he brought it up with the school leaders, and he realised he was fighting a losing battle.

“When I got back to Bretton Hall, where I was studying, there was a glint in the eye of the

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SPECIAL NEEDS

principal who said: ‘Aonghus, are you ever going to teach at a school?’ And I said: ‘I doubt it.’”

But Aonghus, a self-confessed social entrepreneur, was passionate about education, having studied the learning processes of young people all over the world, from nomadic tribes in East Africa to therapeutic methods in the US. He knew if he was going to work in the education world it would be on a project he started himself. That opportunity arose when he inherited a derelict mill from his mother, which he renovated with a view to setting it up as a centre for cultural development.

He named the centre, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, Ruskin Mill after the 19th-century social thinker John Ruskin – one of Aonghus’s biggest inspirations.

The mill evolved into a college in the early 1980s after Aonghus began working in a special school that used the Rudolf Steiner teaching method.

“The school had some serious problems with young people not continuing in education after the age of 16, so I offered them a curriculum down at Ruskin Mill,” says Aonghus. The group took him up on the offer, and Aonghus trialled his ‘alternative’ curriculum on them, which involved a kinaesthetic approach to learning, where students learn through physical activity. So instead of sitting in a classroom trying to master languages and mathematics, the students got to try their hands at farming and carpentry. “It was based on a kind of self-reflective process,” Aonghus says. “You always looked at whether you’d been effective in your task, whether it was picking out vegetables, making a blacksmith’s poker or building a stool.”

A college in demand The result was that these students – who would otherwise have ended up passing through what Aonghus calls the ‘revolving door’ of social services – were able to access opportunities that were previously unavailable to them, such as employment and living independently. Within 18 months of that trial year, Aonghus’s phone was ringing off the hook – social workers and local authorities from around the country wanted to send students to Ruskin Mill.

This demand for Ruskin Mill’s alternative curriculum has led to the expansion of the college into an educational trust, which comprises a further three institutions: Glasshouse College in the Midlands; plus Freeman College and Brantwood School in Sheffield. The latter was an independent girls’ school that was purchased by the trust earlier this year and offers specialist

32

Through working with living creatures the students learn to put something else before their own needs

education to young people aged seven to 19. The trust has also helped set up Clervaux Trust in Darlington for 14to 16-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training. It will form part of the Ruskin Mill Educational Trust by September.

Currently, 90 students graduate from the trust’s colleges each year. Because it caters for a wide spectrum of students – from those with learning difficulties and behavioural problems to a broad range of special educational needs – Aonghus says that thousands of people have benefited from the trust’s learning methods over the past three decades.

Around 85 per cent of those who graduate each year go on to achieve their goal of securing employment or living independently – a statistic that’s even more impressive considering the national average rate of employment for those with learning disabilities is under seven per cent. “Delivering our education method does cost the state more,” Aonghus admits, “But the question the state has to answer is what is the ultimate objective? Student

progression and autonomy, or a cheaper option that will in time come back through the revolving door?”

The trust makes every effort to ensure these young people don’t end up back in the system. When they’ve completed their three years at college, students aren’t simply shown the door and left to tackle the world of work on their own. Instead the trust offers a transition programme – something that has proved an even more crucial lifeline during the recession.

“We have a strong transition programme, and we’re lucky that the team that works with the students has a lot of experience in making sure they can move on to further education or into volunteer work or employment,” says Elisabeth Johnson, principal of Ruskin Mill College. “They’re aren’t very many jobs for anybody at the moment, let alone for somebody who needs a bit of additional support.”

Due to the broad range of special needs that students have, Elisabeth says it’s difficult to pinpoint what can be classed as a successful outcome for students after they leave the colleges. But there are many

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Aonghus Gordon, founder of the Ruskin Mill Educational Trust

learned first-hand how the alternative curriculum benefits this particular student group. “One of the advantages of working with living creatures is that you learn to put something else before your own needs,” she explains. “For example, when you are moving fish from one pond to another you can’t stop because one person is having a bad time.You have to say: ‘I understand, and we will go through it later, but at the moment we have these things that are depending on us to look after them,’ so it was a very interesting way of getting them to understand others’ needs and to build relationships.”

Life experience

student success stories that fill her with pride. “We’ve had one young man who had very severe communication difficulties and we managed to get him a volunteer job with the council. He goes around helping to clean up and do a bit of landscaping work. He was thrilled to bits because he gets a uniform with his name on it and he knows that he’s valued and appreciated for what he does. We have people who go on and do courses in mainstream further education colleges and are now living independently, or with a partner, so it’s lovely to see them integrate back into

society and give something back.”

Elisabeth has just finished her first year as principal, but she has been involved with the trust for 13 years, initially joining to manage Ruskin Mill’s trout farm. Although she had experience in environmental education, which is at the heart of Ruskin Mill’s curriculum, she admits that working with the Ruskin Mill students has been a ‘learning journey’. “It probably took a good couple of years to really start to get my head around it,” she says. “I’m still learning things now, even after 13 years.”

Through managing the trout farm she

The trust’s work to improve students’ life skills extends beyond the daily classes. All three colleges offer a residential programme that enables students to live with families or individuals in the local community.

Oliver Cheney, principal of Glasshouse College, says that for many students, it’s their first taste of independent living. “For some of them it’s the first time that they’ve moved away from home, which as well as being a great opportunity is also a challenge for some of them. It’s a chance for them to learn living skills such as cooking, and managing money and bank accounts, all of those day-to-day things.”

However, the non-residential students don’t necessarily miss out on this experience. “We have a very extensive independent travel curriculum, as a lot of students who come to us, even if they’re 18 or 19 years old, have always had to rely on parents or guardians to ferry them places. It can be a life-changing skill for them to be able to catch a bus somewhere, and it can open up a whole new world of CONTINUED ON PAGE 34 ➧ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS 33

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SPECIAL NEEDS Clervaux Trust Opened: 2009 Number of students: 40 The trust has facilities at Clow Beck eco-farm in Croft-onTees, and Bishop’s House, a bakery and cafe in Darlington.

It students are aged between 14 and 25.

Glasshouse College Opened: 2000 Number of students: 85 Based at the former Royal Doulton glassworks property, the college also includes a commercial glass centre that offers employment opportunities to students.

Freeman College Opened: 2000 Number of students: 95 It was named after Arnold Freeman, who founded the Settlement movement in Sheffield.

Activities on offer at the college include silversmithing and other metal trades.

Brantwood School Ruskin Mill College Opened: 1984 Number of students: 101 A former water mill, the college is located in the Horsley Valley. The college site now comprises 100 acres, and facilities include a working farm.

opportunities that they haven’t previously had,” says Oliver.

Like Elisabeth, Oliver is new to the role of principal, but has been involved with the trust for seven years, previously working with Freeman College’s principal, Helen Kippax. However, his background differs from other college leaders, as he previously worked for the NHS rather than in education. And although he had worked on education programmes in the health service, he was impressed by how well the trust’s methods worked in practice.

“What was immediately unique about it was that it was combining work that I’d seen in the health service with work I’d seen done by the education authority and by social care,” says Oliver. “Those three different areas of work were happening in one place, so the experience for students is more holistic than anything I’d experienced within the public sector.”

This three-pronged approach is used in all of the colleges. Helen Kippax, principal of Freeman College, explains that the method helps young people take control and change their lives. “We offer practical skills and theraputic education,” she says. “It’s all about enabling that student to engage and to be able to access the

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education. The first engagement is to make something useful and beautiful for yourself.

The second is to make something useful and beautiful for a small community like a household or your family. And the third is to do that for the world of work. So it’s like an apprenticeship model. All those strands work together.”

Opened: 2011 Number of students: 15 (to increase to 50) Brantwood, Ruskin Mill’s newest family member, is an independent special school and registered children’s home for pupils aged seven to 19.

The college is a holistic organisation for staff and for students – not looking to blame, but to solve and make things better

A tough audience Helen has been leading the college since it opened in 2005 and has steered it through its pioneering stage. Now, it is at full capacity and is set to welcome its biggest-ever intake of students when the September term starts. She has also taken on an additonal challenge of becoming a trustee for Clervaux College.

Now her own college is thriving, one of Helen’s biggest challenges is maintaining a strong support network among its 240 staff members. She says: “The staff here need to take care of themselves in order for them to take care of their students.

“They need a strong sense of compassion and strong team skills to support each other.

They also need to see the whole college as a holistic organisation for staff and for students – not looking to blame, but looking to solve and make things better.”

One of the things that Helen looks for in staff is a good self-reflective process, which Aonghus himself lists as one of the three main qualities staff need to be able to work in the trust. The other two are a technical competence and a passion for the arts.

Aonghus likens working in the trust to improvised theatre, as you have to be constantly aware of what’s taking place.

“Our students are probably the best trainers for staff because they are an unpredictable audience,” he says.

“The audience has to be heard, otherwise the performance is not particularly effective. So you have to hear and listen to what the students are telling you, and they usually tell you some home truths if you get something wrong.”

Find out more at www.rmet.org.uk

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Performance

by John Agard Poet

presents

Pie Corbett

Raising Standards in Writing - developing poetry, storytelling/writing through Art.

Pie Corbett Inservice conference at the Turner Contemporary (Margate) in the Foyle room.

The inspirational, charismatic and creative Literacy educator Pie Corbett will explore with delegates developing poetry, storytelling and writing through the Arts e.g paintings, sculpture, prints and photographs Date Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Venue Turner Contemporary (Margate) Cost £180.00 + VAT including lunch & refreshments OR £172.50 + VAT including refreshments Be quick to Limited avoid disappointment

Group booking over 5 delegates 10% discount

places available

Delegate details: (Ms/Mrs/Miss/Mr)

Forename:

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Position: ____________________________________ School/organisation_________________________________________________________________________ Address: _____________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ Postcode: _________________________ Tel: ______________________________________ Fax: ____________________________________________ Email: _____________________________________________________________________________________ Dietary requirements: Vegetarian: ☐ YES

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A Jubileebooks.co.uk event Eddie Burnett Children’s Book Consultant & Literacy Events Coordinator 31a Vanbrugh Park, Blackheath, London, SE3 7AE T. (020) 8293 6060 T. (020) 8265 4645 F. (020) 8465 5111 E. eddie.burnett@jubileebooks.co.uk Jubileebooks.co.uk SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS

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INNOVATION

For Hollinsclough Primary, it was a case of change or die.

Now, reborn as a ‘flexi-school’, it is reaching out to the home-educated community. Steve Smethurst reports

n g i x e l F a

school’s muscles I

t’s said that desperate times call for desperate measures and there’s certainly a hint of that about the changes at Hollinsclough CE Primary School in the Peak District. After all, not many schools can survive with just five pupils on the roll, which was the situation head teacher Janette MountfordLees faced in 2009-10. Having said that, there is also a saying about necessity being the mother of invention, which is perhaps more pertinent given the innovative approach to flexible schooling that Hollinsclough has subsequently pioneered.

Janette recalls that during the dark times there was a very real possibility that the school would no longer be deemed viable.

This would have been a blow for the staff, the village and the local community, because although it is a small school with

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just two classrooms, its wide corridor is home to the ‘village office’, as well as a nursery, school office, library, toilets and a cloakroom. It also offers an after-school maths group, yoga classes and a monthly family film club.

It was against this background that an enquiry came in from a parent who homeeducated her children. She wanted to know if the school could take her children parttime – for two days a week. Janette says: “We thought ‘why not?’ It didn’t interfere with what we were doing and we needed more children to attend.”

It also fitted in with her desire to remove barriers to learning and her belief in ‘stage not age’. At the time, her five pupils were of different ages, at different stages and had different needs. The result was that each had an individual programme.

“It wasn’t something that we did deliberately. It happened because we needed

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‘I see no reason why part-time education shouldn’t be available if it suits the children’s needs and learning styles’

NEIL O’CONNOR/UNP

to do it that way. It had nothing to do with personalised learning at that stage,” she says.

“However, I do passionately believe that education should be tailored to the needs of each child and can see no reason why parttime education shouldn’t be available if that suits their needs and learning styles.”

Today, there are 19 pupils (10 full-time, nine part-time) with another nine in preschool, and the school has thrown its doors open to home-educated students with its ‘learning hub’, which offers regular educational workshops and sessions where home educators can use the school’s library, among other resources. With hindsight, it’s a move that Janette says better reflects the needs of a modern society.

“Becoming a ‘flexi-school’ has opened our eyes in terms of society’s needs and the way they are changing, although it was CONTINUED ON PAGE 38 ➧

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INNOVATION

initially like jumping off a cliff and seeing where we’d land. It really opened a Pandora’s Box.” Sir Jim Rose, the former director of inspection at Ofsted who authored the 2009 Rose Review of the primary curriculum, feels it has been successful, however. He’s been involved with Hollinsclough as an adviser through the charity CfBT Education Trust and says that while it’s not necessarily a blueprint for others to follow, it has met parents’ wishes and children’s educational needs.

“It should provide a helpful narrative that sets out some of the issues for parents, head teachers, governors and local authorities (LAs), should they wish to offer flexi-schooling,” he says. “Hollinsclough has taken a flexible approach that enables parent-led educational activities to blend with school-based educational activities.”

An alternative offering The school now offers part-time schooling to those parents in the region who teach their children at home, to give them the option of backing up home schooling with some time in the classroom. In this instance, the child comes in on agreed days, wears the school uniform and joins in with the timetabled opportunities for that day. For those who don’t want to commit to this much school time, homeeducated children can also attend the learning hub at least once a fortnight with their parents or carers.

The offering – which began in the summer of 2010 – has attracted much interest. Janette recalls: “Once we had the first part-time students, we got calls from other parents who were interested. Then I had the first call from a newspaper and then a television company got in touch and came into the school. Now we have pupils from as far afield as Greater Manchester and Yorkshire.

“One of the advantages of being a small school is that we get to know each child and their family to a depth that may not be possible in a larger school. This means we can give each child a personalised learning plan with all the advantages of one-to-one tuition as well as participation in group work and whole-class teaching.”

Organisational and timetabling difficulties have had to be resolved.

For example, many of the flexi-schooled children travel long distances and sometimes arrive late to school. Some children feel left out or marginalised if they miss events such as educational visits. Janette was also concerned to ensure that children who attend full time did not feel hard done-by.

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A CRUCIBLE OF INNOVATION? Could the flexi-school model keep innovators, school leaders, parents and the Secretary of State happy?

Probably not, but let us know what you think The flexi-school model is likely to appeal to parents who take the views of Sir Ken Robinson to heart. The education guru used his RSA lecture last year to say: “The problem with education is that countries are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past and in the process are alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose in going to school.”

This would be music to the ears of home-educator Bina Widdowson (right), a parent who uses the Hollinsclough learning hub. In her opinion – and it’s a view that is shared by many homeeducators – ‘schools are not working’.

She says: “We all know about the proportion of children who leave school without being able to read or write effectively. We know about the violence and disaffection that characterise some schools and we know about the large number of school leaders whose dedication and talent is exhausted after three or four years in the role.

“But what concerns me just as much

One of the undoubted successes has been that pupils who had previously refused to go to school attend Hollinsclough consistently for one or two days a week. “We have even had some children

is that parents flock to primaries that Ofsted has called ‘outstanding’, not understanding that the grade is usually attained through a culture of testpassing and hoop-jumping.”

This has long been a concern of the NAHT and is backed up by the fact that many universities set their own entrance exams to gauge the worth of applicants. As Bina says: “Children who are successful at school win the race to get into universities and it’s there that they realise that doing exactly what they’ve been told to do in order to pass tests is no longer valued. These issues will not be resolved while funding is linked to league tables, and league tables are linked to exam results.”

‘Naturally inquisitive’ A formidable barrier to home education is that it requires a full-time parent and since there’s no funding available for this, it’s not a viable option for most families. Access to facilities is also an issue. At primary level you

who had never been inside a school before,” says Janette. “Parents are surprised to find that children who had previously refused to attend now look forward to the next session.”

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can approximate a chemistry laboratory in your kitchen – at A level, that won’t do.

Most frustratingly perhaps, finding somewhere to sit exams is also an obstacle. In theory, anyone can sit any exam at an authorised centre, but Bina’s experience is that schools are reluctant to let external candidates sit exams.

As such, flexi-schooling offers great opportunities for the home-educator. It also offers options for disaffected schoolchildren. Bina says: “At Hollinsclough, children who have withered in conventional institutions have flourished in a loving home and caring school.

Home-educators also value the opportunity to use school to teach specific subjects, such as French and music.”

Perhaps of greater import is Bina’s view that a school which becomes a flexi-school loses the ability to ‘teach to the test’.

“Home-educated children will simply hijack banal exercises with insistent demands to

learn something properly. At the same time, home-educated children learn that rules need to be respected, and you need systems to be able to function.”

Best of both worlds So could it be that flexischooling offers an opportunity for both parents and schools?

It certainly seems to fit in with Michael Gove’s vision for schools.

In his speech to the National College for School Leadership’s annual conference last year, he said: “If we can develop schools to become crucibles of innovation on behalf of the whole system – working for the sake of all children, as well as meeting the needs of parents who are seeking different provision – then the sum continues to be greater than the parts. And so every school, regardless of its status, works for itself and for the whole system.”

• But what do you think? Email us at naht@redactive.co.uk

The learning hub had its first meeting in January with more than 20 parents and children attending – and enquiries are still taken about it weekly. The school hopes that it will provide a stepping stone to flexi-schooling, but so far parents appear to be content to pay a financial contribution to the hub rather than ‘going into the system’. They like the idea of borrowing books and other resources and one parent has taken responsibility for developing a loan system.

What the future holds In terms of progression to secondary, Hollinsclough has made links with two secondary schools, one in Staffordshire and one in Derbyshire. The model under consideration is that children register with the secondary school, but work in the Hollinsclough hub with an outreach worker from the secondary school supporting the school at regular intervals. The school is also exploring the possibility of becoming a registered examination centre for GCSEs.

From the LA perspective, it is recognised that this could become a model for other schools – although clearly not all. It’s believed to be the only school in the country attempting to take this approach and to overcome the many barriers to effective flexi-schooling.

Of course, there have been some frustrations, particularly with regard to assessment and registration codes. “It’s been like Little Britain and the ‘computer says no’ sketch,” says Janette. “With our part-time students who have two days in school and three days out, we have to be careful we don’t have Ofsted running down the road to close us down.

Registration codes are the worst. We were originally told to use the C code – which gave us a terrible attendance rating – then the B code (where we’re responsible for education off site). We just have to hope they don’t go shark-hunting on those days as we don’t want to be liable! To get around it, we ask parents to sign an agreement to say they are responsible if the child is not in school.”

Overall, however, Janette feels that her school reflects the saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. “My view is that wholeclass instruction is not suited to our country’s needs – it leaves no room for creativity, collaboration or self-management.

It’s passive knowledge transfer and an unquestioning requirement to complete assigned tasks,” she says.

“Schools still reflect the factory model that suited life a century ago. We need to challenge the assumption that knowledge and expertise reside only within the walls of an educational establishment – ask instead what might be gained from tapping into resources that exist in the wider community and within the networks that people are already connected to.

“Also, parents are increasingly working in more flexible ways but school hours remain the same. All they ever tend to offer is fivedays-a-week provision from 9am until 3pm or 4pm. There’s no flexibility and we need to move with the times.”

Find out more about Hollinsclough at www.hollinsclough.staffs.sch.uk

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SERVICE SCHOOLS

JIM VARNEY

The children of members of the armed forces face a unique set of challenges – as do their schools.

Sarah Campbell reports

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Are they being

served?

T

ake a stroll round Le Cateau Community Primary School in Catterick Garrison and you’d be hard-pressed to work out why this school is different from any other. It has the usual collection of low buildings and playgrounds, surrounded by woodland and streams.

As far as outward appearances go, this is an ordinary North Yorkshire state primary with about 400 pupils. But what makes it different is that in any one year up to half of these children might up sticks and be replaced with newcomers.

In addition, many of them have the constant worry of a parent being deployed to an area of military conflict. About two thirds of the pupils at Le Cateau are the children of service personnel stationed at the garrison. Grahame Shepherd (pictured), the head teacher, says CONTINUED ON PAGE 42 ➧ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS

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SERVICE SCHOOLS

we access some counselling support through the relationship charity Relate, and we’ve been involved in a mental health programme. To put it bluntly, we make sure we’re well tooled up for any eventuality to ensure we can support the children and the parents,” Grahame says.

Supporting families is part and parcel of the role of the service children’s school. And in more isolated military communities abroad it becomes even more central.

Kathryn Forsyth is the director of education at Service Children’s Education (SCE), a Ministry of Defence (MoD) agency based in Germany that runs 39 schools for about 12,000 children of serving personnel. She says: “The school is a haven in the military community in the sense that it’s stable and secure.” While in many service families the mother, father or even both could be serving, Kathryn says it’s mainly the dads who are away. “We have to support the mums, and often they’re very young.”

LE CATEAU: JIM VARNEY; SOLDIERS: GETTY

Dispelling the myths

About two thirds of the children in Grahame Shepherd’s school are from forces families.

‘The most important thing is that they don’t have a stamp on them saying “service child”.

To me they are just children in this school’ that 15 nationalities are represented at his school. The majority of the non-English pupils are from Nepali families because the Army trains Gurkhas here, but Grahame says he also has children from Fiji, the Philippines, Thailand, Hungary, the US, Gambia and the Dominican Republic.

“The most important thing is that they don’t have a stamp on them saying ‘service child’,” says Grahame. “To me they are just children in this school. Obviously there are certain challenges they face – and we face with them – but then, all children have their own challenges.”

Grahame’s biggest concerns are mobility, separation and loss. Turnover changes year on year, he says, but if there is a big regimental move, half the school can go with it, as in 2004-05 when 177 children left and 199 enrolled. Grahame adds with

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some understatement that it makes curriculum planning and assessment difficult. Plus, it can be unsettling for the local children who stay at the school.

The separation issue is two-fold: not only is there the deployment itself, but training can take place up to a year in advance, meaning families are apart in the lead-up.

And loss is a real possibility. Grahame says that in the past few years he has had to deal with only two bereavements, but his way of supporting a family through the death or injury of a loved one is to make it business as usual for the children at school. “It really helps their security and wellbeing,” he says.

That’s not to say the children don’t receive additional help. Le Cateau currently gets funding from North Yorkshire County Council for extra teaching assistants and a learning mentor. “We also do play therapy,

Like Grahame’s school, when the worst happens, SCE schools are well prepared. “If we do hear the dreadful, tragic news that a parent has been killed or badly injured, a process kicks in,” says Kathryn. The agency has a team of education psychologists, social workers and counsellors and all school staff are trained in bereavement support.

“Everyone from the Army unit welfare officer through to the class teacher is involved in supporting that child and family.”

But the schools do also try to make the deployment of a parent a constructive experience for the children. Ben Turner, the head teacher of Blankenhagen School at the Princess Royal Barracks, an Army garrison in Gütersloh, northwest Germany, describes how his school does this through a ‘regimental mascot exchange’. “We keep a cuddly toy (Harry the Horse at the moment), and the regiment or squadron takes a similar toy on tour. We then receive regular updates about the adventures of the toy involving the everyday activities of the squadron, so the children get to see pictures of mum or dad going about their job.”

He also tries to educate the children about the complexities of the conflict in which their parents are engaged. He has done this through a project called ‘Little Kites’, where the children seek to discover the history, art and culture of Afghanistan.

It dispels the myth that their parents are fighting some ‘bogeyman’, he says.

Blankenhagen School gained a satisfactory rating in its last Oftsed inspection and SCE prides itself on having no failing schools; in fact 60 per cent of its schools are

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outstanding. High-quality education provision for service families abroad and in the UK is a central tenet of the Government’s military covenant (see box), and is overseen by the MoD’s Director of Children and Young People, Lynda Fisher, who is also the chief executive of SCE overseas. Her directorate is based at Land Forces headquarters in Andover. This is a small team of eight people including assistant directors Colonel David Cartwright and Olivia Denson.

“The key driver here is operational capability,” says David. Olivia adds: “A happy family means a happy service man or woman. An unhappy family means an unhappy service man or woman who is distracted from his or her duty.”

Lynda explains that the advantage of the MoD having responsibility for service schools overseas is that it is able to be more flexible than an English local authority (LA). For example, SCE schools do not have rigid admissions limits, meaning they can expand and contract according to the

THE NATION’S DUTY TO FORCES CHILDREN “Children of members of the armed forces should have the same standard of, and access to, education (including Early Years services) as any other UK citizen in the area they live,” states the military covenant.

As part of this obligation, the Government has announced two sources of funding for schools. One is a pupil premium (separate to the pupil premium for deprived children) of £200 per child who has a parent in the armed forces. This is more of a compensation than extra funding, and was calculated according to what having a service child costs in terms of administration, support and parental interviews. Unlike with the regular pupil premium, heads are not required to demonstrate improvements in attainment.

The other source is a new fund of £3 million per year over four years. Schools across the UK with service children in them have been invited to bid for this grant for specific projects. Colonel David Cartwright outlines an example of what it could be used for: “There are schools that have to sustain staff when there’s been a drop in numbers because a unit’s moved out – but the LA needs to keep it open because they know from the MoD that the numbers will go up again, so they have to manage that dip. But we also expect to see a lot of creative and co-operative bids.”

The Government has written to schools that are known to have service children about the £3 million fund. However, if your school caters for such children but you have not been approached, please email LF-PSC-CYP-Mailbox@mod.uk

CONTINUED ON PAGE 44 ➧

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SERVICE SCHOOLS

number of postings to that garrison. They are able to employ extra teaching assistants and welfare workers to help deal with the mobility and turbulence of service life.

The directorate has also had an important influence on the treatment of service children in the UK, including being instrumental in the introduction of the pupil premium (see box, page 43). But that’s not to say it gets it right all the time. In May, Ofsted produced a report on the quality of education provision for service children. It found that mobility inevitably took its toll on educational achievement, especially during exam years, although it did point out that service children generally performed as well as their non-military peers, if not better, especially in overseas schools. It praised the work of schools and agencies abroad, and also of some English LAs, but expressed concern that there was no accurate record of the number of service children, and that the transfer of their educational records between schools was uncoordinated – they were often delayed or didn’t arrive at all.

A question of definition Olivia Denson acknowledges these issues, but points out that keeping record of the number of service children in the UK isn’t as simple as doing a headcount. For one thing, she says, the definition of a service

44

child is by no means fixed. “It isn’t clear, for example, whether it includes children who have a parent who is serving but is not living with them because the parents are divorced, or the children of reservists and people in the Territorial Army who are experiencing high levels of deployment and turbulence,” she says. She adds that this has been raised with the Department for Education in its consultation on a new code of admissions. Another problem is that

families are not obliged to tell schools that they have a serving parent, and some even prefer not to.

Olivia does concede that the transfer of education records could be better, and the directorate is working with SCE and UK schools to improve this – in fact, Grahame Shepherd is the chairman of a committee looking at aspects of this. For children transferring between English schools and SCE schools it generally isn’t that difficult to get them integrated into the new school’s curriculum. The biggest issues arise if they are moving between England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

A service child’s education, then, is by no means a bad one, and the challenges of mobility are no greater than those faced by any other family that moves a lot. Anecdotal evidence suggests that service children are more socialised and confident than their peers because they have to move and make new friends so often. Grahame says that having service children in his school actually enriches the experience for the other children. There can’t be many geography lessons on the Himalayas that have “living artefacts telling us about their homes in Nepal”, he says.

It looks like service children – and their non-military friends – are being served quite well.

More about SCE: www.sceschools.com

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NAHT is an independent trade union and professional association representing over 28,500 leaders in education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland across all phases in the 0-19 age range.

• Education management and employment advice; • Legal support;

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16/8/11 14:35:33 09:12:08 24/8/11

ROUND-UP

WHAT’S NEW?

The latest products, books and teaching resources The Essential Guide to Coachingg and Mentoring (second edition) Judith Tolhurst Pearson £16.99 As an introduction to using coaching with staff in a school context, this guide can assist head teachers to build a coaching culture in their school and to develop the leadership capacity of staff. It shows how to share and distribute leadership effectively, along with new strategies for leading teams.

It’s also designed to be practical and has numerous case studies, top tips, learning reviews, chapter objectives, summaries and weblinks. It’s up-to-date and relevant – not just to head teachers but to the full range of educational professionals in schools.

Brilliant Head Teacher Iain Erskine Pearson £14.99 What does it really take to become a ‘brilliant’ head teacher? Iain Erskine attempts to answer this question by exploring the qualities and skills required for the role as well as what leading, organising and managing a school really involves. The book aims to teach prospective heads how to inspire and motivate staff, work with parents, governors, support staff, teachers and the wider school while creating a positive environment for learning. Naturally, there are ‘brilliant’ tips – plus examples – and recaps feature in each of the chapters, which cover subject areas such as Ofsted, self-evaluation, the school budget and challenging situations.

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Myy LLife M iffe ffor or Sc Schools choolss – te teachers’ eacheerss’ resources re esourcces on yyoung oun ng rrunaways unaway ayss My Life is a ffree reee KS KS2 S2 PSHEE an and nd citize citizenship ensh hip p teaching te each hingg res resource sourrce produc produced ced byy T The hee Ch Children’s hildrren’s Society.

So ocieety. y These Theese lessons lesssonss he help elp p cchildren hild dren n to o understand un nderstaand what itt me means eans to o run aw away, wayy, wh why hy young yo oun ng peop people ple m might ight d do o it, an and nd h how ow w to o ma manage anagge the th he rrisks iskss inv involved. volvved. Thee las last st le lesson esso on p provides rovvides activities ac ctivitiess an and nd supp support portt to help hellp children child dren n know kno ow who w ho to talkk to and d wheree to o seek h help elp p wh when hen n dealing d ealiing with h fe feelings eelin ngs and d pro problems obleemss tha that at m may ay ccause ausse th them hem m to o run n aw away. way. www.mylife4schools.org.uk/MyLife g / y

ISTOCK

Why W hy W Wednesday ednesd day iss ‘no no op pens ens d day day’ y’ H o iss a cam Hello campaign mpaign run b

by T Thee C Co Communication omm mun nicaation Trust, Tru T ust, t w which hich h h iiss ra raising aisin ng aw awareness wareeneess o off sp speech, peeech, h language lang guage aand nd com communication mmunicatiion issu issues ues amo among ongg everyone eve veryo yone w workin working k ng w with ith t cchildre children d en aand nd d you young oung n pe peo people. op ple In n September, Sept e teem mb ber H Hello’s l theme e e forr thee m month t iss ‘back a to o school’ c o aand it iss encouraging n u g schools h l to o spend p d on n ne day a ffocusing u ng on n speaking p k g and nd listening. s n g W Wednesday n d 28 September e e b is th theirr suggested g e d day a tto take a part, r but b it i can a be b carried a e o out on anyy day ay of the h ye year.. By signing n g up p forr No o Pens e Dayy Wednesday, W d s y you o w will receive r e e a free fr activity t ty pack a that a includes n d s a guide g e to o organising r n n the h day, a m materials t a w with h strategies r e s and n lesson e o p plans, s and n iinformation o a o for o p parents e to eexplain p n the h p positive it e impact m c of good o d communication mm i i skills l o on children’s h d n learning e n . www.hello.org.uk/get-involved/no-pens-day-wednesday.aspx

Accelerated Leadership p Development Peter Early and Jeff Jones Institute of Education £17.99 With a number of head teachers and senior staff in schools due to retire or leave the profession prematurely, this book focuses on the issues surrounding accelerating the leadership development of staff in schools in England and elsewhere.

It outlines the most effective fast-track leadership initiatives and discusses ways of identifying and retaining high-potential staff in school settings. The book highlights the lessons learnt from successful fast-track leadership programmes in the private and public sector and a model is provided for schools to follow and customise as they plan their own leadership development strategies.

Inspirational p Teachers Inspirational Learners Will Ryan Crown House Publishing £18.99 This book examines how to o bring the best out of children by designing creative learning that h iis relevant, l useful f l and d engaging. It looks at what inspirational teachers do differently and how they ‘breathe life into’ their lessons. The author has many years of experience in the classroom, as a head teacher and as an adviser, and the chapters aim to create exceptional learning experiences for youngsters. While each one can be used individually, each is influenced by the others to give a holistic rather than compartmentalised approach. Among the regular features are comments overheard in the classroom, tales of inspirational practice, self-checklists and diagrams.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS

46-47 whats new.indd 47

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22/8/11 11:22:37

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LEADERSHIP FOCUS ● SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

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HAVE YOUR SAY

LETTERS What with the riots and talk of strikes, there’s been plenty for members to get their teeth into…

FIGHT FOR OUR FUTURE Dear editor I am so tired of having to fight over everything and constantly seeing our beautiful profession being called into question and punished by politicians and Ofsted.

If I wanted to work in the private sector I would have chosen to do so but I love my job. Just because we are educators doesn’t mean that we should have our rights walked all over or have the children used to emotionally blackmail us. I would like the NAHT to take stronger action, be brave and really take note of the strength of feeling of its members.

I am more than prepared to take strike action over pensions and Sats and the constant interference of government legislators in our lives. If we don’t, the leadership recruitment crisis we are experiencing will be far worse, there is going to be little to attract people into what is a very noble, extremely rewarding, fulfilling and exciting profession.

Maggie Crompton Via naht.org.uk

EDUCATION BY NUMBERS Dear editor I have not lived or taught in England since 1975, but I have been following the recent riots with great sadness.

The one sentence that has remained with me from teacher training was that we teach the whole person and not just our subjects. I am lucky enough to

teach in a school with mixed-ability classes, no setting, no streaming, and where great emphasis is given to respect for the differing abilities present in a class. Art, drama, and music play an important role, as does absolute honesty with pupils when it comes to assessing their work.You can’t help wondering how this affects young people.

When did education become a GCSE factory in England?

Lesley Wiskocil Via naht.org.uk

Just because we are educators doesn’t mean that we should have our rights walked all over

and they just turn out to be a source of angst. Bah. Name and address supplied.

IDEAS GENERATOR Dear editor This may be something that LF readers are already aware of, but we’ve recently discovered a way to raise the aspirations of our Year Five class. We had them watch a (carefully selected) video from ted.com each week. Each one lasts around 20 minutes and then we get them to research, in groups of four, anything that interested them in the video.

I’ve been amazed how enthused they’ve been. The site’s strapline is ‘riveting talks, by remarkable people, free to the world’ and it is particularly good when it comes to science and global issues. To make life easier when you begin, you can search for talks that have been rated the most ‘jaw-dropping’, ‘ingenious’ or ‘fascinating’ too.

Sharon Lloyd

GET IN TOUCH WITH LF HOLIDAY HEAVEN? Dear editor Is anyone else sharing my frustrations about the summer holidays? I started the break utterly determined to relax, but have now let three weeks go by, and the rest of the break has filled up with family commitments.

All that’s going through my head now is the need to finish the school development plan and write my SEF. It’s so annoying that you look forward to the holidays so much

LF has been speaking to head teachers about their experiences of the Ofsted complaints procedure and is keen to get more views. Have any other school leaders had experience of the process? Can you offer your fellow NAHT members any advice? If you’d like to share your story – anonymously if desired – on this subject, or if you have any other news or views you’d like to tell us about, please get in touch.

Email naht@redactive.co.uk or write to LF, Redactive Publishing, 17 Britton Street, London EC1M 5TP.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 ● LEADERSHIP FOCUS 49

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AND FINALLY SUSAN YOUNG

Pimp my term Have you started planning your end-of-year activity week yet? The start of term is the time to put the wheels in motion, says Susan Young

‘I learned a lot about myself’ Each year had different themes, activities and timetables. Some year groups worked with their usual forms; others didn’t.

Underpinning the fun was a focus on encouraging the pupils to work more independently and build up resilience.

Year Seven built their own civilisation on a newly formed volcanic island.Year Eight spent three days taking part in health and wellbeing challenges, including sorting out a crisis.Year Nine took part in personal

50

challenges; while Year 10 took part in a challenge mixing The Apprentice with Dragons’ Den as they formed teams, created a product and then marketed it. Pupils loved it so much they said they want a fortnight next time.

Clare says: “The Year Sevens were talking about democracy – that they wanted their island to be inclusive – and about how they’d look after people more vulnerable than themselves. They’re the sort of things you don’t normally get 11-year-olds talking about, especially when stood up in front of more than 500 people.”

At the beginning, it was hard for staff to step back, but as one teacher noted: “They were having

better ideas than I was.” This was proper independent learning and the evaluation forms said how great it was to work with people they wouldn’t normally work with and they made a lot of new friends. They did find it difficult to present in front of a new group but quickly learned to be selfconfident, with one Year Seven pupil reporting: “I learned a lot about myself.”

Year Eight’s focus on health and wellbeing found them dealing with the aftermath of a stampede during a concert, in a scenario including first-aiders and roving reporters. “We wanted to teach them to be safe in crisis situations and look after themselves,” says Clare. Other days included

learning first aid and conflict-resolution skills, trying out zumba fitness classes and spending time on healthy eating.

One of the strangest moments of the week came when two Land Rover Freelanders arrived on the school premises to be ‘pimped’ as part of Year Nine’s week of challenges. “They were about to be scrapped – but they looked great with their leather seats and the kids could do anything they liked to them. They made them a lot more sporty-looking, let’s say,” says Clare.

Making new friends Year Nine, on the cusp of their GCSE programmes, got a few more challenges including working with a graffiti artist to create huge canvases for a local children’s hospice, and tackling an army assault course.

Year 10 created snack bars and perfume, mixing chocolate and scents, planning branding, and marketing and finally pushing their wares during a market on the Friday. Was it edible?

“Oh, it was delicious – marbled chocolate too,” says Clare.

So was there more to it than a week of fun away from the usual timetable? Clare believes so. “I think the bonding we had between new groups of people will make a difference. We all got to know each other in a different way. It was not meant to be ‘fun’, it was meant to be a challenge. The kids acknowledged that it was hard work but that they really loved it.”

Plans are already under way for the 2012 event, with members of staff pleading to run a maths challenge. And if they can get pupils screaming for more after that, they really will be doing something right.

Clare got in touch to tell LF about the learning challenge week. Share your story by contacting me at educationhack@gmail.com

NICK LOWNDES

Those joyous days at the end of the summer term when timetables are torn up will be a distant memory for most schools now. But, as we begin the new school year, it’s a good idea to remind ourselves of the fun and the fabulous learning opportunities that are possible.

Off-timetable weeks at the end of term are a brilliant way to keep the children fired up, although Claire Batson will tell you it takes time and planning to organise something memorable. Clare, associate senior leader at Parklands High School in Chorley, Lancashire, got roped into organising its inaugural ‘learning challenge week’ as part of its teaching and learning strategy.

Post-event, Clare was on a high, with staff and student feedback forms all enthusing about how well it had all gone. However, it couldn’t have worked without full involvement from everyone in the team, from the principal down. Just reading the PowerPoint presentation that explained the week to staff was exhausting. Each year group did a completely different week, coming together in a Festival Day on the Friday when the students, parents, and children from the local primary school could see what everyone had been up to.

LEADERSHIP FOCUS ● SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

50 And finally.AT.indd 50

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OUT THERE TIMES TABLES

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