Rather than outstanding why not stand out?” by Steve Davies

Rather than outstanding why not stand out?

by Steve Davies

An article about taking on a supposedly outstanding school in an east London borough as probably my last leadership role of a career spanning over 30 years.

I have been a Deputy Head, Head, Partnership Head and Executive Head, across five schools and in two authorities in the south east of England for the last 22 years and have always taken on schools that are faced with challenges of some kind or other. Usually they are ‘requires improvement’ and need to improve. So, when I saw my present role advertised in the TES I was amazed to find myself visiting, being impressed by those who showed me around the school and then even more amazingly, submitting an application to become the Head Teacher of what was presented as an ‘Outstanding school’. There are a number of reasons for why I was further amazed and these were:

• It was 42 miles away from where I was now living • I had been happy as the Executive Head Teacher of a large federation in Kent and we had become quite successful at the federation and were enjoying this new-found success (the two schools had previously struggled and one was facing an

Ofsted inspection when I arrived that if it were to go badly could mean academisation. It did not and we were awarded good with Outstanding leadership) • It would appear to be a backward career move as

I was moving back into a hands-on role of Head

Teacher and away from the more corporate role of executive headteacher (EHT). Indeed though, this was a motivating factor for me as I had always missed the day to day organisational leadership and as an EHT I always became too involved in the operational. I could not help myself, as this was where my passion for leadership lay. But an Outstanding school? First, a little context as this is important in realising that things were possibly not what they seemed to be on the surface. The school had been through some troublesome times in its recent past namely the whole governing body and the Head Teacher had resigned, parents were rightly up in arms about what was happening and the local authority had sought to avoid the school having an Interim Executive Board (IEB) imposed upon it and possible academisation. Something the school, its parents and the local authority were dead set against, thankfully! It had therefore, received a monitoring inspection from Ofsted in October 2018 (I joined in September 2019) to check whether it was still the Outstanding school it had been graded in its 2013 Inspection. Prior to the inspection the local authority had ensured that a very experienced interim governing body was appointed led by a national leader of governance whom I am glad to say is still the chair and a man of supreme experience and character; he has worked hard during this period to keep the school’s head above the water line and indeed appointed me (to which I will forever be grateful for). The governing body and the LA had appointed an interim Executive Head Teacher who was also the headteacher of another outstanding school in the borough and he had worked very hard to gain the

trust of parents and to build a staff team that were motivated and well coached mainly by him. Together with a very experienced, and extremely capable Interim Deputy Head, he worked hard to steady the ship and subsequently led the school through a successful inspection. The parents and the school community, however, wanted their own substantive Head Teacher and this is where I come in.

Although Ofsted agreed that the school should remain as ‘outstanding’ there was much underneath the surface, and indeed above it when I arrived, to tell me that this may be a school that Ofsted graded as ‘outstanding’ but it certainly was not a school that stood out for me.

Consistency of approaches to planning, curriculum, teaching and learning and display in general was just not there. There was no mission statement or set of values that the school lived by and because of lack of leadership (there had been four different Head Teachers in the last four years and a part time Executive Head Teacher for the last one of these years), no real vision. Staff were craving leadership and some described this to me on the first INSET day in September as “it feels like a ship with a determined and hard-working crew which has no captain and no rudder. We have been floating in the sea, surviving but not really getting anywhere.” The one leadership constant was the acting Deputy Head who knew the school inside out and having been at the school for a very long time was completely committed and invested in it. My first big decision was to make her the substantive Deputy Head and convince her that I needed her and that I was going to be here for the duration and was committed to truly making this school stand out. I am glad to say that she trusted me and she is undoubtedly a major asset in what we are now trying to do at the school. She works as part of the new highly talented and passionately enthusiastic senior leadership team and is ably supported and complimented by a seconded Deputy Head, who is also talented, resilient and passionate. This team works tirelessly with me to ensure that the vision for the school is constantly evolving and embedding. The school did not feel or look like it was an outstanding school. Indeed, it was not even celebrating the successful outcome of the inspection, almost they were concealing it. There were no banners outside to advertise that this was an outstanding school (standard practice in these circumstances if only to increase bums on seats as parents often look at Ofsted-wrongly in my opinion, before choosing where to send their children), it was not reflected on their paper work or communication with parents and more sadly for me, there had been no celebratory staff or children’s party. In fact, it was as if they did not believe that they had achieved something that some schools strive all their existence to be.

At this point I should make it abundantly clear that I do not subscribe to the Ofsted system of grading schools and I have definitely worked in schools that were, and should have been given the recognition as outstanding, and never were by Ofsted. So, I do not hold too much faith in their labelling of schools. Rather, I have striven as a Head to ensure that the schools I have worked in stand out because they are excellent places where children love to learn and teachers love to teach. Where the curriculum is so irresistible that teachers cannot wait to do their planning and are excited when they are teaching it. They are places where children do not want be absent because they feel like they are missing something. Where wow experiences are the norm and the expectation and not the exception. Where parents invest and engage fully in all that we do and leadership and teachers welcome their input.

So, if we were to make this school stand-out then there was a lot to do. I quickly realised that I was not the only one who thought like this. In the very first INSET day after the usual meet your new HT and ice breaker activities I asked the staff to tell me two things; 1-What was great about RBPS and 2-What needed to improve. Almost 100% said the school was great because of the staff togetherness and this they felt had been achieved through the adversity of their situation i.e. lack of

leadership and still having to ensure the school carried on. They were not wrong. There definitely is a bond, a real feeling of family, a warmth that is generated from this at the school and it is what attracted me to come here.

In response to the second question they also told me to a person, that they craved direction, leadership, a vision and a consistent approach to the pedagogy of the place. Something they could get excited about again as they had been four years ago under the longstanding Head Teacher who had got the school out of its dark times and with them (most staff had been here for much longer than four years and could remember it in much different circumstances under this well thought of but tough headteacher) had transformed it into a much better place, but then had retired. In the early weeks of being here I lost count of the times people asked me to tell them what I wanted, what were my expectations of them, what were my non-negotiables as they desperately wanted to know how they could make this happen. The fact that they knew that there was a lack of direction and consistency helped me enormously in implementing much needed changes to policy and practice and helped me to implement my vision for the future of the school which would involve the following three pronged approach (some of which is based on what I have learned from Andrew Morrish in his book “The art of standing out” and some which I just knew to be the right thing to do because of previous experiences of working in schools that needed to improve quickly); Establish our base camp so that we could evaluate, change and reset “the holy Trinity” as Andrew Morrish refers to them: • The organisational culture • The vision

• Our values and beliefs so that we could proudly live by these from now on (as Will Ryan says in his book “Leadership with a moral Purpose” “be careful to measure what you value otherwise others will measure what they value!”) We called these our drivers as these would be the thing that would get us to where we wanted to be as a school in future.

I also needed the children to be more invested so we asked them to come up with the new mission statement for the school which after a vote they decided on RED (Resilience, Excellence and Determination).

When I joined the school there had been over 40 parental complaints and two requests for information in the last academic year, because parents did not feel welcome, valued or listened to and they were also desperate for some direction, leadership and purpose. So, we placed a heavy emphasis on engaging them properly and genuinely so that they would feel that this was their school again, a place they chose to send their children to because it was the best option for them. A place they could invest time and energy into. A place they could commit to also. Simply the school needed a captain to help it to pin its colours to the mast, batten down the hatches and get ready to sail again.

The 5 values that we ask all who come here to celebrate and demonstrate in all that they do. Tube train mural displaying the children’s mission statement; it is the first thing you see when you enter our school.

The analogy I have used in my coaching with the leadership teams in setting the holy trinity has been the mountain model. This represents a whole year split into 3 terms and basically explained, it means that we are facing a climb and the mountain will have troughs, peaks, slips and summits and descents. What leaders absolutely have to make sure is that once base camp is established all staff are securely with us and not dangling as we climb at the end of a long guide rope. They must also decide who needs a little more guidance and who is able to climb and achieve the summit with little or no help. Also of course and perhaps more controversially, who cannot make the climb.

The mountain model has served two purposes: One, it has given a visual analogy to the work we have had to do to get the school to be more stand out than Outstanding Two, it has clearly shown the progress we have made in terms of doing just that as we now perceive ourselves to be at the first summit. Now we are facing the trickier decent and the Spring term is all about making sure we do not travel too quickly, but ensure that we slalom down taking great care to avoid potential potholes or crevices and ensuring all the time that the whole school community is with us and not slipping past, falling by the wayside or taking their eyes off the descent. Summer term will be taking stock, embedding and preparing for the next climb in September (which will not of course be as steep as last year because we will by then have established procedures, practices and consistency to these that will help to make the next climb less arduous. However, when seeking to continue to improve schools, it is still always a climb. So, after just one term’s mountaineering we can conclude from evaluation work we have done with all stakeholders and from our leadership monitoring that we are in a good place. We have reached that first summit, safe and sound and even more together as a staff team and school community, the air feels good up here. Coming back after the Christmas break, however, everybody is under no illusion that we cannot stay here. The descent now starts and this means consolidating on the gains we have made and embedding organisational culture and our values in everything that we do so that the vision can feel real and the direction and steer that the school so badly needed, and now has in place to a degree, can be honed and clarified even further.

I said at the beginning that there would be much to do here at this so-called ‘outstanding’ school of ours, and that is still the case. Having spent the autumn term conquering that first mountain descent everybody now feels they are together and are climbing and descending into a much more positive future and nobody is under any illusion that this school can and will prove it is an excellent place for children to learn and teachers to teach. It deserves the honour of being graded as outstanding and more importantly for me we will begin to stand out not just in our borough but in our city and in the country, as a place of educational excellence. More important than any Ofsted grading our children, staff and parents will judge it to be so. It is also no surprise to any of us that in the last term we had only one parental complaint which was dealt with at stage one of our procedure and no freedom of information requests. Over 600 parents attended the various school events we held during the Christmas period and in the autumn term because of achievement award ceremonies, meet your child’s new teacher days, parent teacher consultation day, parental workshops, and class assemblies (which parents are now not just invited to but made to feel that they are welcome and that it is our privilege to have them here!) over 1,500 parents have been through our doors. It is little wonder that they now tell us they feel part of their school again and that they can see what we are trying to do and low and behold they support what we are doing! Our newly elected Parent Forum representatives from each of the classes in the school meet regularly with me and other leadership team members and we discuss honestly and openly the vision for the future and the issues we are all facing in realising the dream we have for the school. This is a new strategic group that draws upon a wide range of parental skills and interests and it has been instrumental in driving the

changes and helping me as a new headteacher to be open and honest with then parents about the scale of the task ahead of all of us. They are a fantastic group who then champion the school on their individual year group whatsapp pages (something which was used very much to criticise the school previously but is now a powerful social media tool for getting the positive message out there to the parents) The message is we now have leadership, we now have direction, we now have a purpose and most of all we now have our beautiful school back where it deserves to be and should be; standing out for all to see and celebrate! Steve Davies has been a Head Teacher in various forms for the last 16 years before this he was a deputy Head teacher for 8 years and before this he was a teacher and he still describes himself today as a teacher who loves his job. He believes passionately that people come before systems, that passion and enthusiasm always trump knowledge and skills because the latter can be taught or coached, but the former is born with you. He also knows that children always have the answers before the adults do, so we should always consult them first!

References: “The Art of Standing out” by Andrew Morrish “Leading with a moral Purpose” by Will Ryan

Some of the fabulous and inspirational leadership team at our school serving Christmas dinner to the children last term.