In the second in our series on school transformation we explain how school improvement requires both staff and students to adjust their behaviour.

Improving the quality of teaching and learning was not the only issue that needed addressing in our inner London school. The basic behaviours required from staff and pupils in order to create an effective learning organisation needed to be re-established.   Constantly dealing with poor attendance, punctuality, low level disruption and so on, sapped the energy of the leadership team and left them with little capacity to support the growth of the organisation.

We challenged the leadership teams to address these issues, which they did by making sure the basic expectations – their espoused theory – of the school were made overtly clear to pupils and staff, and transgressions were quickly and fairly dealt with.  At the same time, and just as importantly, we worked on developing the quality of teaching and learning so that the number of unsatisfactory lessons students attended was reduced to a minimum.

I visited the school weekly to check progress and provide coaching for members of the senior team, especially the head teacher. We sent in subject specialists to support teachers in areas of weakness, and we started coaching the weaker teachers.  An intervention of this type was not common at the time, and it took us a while to discover the approach we need to adopt, our disposition in order to build the trust of the staff – moral capital – so that we could work collaboratively together as a team rather than being seen as outsiders sent in to sort things out.  Working with them rather than directing them.

We reached a critical point in the process when we worked with those staff who had successfully adapted their lessons to meet the time and place of the students so they could provide effective learning programmes.

We started by identifying the common characteristics of the students, in particular those that the school had no impact on but shaped the pupils’ behaviours. We then compared them with the characteristics of the staff, which highlighted a need to understand the students’ sense of time, place and disposition rather than expecting them to know it. Those staff who had taken the time to do this and had adapted their approach accordingly were successful. It was their knowledge that needed to be accessed by their colleagues. They did this by considering individual students and describing how they had adapted their approach to meet their needs.

In particular these strategies revolved around how their classrooms had become a safe place to learn – basic classroom management.  There was a reluctance amongst some staff to adapt their teaching to meet the students’ needs rather than the students adapting to their demands. Some of these staff were won over quickly when they tried the strategies suggested by their peers and found they transformed their teaching, but for others the doubts linger for some considerable amount of time with the leadership team continuing to deal with the consequences. In some cases, the situation was never resolved and in time they decided to work elsewhere.

Further analysis revealed two key needs for many of their students: confidence to venture beyond their locality and the need for stable adult relationships. They identified that though they were very confident within their own environment – or manor as they called it – they did not venture very far afield.  A lot of this was attributed to the postcode gang culture that was prevalent in the area.

To address these two issues, they strengthened the consistent day-to-day contact the students had with their form tutor and arranged many outings with the students. These included Saturday trips to museums and art galleries, as well as increasing the number of sporting events the students took part in with other schools.

This thoughtful and comprehensive approach quickly had a positive impact on the school, with the tipping point being reached when the leadership team was able to be proactive rather than reactive, towards the end of the first year. With the ground work done, we stepped back from our large-scale engagement and left them to call on our resources if and when they needed them. I continued to coach the head teacher, though by now I was learning as much from him as he from me and our meetings became monthly rather than weekly.

The school continued to improve, with examination results consistently above average compared to similar schools. OFSTED returned and awarded it a good rating. Despite this, a few years later the local authority held a strategic review of school provision and as a result of this it was decided to close the school. It is to the credit of the staff that during the protracted period while this took place, they continued to provide a good education for their pupils with many of the best staff remaining in post until the end.

Looking back, it is interesting to note that throughout this process, George Gyte’s team of advisers continued to visit the school and report on its progress.  We used this report to evaluate our work. However, he never asked us to report on the school’s progress, only to check if we needed anything. This gradually stopped the school from thinking we were the spies from the Local Authority and helped us to establish a level of trust. This would be one of a number of invaluable lessons we would learn from our first venture into school transformation.

We hope that you found this second article in our series on school transformation useful. The next in the series will continue to describe how our approach emerged from our action.

This has been a busy week for us with us making contact with a number of our colleagues. From these, we are aware that the situation in many of the schools in our global community are still far from normal, let alone the new normal. The virus continues to spread, and isolation of staff and students is common, as is the disruption to learning that comes with it. There have been indications of light at the end of the tunnel for the UK. Let’s hope this materialises and spreads across the globe.

Take care and stay safe

George