School Improvement Cycle

As a result of growth and capacity, The Athelstan Trust school improvement cycle is continually developing and being refined.

This document is intended to provide a scaffold for the current School Improvement Cycle, illustrating how we aim for our work to be thoughtfully structured, strategic and sustainable whilst exemplifying our caring, collaborative and excellent ethos.

The school improvement strategy timeline that each school operates within is outlined below:

Annually:

Each school completes its own detailed School Improvement Plan (SIP). The structure of this is standardised and content aligns with the Athelstan Trust priorities for the year ahead. The detail is individualised in accordance with the context of each school.

The appraisal process for all colleagues feeds into the school improvement plan – a mid term review meeting is in place to support the development of all colleagues.

The Senior School Improvement Lead (SSIL) meets with each Headteacher at the start of term 1 to discuss and agree how the School Improvement (SI) team can be strategic in supporting the SIP. This support is then reviewed through regular, informal meetings throughout the year and also via the ELG forum.

Bi-Annually:

The two Athelstan Trust Professional Development days (term 2 and 6) are organised by the CPD Manager and School Improvement Leads and themed around relevant and pertinent school improvement themes.

During these events, the School Improvement Leads facilitate collaborative meetings of colleagues from subject specialist groups in order for them to analyse data, share good practice and current research, collaborate on strategy etc.

Termly:

The School Improvement Leads meet with teams of key colleagues from across The Athelstan Trust to analyse data, share good practice and current research, collaborate on strategy, encourage peer support and resource sharing to reduce workload etc. These meetings are currently active for English, maths, science, PSHE, mental health and pastoral leads, SENCOs, disadvantaged, data, attendance, CPD / Teaching & Learning leads.

The School Improvement Team meet 1-2 times a term to share progress on shared SI targets, to discuss risk, analyse hard data, share soft data and agree on actions going forwards – the team is careful to consider wellbeing, recruitment and retention in these discussions.  The CEO is updated on this progress and discusses deployment of the SI team through 1:1 meetings with the Senior School Improvement Lead.

A primary specialist School Improvement Advisor (SIA) is employed to work with the Headteachers, achieved through 6 visits to each Athelstan primary school across the academic year. These visits include a report with agreed action points that are reviewed at the next visit.

The Standards Committee, attending by a selection of trustees, governors and School Improvement Leads, meet three times a year to approve, review and challenge educational provision and standards, ensuring that its work supports the Trust in its responsibilities by advising the Board on matters relating to standards of teaching and learning.

Fortnightly:

The CEO meets with the Executive Leadership Group (Headteachers) to analyse, share, discuss and action school improvement work. Key actions and information relevant to school improvement is shared with the SI team.

The CEO meets with each Headteacher on a fortnightly basis for conversations and coaching that balance accountability, challenge and support.

Weekly / daily:

The School Improvement Team manage their own diaries to ensure that their time is spent working in schools as much as possible, often working in a way that is bespoke to particular need and context, as directed by the CEO, Headteachers, SSIL and other school leaders. For example:

  • Team teaching and instructional coaching to develop practice.
  • Splitting ‘priority groups’ to maximise achievement and enable catch up where necessary.
  • Small group intervention across the ability range, in line with trust priorities.
  • Joint planning with teachers at all levels, alongside observation and feedback.
  • Moderating assessment – setting the standard.
  • QA (Quality Assurance) – as subject experts making sure standards are high.
  • Contributing to subject specific CPD.
  • Leadership development.
  • Sharing research and current educational theory / best practice.
  • Developing resources and improving curriculum content.
  • Supporting wellbeing and retention through coaching, facilitating opportunities for peer support with colleagues in other schools and being available to support the capacity of senior leaders if there is absence etc.

When not working in schools, the School Improvement Team is based in the central team office where they work collaboratively on leading the CPD programme, the learning circuit package, data analysis, reading and planning for collaborative meetings, producing resources to support teachers and leaders, networking with other MATs and School Improvement Teams (e.g. CST, SW SI Network) etc.

 

Vision, Values, Strategy and Culture:

At the core of every aspect of School Improvement lies The Athelstan Trust’s commitment to being an organisation in which children, staff and parents feel part of a caring, collaborative and excellent community. These values, alongside the more detailed mission statement, and strategic aims, motivate all school improvement work within the cycle.

The School Improvement Strategy does not sit alongside a standardised approach to curriculum and pedagogy but is guided by an ethos that respects and values the individual nature and ethos of our schools while believing we are more effective when we work together and support each other. However, each school’s curriculum is aligned to The Athelstan Trust curriculum statement and through the SI Team’s work to foster collaboration across schools, there are increasingly common examples of schools sharing both approaches to curriculum (maths being the most wholly aligned) and pedagogy.

With collaboration as one of our core values, the school improvement cycle includes regular opportunities to meet and share good practice. The agenda for these meetings are led by various members of the school improvement team and designed to be strategic in terms of responding to identified need and creating actions points that feed into continuous school improvement:

  • The executive leadership group (ELG) meet every fortnight, led by the CEO.
  • English, maths, science, pastoral leads and SENCOs meet at least three times a year, led by the linked School Improvement Lead. Other faculties are encouraged to meet at least once a year, with the agenda led by subject specialists but the meeting facilitated by a linked School Improvement Lead. Time is given on the Bi-annual Athelstan Trust days for subject specialist teams to meet.
  • Disadvantaged, Attendance and Data, PSHE, Mental Health, Reading, CPD / Teaching and Learning leads from each senior leadership team meet at least twice a year, led by a linked School Improvement Lead.

People, Learning and Capacity

Recruiting and retaining excellent colleagues is key to being successful. The School Improvement Leads work with the CPD Manager to support this through the offer of a trust wide CPD programme, linked closely to the delivery of two Athelstan Trust Professional Development days (term 2 and term 6) which are attended by teaching and non-teaching colleagues from each school. These give the school improvement team the opportunity to deliver key messages that are pertinent to improvement in each school but also that reinforce the culture and values of the trust; this is most obviously achieved through the keynote address at the start of the day (e.g. focusing on EDI, attendance, disadvantaged students, disciplinary reading etc).

Throughout the day, colleagues spend time in relevant cross school communities (subject specialism groups for teacher, pastoral support teams, Teaching Assistants, Finance and HR teams, IT and site teams etc.) with time to collaborate around key areas for development. Sometimes, this will involve external input but often, colleagues within The Athelstan Trust take on the responsibility to co-ordinate this session in response to the identified need of each group.

The Athelstan Trust CPD programme is also part of these events, with one additional after school, virtual meeting happening between the two. This programme fits into the school improvement strategy by enabling all colleagues to benefit from an enquiry-based approach to their own professional development – a PACT (‘personalised action I commit to trial’).

Secondments across schools is another opportunity for both professional development and school improvement. This is led by the CEO and discussed in the forum of the Executive Leadership Group of Headteachers. The SI Team include talent spotting as a standing item on the agenda of their SI meetings and support the Headteachers with the growth of individuals.

Further CPD opportunities (, Creative / Outstanding Teacher Programme, Olevi Outstanding Teacher Assistant Programme, CLEAPSS,  an internally led ‘New to Pastoral Leadership’ programme, Athelstan ) fall into line with the school improvement cycle as the following can either be accessed through a request from school leadership teams to the CPD Manager / SIL or the SI Team can suggest where it would be beneficial for particular colleagues to be involved.

The Athelstan Trust is supported by the Odyssey Teaching School Hub to offer UCL linked NPQs and the ECF offer.

Finally, the flexible working culture ( status) is modelled by the School Improvement Team and supported as a way of investing in people and creating capacity.

Assessment, Curriculum and Pedagogy

The Athelstan Trust has not adopted a school improvement model of standardised or even unanimously aligned assessment. However, building on the collaborative approach to CAGs adopted during the pandemic, in 2023, and to support the reliability of GCSE projections collected in December, all secondary schools will hold mock examinations in early November. Where there is alignment of exam syllabus, common papers/part papers will be used to support moderation and enable additional support where appropriate.

The SI Team also works with leaders to share best practice and encourage an organic model of joint working. Where there are identified pockets of weakness in terms of quality, curriculum and / or pedagogy, the SILs will work with individual leaders and bring in specialists from across the schools or external consultants; in some cases, this leads to a shared approach to assessment, curriculum and pedagogy as a means of supporting improvement.

In supporting The Athelstan Trust objective to ‘maintain a rich extra-curricular offer to ensure students have access to exciting learning outside the classroom’, SILs actively pursue and support opportunities for students from across the schools to share curriculum enrichment opportunities, for example, the maths challenges, the Athelstan Festival of Speech and Debate, visiting performance poets, shared residential / overseas trips and PSHE and careers related speakers.

Quality Assurance and Accountability

In seeking to streamline how data is used for improvement work, Headteachers’ Report, 4Matrix Fusion, Insight tracker and PowerBI have been recently introduced to enable the tracking of school performance and attendance in a way that can be openly compared as a prompt for conversations around accountability and how to improve.

One of the School Improvement Leads co-ordinates and advises the data leads in each school to scrutinise data and thus creates a culture of transparency about where improvement is needed and how this can be achieved. The School Improvement Team are involved in all communication around the data, ensuring that their time can be allocated according to risk.

Each school has its own cycle of Quality Assurance through subject reviews but are encouraged to include the School Improvement Leads, specialists from other Athelstan schools and / or external experts so that school improvement expertise is being constantly developed and shared.

In building a sense of collective endeavour, the School Improvement Leads also conduct themed reviews twice a year. These look at a theme through the lens of a particular subject, enabling a holistic picture of where there is best practice across the trust. These reviews involve lesson observations in each school, conversations with subject and senior leaders and student voice feedback.  Colleagues are invited to join these reviews which has strengthened the wider impact of this as QA strategy but also a developmental opportunity for those involved. The final report details the best practice seen in relation to the theme, asks challenging, pedagogical focused questions that are based on research led reading around the review focus; all participants in the review, governors and leadership are invited to discuss these before the final report is published. The conclusion to the report also outlines how the school improvement team will respond to its findings; for example, in the review entitled ‘SEND provision through the lens of Humanities’, each school was given time with the ASD lead who delivered training on how to ensure that lesson resources are SEND friendly and therefore accessible for all. Finally, a school specific summary is shared with each Head Teacher so that they are clear about where best practice was seen in their school but also able to respond to the questions most pertinent to their context.

In the regular school improvement meetings, all colleagues in the team feedback on the soft intelligence they are constantly gathering from their regular visits to each school. Triangulated with other sources of data, this often leads to the initiation of various school improvement strategies, whether it be that the CEO follows up a line of enquiry with the individual Headteacher, a SIL offers bespoke support or sets up a collaborative relationship between colleagues in different schools, the CPD Manager initiates the search for context specific training etc.

Developing as a Learning Organisation

The Athelstan Trust School Improvement Team is consciously adapting to a constantly changing external environment. In responding to this, governance, the central team functions of finance, HR and operations all play a key role in ensuring that school improvement is both challenged and supported in moving schools forward.

The School Improvement Leads have presented to each Local Governing Body about their work and given them time to understand, question and challenge the work of this team. Likewise, the trustees have regular updates on the work of the school improvement team and through scrutiny of outcomes in terms of school performance data, have the opportunity and imperative to question and challenge the strategic direction of school improvement work.