Strategy For Education
1 atctrust.org.uk
Contents Context 3 Our Pledge 4 Levers For Securing Our Aims 5 Powerful Collaboration 6 Working With You 10 2
Context
AtC is a collaborative community of individual schools united through common purpose and shared values. Our schools and the communities that they serve are diverse but our educational mission is the same: to equip all of our students with powerful, substantive and disciplinary knowledge and a range of transformative competencies. As a result, we strive to enable our students to reach their potential; living positive, meaningful and healthy lives; making valuable contributions to the world.
We know that in the current educational landscape there are many faces of disadvantage and disempowerment which have the potential to interrupt a great education; from overt poverty, adverse childhood experiences and low self esteem to covert elitism, homogeneity and unconscious bias. Therefore our role as a Trust is to help our schools to “interrupt the patterns and cycles which disempower”
Through education, experiences and opportunities, our schools actively break cycles of disempowerment, remove barriers, and equip the children and young people they serve with the knowledge, confidence and foresight to be able to do the same. Our Strategy for Education supports all of our schools to fulfil this mission and respond effectively to the emerging and changing needs of our society and our students.
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...equipping our students with powerful, substantive and disciplinary knowledge and a range of transformative competencies
Our Pledge
Our Quality of Education Strategy supports our schools to be “great schools,” in which all of our children get the right education and the right support at the right time, in the right way. We know teacher and staff expertise is key to achieving this, so we work collaboratively across our organisation to help every member of our Trust be the “best they can be.”
We support our schools in their quest to diminish the difference between student groups and to secure positive KPIs for every child in our organisation. Together, we build and deliver curriculums, systems and school experiences through which individuals and groups can flourish.
By being highly ambitious for our students, we support the national drive for “Levelling Up,” aiming to ensure 90% of our primary school children achieve the expected standard in Key Stage 2 reading, writing and maths by 2030. We support aims for increasing Maths and English Language GCSE outcomes from a grade 4.5 to a grade 5 in line with the 2030 vision. At secondary level we also continue to support schools in offering Ebacc as a measure of a strongly academic, knowledge based curriculum.
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Levers For Securing Our Aims
One of the things that makes AtC Trust different from other Trusts is the bespoke approach we take when collaborating with our schools to achieve our educational aims. Every school is different and requires a different approach to school improvement and securing excellent quality of education outcomes.
For us, personalisation at all levels of our organisation is key, and therefore the approach we take and the collaboration we undertake with school leaders, depends on the identified needs of the school. Four main levers however, frame our collaborative work as we know that these represent the highest leverage actions for growing and securing “great schools.”
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Powerful Collaboration
The quality of education work within our schools often focuses on securing one, or more, of the following high impact strategies for school improvement:
The Science of Cognition:
We work together to provide all teachers with access to excellent, evidence-based, scienceled research, training and professional development at every stage of their career; giving them the expertise and knowledge to deliver great teaching. Together we develop a culture of understanding about how the learner brain works so that teachers and staff know how to secure knowledge for all. We share expertise, experience, guidance and training so that together, we can make informed decisions around curriculum content, pedagogy, best practice and personalised learning.
We collaborate across our schools to build a workforce of well informed, well supported professionals. By providing and supporting high quality and purposeful CPL at our schools, we improve outcomes for all students. Our commitment to high quality personalised CPL also helps us recruit and retain excellent practitioners across the Trust. We know that recruiting, growing and keeping great staff leads to consistently great outcomes for our learners. Our approach therefore reflects the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy (2019), and the Early Career Framework reforms and refreshed National Professional Qualifications. We want our staff to have the best of what’s available in terms of training and we work with a number of organisations to ensure that we are leading innovation in education and making contributions to the national and international conversation about “what works” for learners.
Developing Teacher Expertise:
As we know, the foundations of great schools and great outcomes are firmly rooted in the day to day work happening in classrooms. For us, developing the science of teacher expertise and effective classroom practice is a high leverage action. We understand that securing excellent quality teaching and learning every lesson, every day is the single most important in-school factor for improving outcomes for all children. Deliberate practice, instructional coaching and staff expertise trajectories guide the development work we do with our teachers and staff to support them in becoming highly skilled, highly effective classroom practitioners.
We collaborate to secure high quality learning experiences for all
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Quality of Curriculum:
The quality of our school curriculums are central to our Trust Education Agenda. We want all of our children to have the best education possible and so together, we carefully examine the substantive and disciplinary knowledge of the curriculums offered. We work closely with leaders and teachers to secure confidence, clarity and articulacy about the scope, coherence and sequence of the curriculum design and delivery.
Ensuring curriculum efficacy and rigour through quality assurance is fundamental to our work with school leaders and decision makers and we help schools to establish appropriate systems and mechanisms that evaluate curriculum efficacy and measure curriculum impact on learners and outcomes.
Words for All:
“Unlocking the curriculum and turbocharging social mobility.” We know that high-quality early education, particularly early language skills, can greatly improve a child’s attainment throughout primary school and beyond. We also know that almost half of the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers at key stage 4 has emerged by age five. The acquisition of language is one of the most powerful tools for transformation and for success.
We work with our schools and national organisations to develop methods of securing language, basic literacy and numeracy as a powerful tool for success, liberation, confidence, articulacy both academically, socially and emotionally. We know it is a learner’s right to be able to access the curriculum designed and so the work we do around language aquisition and fluency helps secure the foundations on which to build knowledge and skills for the future for all of our children.
We collaborate to secure basics in literacy and maths
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CollectiveEd and Coaching Organisations:
Much of our collaboration follows the principles of coaching (for learners and staff). Collectively we support individual development and use an ipsative approach to next steps and action planning. Within our schools we often use technology to personalise learning for staff and students, and consequently build choice, agency and discretionary effort. Because the coaching approach is empowering, we find that our students, staff and schools go above and beyond, take risks and innovate because they work in a supportive, collaborative and personalised setting.
Culture and Routines:
Helping our schools secure culture and routines that are consistent, predictable and appropriate means that we are providing a safe and supportive environment in which all learners can thrive. The work we do to collaborate on approaches to the holistic development of the individual, is an important aspect of our organisation’s work. Each school’s personal development offer should “upskill students” in navigating the world, being safe and making choices that lead to better social, emotional, mental and physical wellness. As a Trust, we monitor and respond to any emergent long term impact of a global pandemic and other local or national influencing factors that can change the welfare or wellbeing of our students. We support our schools in making appropriate and timely responses to these challenges.
Skills for Jobs and Lifelong Learning:
Student action, agency, leadership and ownership. As well as supporting our schools with work around careers, next steps and future destinations, we also hope to offer a platform for our students to work with their peers to use their learning for the “greater good.” We know that the power to make a difference has to be experienced as a process in a safe and supportive place. Applied educational empowerment brings about an understanding that school and education actually makes a difference to the world and has meaning beyond the walls of a classroom. In order to equip our students with transformative competencies, skills for jobs and an understanding of the value of lifelong learning, we provide student summits, working within our schools to create student leadership and student action. We are a child centric Trust and therefore, a big part of what we do impacts directly on providing and supporting opportunities and experiences for our learners.
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The Future is Now:
Adopting a next-generation hybrid learning experience requires a fresh, future-focused attitude towards three key aspects in the classroom: Pedagogy, Environment and Technology. Lots of the work we do with our schools helps develop world class digital provision that supports the individual and promotes meaningful and relevant learning experiences.
Pedagogy: Teachers within our Trust have the advantage of utilising traditional learning practices while incorporating new educational technologies to create a diverse, differentiated classroom, ready for mixed-ability students.
Environment: We help schools create a space that is well planned, well used and well cared for to create a space that is malleable. Spaces can be tailored towards specific activities, learning goals or student personalities and we support our schools in innovating and exploring different approaches to how classroom environments can be used.
Technology: Within our Trust we have seen an extraordinary transition from the precious single desktop computer to a proliferation of high tech teaching aids plus Chromebooks for students to work on. By leveraging digital, we are enabling our teachers to work more efficiently and reducing workload.
Students are eager to embrace multiple pillars of support and leverage new tech, AI and machine learning solutions to enhance the classroom experience. This has been the focus of the next wave of new edtech platforms, providing students with multiple avenues for support, learning and collaboration. Taking the idea of “learning” versus “being taught,” the next generation of edtech platforms are about empowering students to know where their resources are, before they’re even needed. Giving students opportunities to bring down walls and open doors on their own. The pandemic was a catalyst for rapid adoption of edtech platforms which are now set to continue supporting students.
Our students have embraced a whole new suite of tools that they will have at their disposal for the rest of their education, which helps them push beyond average into exceptional. As these students move onto the world of work, the demand for skills in the workplace is evolving faster than ever amid accelerated technology development. Skills acquisition is the backbone of any successful career, therefore it is our duty as education providers to ensure our students are fully equipped with technological skills that will enable them to be agile, employable members of society.
We collaborate to future proof our schools
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