Message from the headteacher

I was going to write a piece about the wonderful Sports Leaders Awards evening which happened in the last week of last term, but I noticed that there was a very good article in the newsletter. Nevertheless, I thought it was brilliant, not least because it focused on some students who have overcome significant odds to win awards.

At the moment the senior team is wrestling with our improvement plan for 2022-23. We started around the end of February and will brief governors in our next meeting on Thursday evening. The easy bit of any improvement plan is writing it. The difficult bit is ensuring that it makes a difference to children.

I imagine most people have stopped reading by now because strategic planning is not exactly sexy. Except it is to me. I’ve been working in school for 28 years and I’ve not yet cracked it. The idea is to change behaviours. Partly you want to change staff behaviours so that everyone adopts practice which is most likely to work. And partly the focus is on changing student behaviours. This is because, as the saying goes, ‘a great student will learn from anyone (even a poor teacher) but a poor student will learn from no one (not even a great teacher)’.

Changing behaviour is difficult. Staff are busy. A study showed that educational staff are amongst the most efficient professionals in the workplace. We don’t have long breaks during the day, we don’t attend many meetings, we certainly don’t attend many business conferences, away days, networking lunches, award dinners etc that family and friends in other sectors mention. Our time is spent in the classroom with children. The benefit of this is that we get very good at what we do because we have lots of practice. The drawback is that we don’t see and learn from others’ practice. Although we are always surrounded by young people (which is obviously a wonder) it is quite a lonely profession. For this reason, any time we DO have for training and sharing practice is like GOLDDUST. So currently we are agonising over our training schedule. Which foci to pick and how to ensure that we achieve IMPROVEMENT.

Our strategy is pretty simple. We look at research and incoming feedback from stakeholders. Then we longlist a number of possible projects. Then we get rid of anything less likely to work and begin to plan training for the projects remaining.

Anyone still reading deserves a nice chocolate biscuit and a cup of tea. Next week I will present our draft plans to governors. Wish me luck.

A lot of our evidence comes from dropping into lessons every day - limited time this week but I did see a wonderful English lesson featuring someone I regard as a master/ mistress of their craft. The lesson was challenging, supportive, confounding, revelatory and about ten times as good as anything I could ever produce now I am an old dinosaur.

BTW in my last newsletter I explained my disappointment on trying to speak Ukrainian and not getting a response. I have now realised that the child I was speaking to was not from Ukraine - he was from Tansley. This explains his confusion. Huge apologies.

Я сподіваюся, що ви проведете приємні вихідні! We are Highfields