Meet the Principal Managing Both a ‘Grand Design’ and a New Free School Community

by Elaine Bennett

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January was an important milestone for Charles Darwin Primary, a free school that opened in a remodelled office block in Norwich in September 2016. After receiving permission to use the building as a school for two years, the school was now seeking a permanent change of use from the council planning committee.

Much to staff’s relief, the request was granted, but the decision was by no means a done deal, with only the chairperson’s casting vote pushing the decision through. During the meeting, one councillor declared the school “a prison for students”; a viewpoint that rankled principal Jo Brown.

Emma Watts, classroom assistant I teach adults in the evening but was at a point in my life where I needed to decide what I wanted to do. I wanted to have an earlier influence by working with children so I’m now doing a degree and starting my teacher training. It’s nice to share the journey with my colleagues. They’re really supportive and hopefully next year I’ll be doing what they do.

Pupil voice

Ava In cooking club we made fruit salad and cheese straws. On Thursday we went to Norwich Cathedral. There was someone dressed up as Edith Cavell and we got a storybook about her life.
Frankie Buttons and Fudge are our school rabbits. They like to jump and snuggle up together. The thing I like best about this school is that I always make new friends and we always learn new things.
Bella I am in gardening club. We get to plant our own flowers. My favourite teacher is Miss Chipperfield because she lets us do really fun things like learning about the Stone Age. She’s also my mummy!

Chandan In the art club on Wednesdays it is really interesting because you can design your own things. I’ve designed my own crest. My favourite thing about this school is that sometimes on Tuesdays we get jacket potatoes with ham!

“After a while he was able to stand up and talk about his toy in front of his group. Nowadays he doesn’t even mention the dinosaur, but it worked for him at that time. It’s really important to have time for that kind of nurturing.”

Meet the staff

Louise Burt, Reception teacher This is my first ever teaching job. The school held an open evening for prospective teachers and I was sold from then. After I’d been shown around, met everybody and seen all the amazing things that the school did, I went home and wrote my application that night. I thought, ‘I can’t work anywhere else.’ I’m yet to find anything I don’t enjoy about the job.

Caitlin Peck, Y1 teacher & maths lead Last year we were only on the ground floor. When they gutted the second floor, we had input into exactly how we wanted it to be. We had a blank canvas and could say where we wanted the classrooms, sinks and toilets. We were able to design the perfect school. Overall I think we made good decisions and I wouldn’t change anything at all.

Joe Mills, assistant principal Every teacher is entitled to spend at least an hour every week doing something that will make them a better teacher. Staff are invited to all CPD sessions and choose which ones to attend based on their own strengths and areas of development. A big thing for us is trusting staff to work on the things that will help them do their jobs really well.

Emma Watts, classroom assistant I teach adults in the evening but was at a point in my life where I needed to decide what I wanted to do. I wanted to have an earlier influence by working with children so I’m now doing a degree and starting my teacher training. It’s nice to share the journey with my colleagues. They’re really supportive and hopefully next year I’ll be doing what they do.

Pupil voice

Ava In cooking club we made fruit salad and cheese straws. On Thursday we went to Norwich Cathedral. There was someone dressed up as Edith Cavell and we got a storybook about her life.
Frankie Buttons and Fudge are our school rabbits. They like to jump and snuggle up together. The thing I like best about this school is that I always make new friends and we always learn new things.
Bella I am in gardening club. We get to plant our own flowers. My favourite teacher is Miss Chipperfield because she lets us do really fun things like learning about the Stone Age. She’s also my mummy!

Chandan In the art club on Wednesdays it is really interesting because you can design your own things. I’ve designed my own crest. My favourite thing about this school is that sometimes on Tuesdays we get jacket potatoes with ham!

“He can speak to parents and children and see what they think.”

Dinosaur days

The children in Reception and Y1 at Charles Darwin Primary have at least ten minutes of ‘key worker time’ every day. This involves splitting up into groups of around ten, guided by the class teacher or classroom assistant.

“We choose the groupings after the children have been here for about four weeks,” explains Jo, “because sometimes children naturally warm to one member of staff or another. During this time they get the opportunity to chat about things they want to share. We also work on things like the school’s core values. It’s really important to get these sort of things right in Reception and Y1.”

Jo and the team have seen the initiative work particularly well for some of the school’s quieter children. “It’s a really important part of their day,” Jo explains. “Somebody wants to listen to what they’ve got to say, even if it’s not to do with what we’re doing in the curriculum. It might be something happening at home or something they’re really proud of.”

For one particular pupil who was struggling to settle in, time with his key worker helped him come out of his shell. “We found out that he loved a particular dinosaur toy, so we encouraged him to bring it in every day and talk about it with his key worker,” says Jo.

“After a while he was able to stand up and talk about his toy in front of his group. Nowadays he doesn’t even mention the dinosaur, but it worked for him at that time. It’s really important to have time for that kind of nurturing.”

Meet the staff

Louise Burt, Reception teacher This is my first ever teaching job. The school held an open evening for prospective teachers and I was sold from then. After I’d been shown around, met everybody and seen all the amazing things that the school did, I went home and wrote my application that night. I thought, ‘I can’t work anywhere else.’ I’m yet to find anything I don’t enjoy about the job.

Caitlin Peck, Y1 teacher & maths lead Last year we were only on the ground floor. When they gutted the second floor, we had input into exactly how we wanted it to be. We had a blank canvas and could say where we wanted the classrooms, sinks and toilets. We were able to design the perfect school. Overall I think we made good decisions and I wouldn’t change anything at all.

Joe Mills, assistant principal Every teacher is entitled to spend at least an hour every week doing something that will make them a better teacher. Staff are invited to all CPD sessions and choose which ones to attend based on their own strengths and areas of development. A big thing for us is trusting staff to work on the things that will help them do their jobs really well.

Emma Watts, classroom assistant I teach adults in the evening but was at a point in my life where I needed to decide what I wanted to do. I wanted to have an earlier influence by working with children so I’m now doing a degree and starting my teacher training. It’s nice to share the journey with my colleagues. They’re really supportive and hopefully next year I’ll be doing what they do.

Pupil voice

Ava In cooking club we made fruit salad and cheese straws. On Thursday we went to Norwich Cathedral. There was someone dressed up as Edith Cavell and we got a storybook about her life.
Frankie Buttons and Fudge are our school rabbits. They like to jump and snuggle up together. The thing I like best about this school is that I always make new friends and we always learn new things.
Bella I am in gardening club. We get to plant our own flowers. My favourite teacher is Miss Chipperfield because she lets us do really fun things like learning about the Stone Age. She’s also my mummy!

Chandan In the art club on Wednesdays it is really interesting because you can design your own things. I’ve designed my own crest. My favourite thing about this school is that sometimes on Tuesdays we get jacket potatoes with ham!

“We always knew that we’d need to apply for a change of use and put a permanent solution in place,” she explains, “but it’s disappointing when people who haven’t even visited our school use that kind of language. I think it was really disappointing for our parents too, because they know it’s completely unfounded. It was frustrating.”

1. Location, location

Although not your traditional school building, when Jo first visited the former office block in the city centre, she could see its potential. “My first thought was that it was in a great location,” she explains.

“We’re close to all the local amenities. Previously I worked at a village school where it costs £20 to go anywhere, whereas here we can walk everywhere so it’s perfect. We can walk to the swimming pool. We go to Norwich City’s Carrow Road training facilities. Who else gets to say they go to a football ground for their PE sessions?”

One of the best things about being based in Norwich, explains James Goffin, head of communications at Inspiration Trust, which the school belongs to, is the surprising amount of green space it contains. “The country park is half a mile down the road – there’s lakes, lots of open space. It’s a brilliant facility right on our doorstep.”

Although there were tenants still in the building when Jo first looked around, and moving in would mean project managing a major regeneration, she wasn’t put off. “The sheer space in the building meant that we would be able to cater for the number of students we’re going to have when we’re full,” she says.

“I knew that we could develop the site into a real oasis in the middle of the city.”

Jo took on the role of principal after a period of maternity leave and was involved with the redevelopment from day one.

“I helped to plan where all the rooms were going to go, what it was going to look like, how many children we could cater for,” she says.

While parts of the building have been fully refurbished and now house a nursery and Reception to Y2 classrooms, the rest remains a work in progress, with the next phase of building work due to start imminently.

“There’s two different prongs to my role,” explains Jo. “On one hand, it’s about making sure that teaching and learning is really high quality and that the school runs consistently, but I also have the build programme as well. They are very different roles but have to run hand in hand. I work really closely with the the project management team and we’ve built up a really good relationship. I’ve never built a school before, but I’m now in my third year of doing that and actually, it does get easier as you go along!”

2. Fresh start

When starting a new school community from scratch, the most vital thing is winning over local parents, but how do you do that when you don’t have any results, reports or even a building to show families around?

“When I first started talking to parents, we didn’t even know where the site was going to be,” says Jo.

“The only way they knew anything about the school was talking to me and coming to events that we ran during that year before we opened. Luckily we had a core of parents that were massively behind us, even before we knew where we were going to be. For those particular families I think it was important that we weren’t going to be stagnant. We were going to be new and fresh and that’s what they wanted.”

Being based in the city centre gives the school a varied catchment, as Jo explains. “We have a lot of families who work in the city centre. They drive in then walk their children to school from their workplaces.”

Many parents work at nearby Norwich employer Aviva and the school also serves new city centre residential developments aimed at young families.

One factor that encouraged parents to take a leap of faith on a brand new school was Charles Darwin’s plans for an extended day.

“We quite quickly found that we were going to be catering for families that needed the service of a longer day,” explains Jo. “It was always part of the school’s vision, but we soon realised that the uptake for it would be greater than we first thought.”

Children can attend breakfast club from 7.50am and paid-for after-school clubs run until 6pm. Three days a week, the school runs one-hour ‘electives’ from 3pm to 4pm. These are not compulsory but are free to attend and there is an average take up of 75% every night.

“The elective programme is a real mix of enrichment activities,” Jo explains.

“This term we’ve got gardening, cooking, French, maths, a library club, choir, drama… a huge range. They change every term. We limit the number of children who can come to each one because it’s really important for us that they’re high quality. That extra hour of free childcare is brilliant for working parents.”

While it only caters for KS1 pupils currently, when the school grows these extended hours will become part of the formal day.

“Most of the children stay anyway, so it won’t feel hugely different to them,” says Jo, “but it enables us to offer an enriching programme that doesn’t cut into the normal school day. When the children get to Y5 and 6, they’ll stay until 4.30pm for free and we’ll add homework support into that offering.”

When recruiting for new staff, Jo has one eye on the extracurricular expertise new teachers will be able to bring to the school. “I’m looking for quality staff who are passionate about things because it adds so much to the school,” she says.

“One of our classroom assistants has a fine art degree so she runs an art elective. We’ve got a drumming teacher and someone who speaks four languages. Everybody runs something here.”

3. Knowledge is power

Another aspect that Jo believes attracted parents in those early days of promoting the school was its focus on a knowledge-led curriculum; an approach championed by the Inspiration Trust which is opening its own curriculum centre on the site of another school in the chain.

Here, subject specialists will work to develop a ‘fact-based’ curriculum and provide training for both trust-based and external teachers. As James explains, the trust’s first area of focus is the KS2 curriculum.

“People tend to focus on KS2 and KS4 because you have to get the results, but that leads to an intervention culture where you get to autumn term and start panicking,” he explains.

“That’s not very good for the kids or sustainable in terms of staffing either. We’re not looking at exams as an endpoint, because, actually, if the kids have that knowledge, they will do well in exams anyway. It’s all about breadth, and you need to start early on for it to work. You can’t do it last minute and get good, sustainable results.”

From Jo’s point of view, she’s found it refreshing to work at a school where cramming for results isn’t high on the agenda. “I want the children’s everyday experience to be amazing,” she says.

“I want them to be lifelong learners so that they can function no matter what they want to do in the future. We look after children from six months old here, so getting it right at the beginning is really important. We don’t want the stress that cramming for outcomes brings. That’s now what I or the staff want for a Y2 child, a child that’s just six years old.”

Jo is part of the curriculum development team, which meets once every half term to discuss recent developments and next steps. “I bring that information back to staff and they then meet in groups as well, with staff from other schools,” she explains.

Although the trust’s first focus is KS2, a group not currently catered for at Charles Darwin, Jo has formed a subgroup to start work on the KS1 rollout. “By the time we get to KS2, the curriculum will be there for us to use,” she says.

“At the moment our Y2s are learning about Ancient Mesopotamia and the Stone Age and they’re doing agriculture and farming. The rich vocabulary that they use is amazing. Our Reception class are doing the Triassic period – they’re not calling it dinosaurs! It’s been really great timing for us as a school, because it means that we can start from the beginning and won’t have to change things along the way.”

In Reception and Y1, the school focuses on half-termly topics or themes and the classrooms are adapted to incorporate vocabulary displays and role-play opportunities.

“We’re extending the children’s vocabulary all the time so they have a rich language to use,” explains Jo.

“We impart a lot of knowledge at the beginning of topics, then the whole day is based around boosting that knowledge as much as possible. For that reason, our planning is based around what we want the children to know by the end of that period and how we’ll assess that knowledge. In previous schools I’ve worked at, planning and intervention was based around the skills that the children need, rather than what they know.”

4. Sharing and growing

With a lot of new staff to recruit over the coming years as the school grows, another key draw for potential applicants, according to Jo, is the learning opportunities available at the school.

“We run CPD every Wednesday. There’s a programme of events that teachers can sign up for. Although some our compulsory, most aren’t. However, most people stay anyway – they want to do that. Recently I gave a member of staff time to prepare something about EAL students as we have a high proportion of those here and there’s not a huge amount of support externally in this area for that. We also use that time to share our reading about current research.”

Staff are also supported if they want to do a degree, as Jo explains.

“Although we don’t fund it, we give them time to do it. I think that’s really important. You can’t be a full-time teacher and do a masters without burning yourself out – that’s a pretty big ask and puts people off from wanting to move forward. We assign them a mentor who has done a similar course or is an expert in that field, then they’ve got somebody who can read through their assignment before they send it off.”

In terms of Charles Darwin’s future, Jo is excited.

“We’ll be getting our first KS2 classes and our first set of Y2 results soon. It’s all about focusing on the children that we’ve currently got and making sure they have a great education, and also managing the build for the next exciting phase.”

And what would she like to say to the councillor who dismissed the school at the planning committee? “I’ve just invited him to come and visit,” she smiles.

“He can speak to parents and children and see what they think.”

Dinosaur days

The children in Reception and Y1 at Charles Darwin Primary have at least ten minutes of ‘key worker time’ every day. This involves splitting up into groups of around ten, guided by the class teacher or classroom assistant.

“We choose the groupings after the children have been here for about four weeks,” explains Jo, “because sometimes children naturally warm to one member of staff or another. During this time they get the opportunity to chat about things they want to share. We also work on things like the school’s core values. It’s really important to get these sort of things right in Reception and Y1.”

Jo and the team have seen the initiative work particularly well for some of the school’s quieter children. “It’s a really important part of their day,” Jo explains. “Somebody wants to listen to what they’ve got to say, even if it’s not to do with what we’re doing in the curriculum. It might be something happening at home or something they’re really proud of.”

For one particular pupil who was struggling to settle in, time with his key worker helped him come out of his shell. “We found out that he loved a particular dinosaur toy, so we encouraged him to bring it in every day and talk about it with his key worker,” says Jo.

“After a while he was able to stand up and talk about his toy in front of his group. Nowadays he doesn’t even mention the dinosaur, but it worked for him at that time. It’s really important to have time for that kind of nurturing.”

Meet the staff

Louise Burt, Reception teacher This is my first ever teaching job. The school held an open evening for prospective teachers and I was sold from then. After I’d been shown around, met everybody and seen all the amazing things that the school did, I went home and wrote my application that night. I thought, ‘I can’t work anywhere else.’ I’m yet to find anything I don’t enjoy about the job.

Caitlin Peck, Y1 teacher & maths lead Last year we were only on the ground floor. When they gutted the second floor, we had input into exactly how we wanted it to be. We had a blank canvas and could say where we wanted the classrooms, sinks and toilets. We were able to design the perfect school. Overall I think we made good decisions and I wouldn’t change anything at all.

Joe Mills, assistant principal Every teacher is entitled to spend at least an hour every week doing something that will make them a better teacher. Staff are invited to all CPD sessions and choose which ones to attend based on their own strengths and areas of development. A big thing for us is trusting staff to work on the things that will help them do their jobs really well.

Emma Watts, classroom assistant I teach adults in the evening but was at a point in my life where I needed to decide what I wanted to do. I wanted to have an earlier influence by working with children so I’m now doing a degree and starting my teacher training. It’s nice to share the journey with my colleagues. They’re really supportive and hopefully next year I’ll be doing what they do.

Pupil voice

Ava In cooking club we made fruit salad and cheese straws. On Thursday we went to Norwich Cathedral. There was someone dressed up as Edith Cavell and we got a storybook about her life.
Frankie Buttons and Fudge are our school rabbits. They like to jump and snuggle up together. The thing I like best about this school is that I always make new friends and we always learn new things.
Bella I am in gardening club. We get to plant our own flowers. My favourite teacher is Miss Chipperfield because she lets us do really fun things like learning about the Stone Age. She’s also my mummy!

Chandan In the art club on Wednesdays it is really interesting because you can design your own things. I’ve designed my own crest. My favourite thing about this school is that sometimes on Tuesdays we get jacket potatoes with ham!