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Secondary

Our Dramatic School Improvement Began With Dramatically Changing People’s Mindsets

“I heard a lot of talk about, ‘our kids’, when I first arrived, as if they were a different species from students living two or three miles away”

Andrew Moorcroft
by Andrew Moorcroft
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I became Principal at Beamont Collegiate Academy in September 2013, and it became clear pretty quickly that improvements had to be made. The school – a 900-place, 11-16 academy in Warrington – was bottom of most of the performance tables in the local authority for GCSE results, attendance and exclusions, and student numbers had decreased year on year, meaning we were significantly undersubscribed.

There were some really strong teachers, and pastoral care was excellent, but generally, behaviour wasn’t great and teaching needed to improve. At first there seemed to be a glimmer of light in the shape of a proposed new school building – but that was soon snuffed out when we failed to achieve planning permission.

And what made it worse was the entrenched, fatalistic belief amongst many that this was simply the natural order of things for BCA, just as it had been for the predecessor school.

We had to start by convincing the staff, students, parents and the community that the school’s fate was not set in stone, and that things could be different.

Like many large towns, Warrington has extremes in terms of affluence and opportunity. The south is in the heart of leafy Cheshire – but BCA serves the centre, which is far more urban and considerably less affluent.

In terms of context, you would call it a challenging school which is in an area of social deprivation, with approximately 50% pupil premium each year and 16 languages spoken. Psychologically, this had provided reasons for some colleagues to justify low aspiration, and poor attendance, behaviour and academic performance.

I heard a lot of talk about ‘our kids’ when I first arrived, as if they were a different species from students living two or three miles away.

Furthermore a ‘social work’ culture had been established, with too much focus upon young people’s problems rather than the delivery of a high quality educational experience which would enable them to break down the personal, social and economic barriers they faced.

High expectations, no excuses

It was clear to me that the emphasis had to shift in order to change the culture; we needed to convince staff and students that we could achieve greater things; that our future was not preordained, and that we could perform as well – or better – than other local establishments.

After looking at schools in similar circumstances to ours that had performed well, we raised targets and expectations. We thought carefully about our existing strengths, decided collectively on what we wanted the school to be, and put our ‘manifesto’ down on paper.

In other words, we began to turn the ship by making it clear where we wanted to go, and how we would get there.

Initially we adopted the, ‘high expectations, no excuses,’ approach to improving conduct. We set out clear expectations of appropriate behaviours within a Staff and Student Charter.

We left nothing to chance – and prepared ourselves to do battle on a number of non-negotiables such as uniform and attendance. We had some parental resistance, naturally, but we remained unmoved; we then made it into the local paper when a number of aggrieved families took up the cause over hair or trainers or stern letters they had received, resulting in the kind of story which could be summed up as, ‘School Has Rules And Sticks To Them’.

Still we stood firm; indeed, I saw the ‘bad press’ as a good opportunity, as it reiterated our belief in high standards and publicly got that message out there. Gradually, the resistance weakened.

Next, we wanted to start changing the mindset of the students, through creating a culture of aspiration. Many of our young people face challenges and their environment does, without question, impose limitations upon their ambitions.

We knew a few glossy posters would not do the trick; we had to live and breathe this mantra of positivity and achievement. We wanted to ‘demonstrate not just laminate’, as Mary Myatt warns – and so our motto, ‘I can, I do and I will be’ was born.

It’s a motto for change, and one which suggests ability rather than limitation; positivity and courage over reluctance or defeatism; and aspiration over fatalism.

We talk about this in some form every single day and it provides a ‘way in’ or a discourse students can understand, which opens up all sorts of discussion and opportunities.

Celebrating great practice

Teachers talked about behaviour at the academy, but they did not routinely discuss teaching and learning. It had fallen down the list of priorities, to be replaced by survival and control.

Again, we had to put structures in place to change mindsets and get staff thinking much more consciously about their craft. We began talking about ‘deliberate practice’ and put some initiatives in place to reclaim the art of the profession – for example, we introduced sharing good practice briefings, and we brought students in an hour later each Friday to facilitate quality CPD time each week, which was delivered by our own staff, including NQTs (accompanied by a bacon butty to galvanise creativity!).

We also bought in Kagan training for a much needed injection of something new.

We then began to celebrate and promote the results of this in classrooms, using twitter and positive emails, and we celebrated a ‘teacher of the week’ where we witnessed good practice or risk taking.

We still do all of these things, but have also invested more heavily in a weightier infrastructure – we now offer subsidised MA places with Chester University and have enrolled a number of staff onto the Teaching Leaders course.

We’ve even held Teach Meets, which we opened to schools from across the north west. Tim Brighouse defines a good school as one in which teachers “talk about teaching, observe each other, plan together and teach each other” – and we began creating the conditions within which these things would start to happen.

One anecdote which always sticks in my memory is listening to two male teachers in the less than salubrious gents’ toilets discussing a ‘think, pair, share’ technique they had trialled in class and being reassured we must be moving in the right direction!

We also introduced a Teacher 360 programme to sit alongside performance management; this took the emphasis away from Ofsted style grades (which we have now done away with completely) and looked at the teacher holistically.

As a result, we were able to focus CPD on bespoke areas for improvement. Inevitably, this more thorough system of teacher appraisal did start to highlight some inadequacy, and we worked hard to offer support and mentoring.

Raising the bar in this way did not come without casualties in terms of teachers moving on, but in most cases this decision was made by the individuals themselves.

Doggedness, enthusiasm and empathy

In terms of raising attainment, we quickly increased accountability by ensuring all subject leaders regularly met with senior leaders to discuss progress. This became priority number one.

We asked subject leaders to incorporate two agenda items into their department meetings: progress and sharing good practice. We began to talk much more about the progress of students and our approach has always been to focus on individuals.

Each progress meeting even now has a focus upon which individuals have entered the ‘red zone’, and we work hard to identify and remove barriers.

Quality assurance of all of these initiatives was also key if we wanted to ensure they became the norm and were not seen as drives or fads. We introduced a detailed quality assurance system which is transparent and clearly sets out all of the work scrutiny, learning walks and so on for the year.

There are no surprise visits or randomly announced observations – they are scheduled at the start of the year and they ensure consistency and rigour across the school. These activities are also frequent enough to alert us to issues early before they become problems.

There are some words which are used frequently within or about the body of staff at our school; these include: tenacity, doggedness, imaginative, energetic, extra mile, committed… you get the gist.

It is difficult to work in a school in a challenging area (or anywhere) if you do not possess these traits; the pain of battle will always outweigh the glory of victory if you do not.

These are qualities I look for when interviewing prospective candidates and are quite often revealed in questions which have nothing to do with teaching. But they have to be allied with an infectious enthusiasm for the subject and a strong moral drive to improve the life chances of young people. Empathy is also key.

A different place

So, what’s the picture now? Within the past four years we have become one of the best attended schools in the area, and we now exclude fewer students than most other high schools locally or nationally.

We have been significantly oversubscribed for the last three years and we finally overcame our planning issues and have recently moved into a beautiful new school building which the students love, as they feel invested in.

We became the first 11-16 academy in the country to achieve STEM assured status with a Fablab on site and we are preparing to host an international conference on computer coding, robotics and engineering. GCSE results have improved consistently across a huge range of subjects and we were recently judged ‘good’ by Ofsted.

We have also taken control of our own destiny and formed a new multi-academy trust with other local schools and a college. This has been a consequence of strong collaboration, which I believe is essential to school improvement and will go on to provide even more opportunities to staff and students here.

BCA is a great place to work and, due to the unrelenting hard work and dedication of staff, has become a school of which I am incredibly proud to be a part.

There is still a lot to do – but the future is bright.

Andrew Moorcroft is Principal at Beamont Collegiate Academy, Warrington. You can follow him on Twitter at @BCA_Principal.

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