OUR IMPROVEMENT STRATEGY
Trust Aims & Principles of Trust Improvement
Consistent focus on children and young people – the learners
Education must have at its heart the development of all our pupils and students, to be successful people throughout their lives. Their achievements must be across academic, creative and cultural fields, and must deliver the widest personal development. Education is a social function that young people should enjoy and treasure, building an attitude that reinforces their commitment to learning.
Clear and effective leadership
Such leadership creates an ethos and expectation which embraces the highest of ambitions for every pupil, student and colleague within each school, as well as the wider community served by that school. The best leadership always focuses on the learner, analyses learning rigorously and develops highly effective plans to improve that learning; these plans identify mechanisms to develop and value the best possible staff teams.
School Improvement
Securing sustainable school improvement requires careful prioritisation and sequencing of the changes necessary. An awareness and understanding of the improvement capacity within each school is crucial in order to establish and secure the right sequential stages of improvement and whether the school requires additional improvement capacity or whether it can become a capacity giver.
There are three key levels of leadership that drive school improvement:
- Trust Leadership
- Local Leadership
- Engagement with the LA
Confident and innovative performance development
The most effective teaching arises from teachers developing impactful approaches and reflecting on practice and from working collaboratively to share expertise, supporting each other in developing learning that responds to the needs of individual pupils and students. Such collaboration is driven by the Performance Development Policy and carried out within close teams, across the school and between schools, in order to develop colleagues who are self-reflective and innovative in their approaches.
Centralised and effective business support services
Such services ensure that business and finance functions support the teaching and learning approaches and maintain the highest level of resource in the classroom. This document does not focus on such work, although business support is a key function of our Trust work.
Trust Improvement
School improvement is achieved through four strands:
Professional Learning
Professional learning across the trust ensures a high-quality and comprehensive offer. Structured, quality and plentiful professional learning is paramount to school improvement. Developing high quality and effective staff is an essential driver of building capacity within schools to ensure staff teams can deliver on school improvement priorities.
Leadership Development
To ensure leaders have the knowledge, skill and expertise to deliver improvements and can identify which data and quality information will be required to monitor progress. The rationale, the objectives and the indicators of success for leadership support and improvement work will be agreed, with timeframes to monitor impact.
Professional Networks
To guarantee structured and effective collaboration, Professional Networks are implemented. Network leaders are appointed as colleagues with demonstrable impact on standards and outcomes, who facilitate standardisation of statutory requirements and alignment of effective policy and approach.
Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance must be evaluative and developmental; it must be collaborative by including school leaders in aims and evaluative activity and must lead to the identification of clear and purposeful improvement activity. Quality Assurance should form part of a cycle that ensure school leaders have engaged in quality reflection and planning.