Back Story
Seven years ago we created a partnership of schools founded on the principles of trust and reciprocity, with a genuine desire to do things differently, to put the needs of the children in our schools at the very heart of everything we did and to place an emphasis on developing the adults in our schools to achieve the very best outcomes for the children.
2013
At the time, we knew that the Headteachers in our schools were pivotal in creating the right environment in their schools to enable teachers and support teams to flourish, enabling them to create the rich learning experiences they wanted to provide.
We also knew that they had very limited development opportunities as leaders beyond the NPQH and that they can feel isolated in their roles; our partnership presented an opportunity to harness a collective resource with huge potential to impact all aspects of school performance.
We embarked on an ambitious plan to create a structured and very deliberate programme of development, driven by our Headteachers, that took a strategic view of the education landscape. We drew on the very latest thinking in CPD from across sectors; our Headteacher Strategy Days were born – a calendar of tri-annual full day sessions, delivered away from school, allowing Headteachers to forge connections, reflect together and share their experiences in a safe and increasingly familiar environment.
We invested in building strong and trusted relationships, we were responsive to specific development need as a focus for our Strategy Days. In the space of just four years we had devised and delivered no fewer than 12 dedicated days looking at a diverse range of issues from individual leadership style to recruitment and retention of staff teams, a dedicated peer coaching programme for Headteachers as well as a year-long Expanding Your Leadership Programme. In addition to this we rolled out a whole school coaching programme to underpin our CPD provision across our partnership of schools.
2017
By 2017 we had crafted a format for our Headteacher development days that, upon reflection had created the perfect conditions for cross-school collaborative planning, strategy development and long term leadership development that was anticipating future developments not only in the sphere of teacher development and Government Education policy, but also in the future needs of the employment market and society as a whole. Our Headteachers were becoming well versed in working collaboratively not only in the context of their leadership roles, but also in terms of school improvement. Our schools were initiating research programmes and cascading their findings for the benefit of all.
Our programme of very deliberate Leadership Development had given us a community of invested Headteachers with Advanced Leadership Skills and a desire to continue to push the boundaries of their own development as well as that of their staff teams.
2020
For us, the challenge was, what next? How did we take our Headteachers and all of our schools to the next level?
The answer was FED – a tantalisingly simple leadership philosophy from Steve Radcliffe. The rest, as they say, is history…