During the past two decades as a headteacher I’ve seen well over a thousand year six pupils pass through. In my present school, where I’ve been the head for eleven years, the current cohort weren’t even born when I first arrived at the school. It was especially poignant therefore to see them on their way at their leavers’ ceremony earlier this week.
By this time next year we are likely to have at least 16 year six classes across the multi academy trust, each one as equally as important as the other as we strive for the best possible outcomes. SATs results day feels very different now than it did when we were a stand-alone academy.
As we complete our third proper year as a trust, the pace of the journey that we’ve all been on has been unrelenting. I say ‘proper’ because in the early days four years ago, when we were in the start-up phase, everything was new and scary because there was no one else out there to copy. We are now through this thankfully, even though at times it still feels like a cottage industry as we struggle with cash-flow and ever-diminishing budgets.
As a MAT though with a strong set of values, we’ve managed to stay true to our objective of achieving ‘both/and’. By this I mean that we’ve created a partnership of schools that are bothindividually unique in their own right and with a strong sense of family belonging, each with a real sense of mission, moral purpose and corporate identity.
If you can’t do this as a MAT, then what is the point? I never wanted to create a MAT that was simply the sum of its parts. The whole purpose was to create something that allows us to do things that we couldn’t necessarily do before when working alone. If we can’t demonstrate how we’ve added value then we may as well pack up and go home.
For me, being able to measure and articulate this added-value becomes our raison d’etre. Quite how we do this is a different matter and must never be as simplistic as the aggregate of test scores. Instead, we’ve worked hard to try and develop a measure that we value and in particular wrap it up within our own core values. These are based around the concept of ‘Fides’, meaning ‘to trust’ in Latin and drive all that we do.
Being able to measure what we value is one of the major benefits of being part of a trust, especially one with a clear moral imperative. There are a number of other benefits of being part of an effective MAT. Some of these include:
1. A strong sense of belonging as a result of shared values, mission, objective and strategy. Our mission is simple: To make people become the best they can be. We do this by creating a transformative family of stand-out schools that has three main strands: Great schools, great services and great capacity.
2. Succession planning and talent management. By identifying our A-players from an early stage (about 10% of the workforce at a time), we can ensure that we have a steady flow of future leaders who are able to access a bespoke CSPD entitlement programme at every stage of their development.
3. Growing our own teachers. The identification of future leaders starts the minute one of our SCITT trainees steps through the door at interview. This year alone, we’ve trained 17 highly-skilled teachers, 11 of whom take up post in the trust in September as NQTs and potential future leaders.
4. Publically celebrating our successes through an annual conference. We are currently organising our third annual conference (#standingout18) where each spring every member of staff joins us for the highlight of the academic year. Always with a strong focus on school-led action research, littered with workshops and inspirational keynotes, the day allows us to articulate in public our values in a way that we could never have done before.
5. A common approach to teaching and learning. Although each school is free to develop its own teaching and learning policy, there is an expectation that schools adhere to our common approach based on our six pillars of pedagogy. The same goes with the curriculum. Every school in the trust is free to develop its own curriculum that is relevant to the local community providing it is based on the principles of our NICER framework for challenge-based learning.
6. Strong and effective governance. This is the hardest thing to do well in a MAT and perhaps the biggest challenge. No matter how good the scheme of delegation, keeping the wheels of governance well-oiled is not easy. New academies have to get used to how local governance operates and in particular the interface with the board. But when done well, with trustees who are highly-skilled in terms of finance, legal, HR, risk and so on, the benefits far out-weigh the challenges.
There are many more benefits, such as the pooling of staff expertise (SEND for example), movement of staff across the organisation, MAT-to-MAT collaboration, distributive leadership, economies of scale, teacher networks, pooling of funding to create discretionary spend etc. But for now, as I head for the hills (and in a few weeks’ time, the beach), I’ll log-off tomorrow for the final time this year in the knowledge that the MAT is in good shape as we continue to put family first.