As a Trust, we support our academies throughout their journey of continual improvement, ensuring that together we make a difference in our diverse communities, and in the lives of those who learn with us and work with us.
Explore
We define the problem we want to solve and identify appropriate programmes or practices to implement.
Prepare
We create a clear implementation plan, judge the readiness of the academy/function to deliver that plan, then prepare staff and resources.
Deliver
We support staff, monitor progress, solve problems, and adapt our strategies as the approach is used for the first time.
Sustain
We plan for sustaining and scaling an intervention from the outset and continuously acknowledge and nurture its use.
Adapted from Education Endowment Foundation (2019)
As a multi-academy trust, we exist to support our schools to improve by enabling them to maximise their resources and enhance the life chances of the children in the communities we serve. We know our academies really well, and we use this knowledge to identify strengths alongside areas that need to improve. We focus in on the problems that need solving and put in place the most appropriate solutions, delivered by high quality professionals across educational and business functions, through a fully costed integrated planning cycle.
Identifying and implementing best practice within our academies, based on research, plays an essential part of developing excellence. A key aspect of our model is using the Diverse Association for Professional Learning to develop the workforce to be highly skilled and agile enough to respond to need. The quality of support that we put in place is held to account through a clear line of sight and strong governance at a local and Trust level.
Creating a leadership environment and climate that is conducive to effective implementation is central to success, and we recognise that school improvement is a complex process that requires leadership at different levels of the academy. Therefore, we prioritise leadership development through high quality programmes and opportunities.
To achieve long term school improvement, we treat implementation as a process, not an event. We ensure that we spend time on each of the stages of our school improvement model – explore, prepare, deliver and sustain – and involve the right people at the right time, giving the best chance for success. To be effective we aim to make fewer, but more strategic implementation decisions and pursue these with greater effort. We look at practices that have proven to be less effective and stop these, freeing up time and resources for school improvement.
