Case studies

Leading Innovation at KS2
Christ Church Junior School
Alex Wilkinson

Since qualifying as a Primary teacher 14 years ago, Alex has worked in the ILEA, Zanzibar and Bristol. Having trained at the tail end of the ‘child-centred’ paradigm, he returned from Africa to find the new model of education as ‘delivery’ in complete ascendancy. He is now the Headteacher of Christ Church Junior School, South Gloucestershire.

Alex describes his best moments as a Headteacher being inspiring INSETs, like ALPS and Richard Dunne on mathematical understanding; his worst moments have “yet to come”, though he wonders whether his first OfSTED as a Head will excite a ‘reptilian’ brain response in the same way as SATs results and PANDAs do. He could always try relaxing with his favourite pastimes: being on a remote mountainside walking with his family or doing the Congolese Rumba (though not at the same time).

The Big Picture

• From ‘The ALPS Handbook’ as a manual of good teaching to Accelerated Learning as the inspiration to ‘Transform Learning’.
• The rhetoric of transformation and the reality of Primary education, possibilities and obstacles in current education policy.
• Emotionally Intelligent Leadership; some thoughts on the ‘highs’ of inspirational training and the challenges of getting ALPS from the agreed vision to the reality experienced by most children in most lessons.

On my Headlamp training I learnt that one of the three roles of leaders is…‘to make sense of things’. This is my starting point – making sense of the call for ‘transformation’ and what it means in our school’s vision, in classrooms and in the national context in which we work.

National Context

“Do we take modest though important steps of improvement?
Or do we make the great push forward for transformation?
Let me spell it out. In education…we open up the system to new and different ways of education, built round the needs of the individual child.
There's nothing wrong with the old principles but if the old ways worked, they'd have worked by now.”
Tony Blair. Labour Party Conference Autumn 2002

Faced with a reduced budget, a crowded curriculum to ‘deliver’ and relentless pressure to add SATs value it would be easy to dismiss the Prime Minister’s words as mere rhetoric. Charles Clarke may not have a vision of ‘transforming education around the learning needs of individual children’, however there are currents within the education establishment that recognise that ‘more of the same’ simply won’t deliver either the quality of learning or quantity of pupil ‘outputs’ that Michael Barber’s aspiration of a world class education system implies.

David Hopkins, head of the Standards Unit:

“It seems to me that unless we actually do something about the accountability framework then all of this talk about transformation, all of this talk about creativity will come to naught.”
NCSL July 2002: Leading Transformation

and David Bell, HMCI:

“Apprehension about inspection can mean that schools prepare what they think inspectors will want to see, rather than taking risks and using the opportunities of the moment. This article sets out the steps that OfSTED is taking to encourage schools to highlight Innovative and Effective practice.”
Evaluation of Innovation. Education review Autumn 2002

One way to make sense of this is to take seriously the ‘Standards Unit’ version of the history of recent education policy, which suggests a movement from the uniformed professional judgement of the 1970s to the knowledge-rich autonomous Leadership of the present day.

Source: www.standards.dfes.gov.uk

The question is informed professional judgement about what?
Informed by what knowledge and to what ends?

The School Improvement paradigm produced informed prescription on leadership, pupil outputs (standards), accountability, curriculum (as entitlement) and teaching (as effective delivery) legitimised by (contentious) School Effectiveness and Improvement Research.

The quotes above from Blair and Hopkins indicate that the next phase of reform will be about individual children’s learning. In which case the DfES, the delivery Unit and the No10 special advisors need to start finding out about the ‘Learning Agenda’, where better to start than the ALPS Handbook?

School leadership perspectives

In my first term of headship I was faced with a case of teacher competency. In order to set clear and supportive targets, we looked at the recently published Hay Mcber Research into Teacher Effectiveness (June 2000). With its clear sections on Classroom Climate, Passion for Learning, etc. it provided a wonderfully lucid overview of the basics of what a successful classroom could look like. Many hours were spent translating these goals into practical tasks. Six months later the ALPS handbook was published, adding both theoretical depth and practical steps.

Following an ALPS training day for the whole school, every class teacher was given a copy of the handbook, which we use as a source of ideas as we work our way through upgrading together our collective understanding and agreed practices. We have also been involved in Assessment for Learning, teaching Thinking Skills and Guy Claxton’s work on Teaching how to Learn.

Two things have emerged:
Firstly, there does seem to be a paradigm emerging (The Learning Agenda), suggesting that if the focus shifts from education as ‘effective delivery’ to education as ‘quality learning experiences for individual children’ then there are six dimensions at the classroom level in which teacher understanding needs to translated into classroom practice:

• Classroom climate (EI)
• Planning – links from the big picture to the specific learning
• Teaching that engages groups and individuals – VAK
• Opportunities to question and talk
• Time to reflect – from have I reached my target to what and how have I learnt and how can I apply it?
• What is it to be educated in the 21st century?

Secondly, there is a real sense in which the ALPS handbook provides a practical guide to what is increasingly being recognised as mainstream good teaching. We use it to agree individual and collective Performance Management Objectives, as a basis for the agreed criteria for lesson observations, as the starting point for policies and as a map of the areas for further training. I took over as Headteacher of a ‘good school’ with ‘effective teachers’. We are not an Accelerated Learning School (yet) - it’s a long journey not least because at the level of leadership it can’t be about relentlessly driving though my vision.

Towards an ALPS school:
As Charles Clarke contemplates both the failure of ‘Superheads’ and ‘taking out’ poor Headteachers, I wonder about the following:

• Feeling inspired but ‘daunted’ after a brilliant days training with Mark Lovatt from Cramlington High (which is an Accelerated Learning School).
• The school that announced the day after ALPS training that they were now an ‘Accelerated Learning’ school
• How many schools over the years who have had ALPS training now consider themselves to be Accelerated Learning Schools? What happens post-inspiration?
• Driven, visionary Headteachers, inspired by someone or something from the Learning Agenda but not able to translate their own intellectual excitement or emotional inspiration into classroom reality. Why?
• Time.

Howard Kennedy at the London Leadership centre (my Headlamp mentor)
“It took 7 years to create a good school; 11 years a very good one,”

Or this:

“When you plant Chinese bamboo nothing happens in the first year, nor in the second or the third or fourth years. You don’t even see a single green shoot. And yet in the fifth year in a space of just six weeks, the bamboo will grow 90 ft high. The question is, did it grow 90 feet in six weeks or in five years?”
(from Learning by L. Stoll & D. Fink)

So in my ‘third year’ what has been achieved? At a DfES Innovation Unit meeting I came across a phrase I like - Building the Capacity for Innovation.

• A collective, clear, practical and public (website) vision that focuses on Learning
• A common set of experiences and language about learning (through investing in high quality and inspiring training) for staff and governors.
• An ‘evolving’ Teaching & Learning file (modelled on Horsenden Primary’s – THANKS!) that combines ideas, theories, ideals and agreed practices.
• Clear evidence (from observations) that teachers are experimenting with implementing VAK approaches to teaching as well as other individually chosen areas for development (Marking codes, mental mapping, brain breaks/gym, kinaesthetic memory for spelling, reviewing learning (beyond the plenary!)
• Anecdotal evidence both that the climate for learning in the school is positive (for staff and children) and that children are mostly happy, engaged in learning and sometimes ‘buzzing’.

The Next Stage
As a Headteacher how do you take forward ‘inspiring training’, from INSET to classrooms? Headteachers have been encouraged/trained to have at their disposal the ‘tools of improvement’ that have emerged from the inspection and delivery focus of the past five to ten years, namely: monitoring planning, observing lessons, sampling pupils’ work and analysing pupil outputs. Is getting ALPS into classrooms a similar leadership challenge to getting phonics into Year 3 and level 4 writing skills into Year 6? Daniel Goleman’s book on Emotionally Intelligent Leadership (‘The new Leaders’) gives a typology of six Leadership Styles: Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting and Commanding. There is an interesting empirical research project to see if those school Leaders who have succeeded or failed (or aren’t interested) in Leading a ‘Learning’ school fit into this typology and how have they used, adapted or subverted or ignored the tools of ‘Improvement Leadership’ at their disposal?

Taking ALPS beyond the stage of a manual for good teaching perhaps involves a different (additional?) set of challenges:

• Hearts & minds: securing the emotional and intellectual commitment of staff, parents, governors and children – beyond ‘Training Days’.
  
• Workload:
  ‘Innovation must be balanced with abandonment
   
  1. Things that were designed in the past but which, if we were starting afresh, would not be designed in the same way, knowing the terrain ahead.
  2. Things which are currently successful but which have a limited ‘shelf life’.
  Brian Caldwell (Leading Learning 1. London March 2000)
   
  A whole school ‘sifting’ of the sedimentary layers of policy directives that have built up because innovation in policy has not been accompanied by abandonment.
  
• Innovation: space/time to experiment, fail, share, reflect - support from the DfES Innovations Unit http://www.standards.dfee.gov.uk/innovation-unit/

On-going Project
After two years of building capacity and understanding we are now getting some specific ‘projects’ going, the first of which focuses on ICT (following INSET from John Davitt – ICT meets VAK), details of which can be found on the school website (www.christ-down-jun.s-gloucs.sch.uk/). This is part of an LEA-wide initiative Learning through Innovation, which involves 27 schools using multimedia ICT as a tool for getting the Accelerated Learning approach (specifically VAK) into teaching at all levels and in all subjects. Details of the project will soon be available at www.southglos.gov.uk/Corporate_Advisory_new/Advisory/

1. What is ‘real’ geography (for instance)? What do real geographers do? What kind of ‘geographical learning’ experiences will pupils get in secondary school? Richard Dunne’s INSET has prompted us to draft subject policy statements that focus on the big ideas that structure each subject (can this be represented visually?) This links with OCT2002 HMI report on successful Primary Schools and QCA guidance on organising the Primary Curriculum, namely ‘Coverage is less important than depth’.

2. Identify the Learning styles of a whole Year 5 cohort. Select a group of 25 identified as under-achieving for whom an explicit focus on visual and kinaesthetic learning will raise their self esteem and level of ICT skills.

3. Teach the groups some basic collaborative working skills (using the Critical Skills Programme). Specifically encourage them to come up with questions about water and the landscape to be investigated on a trip to the Forest of Dean and Symmonds Yat.

4. Use specific ICT skills that will enable the groups to organise their questions and learning, field-trip experiences, interviews with experts (from the university and Secondary school)

5. Give/make presentations using the latest multimedia technology.

6. Use ICT as the vehicle (Trojan Horse!) for a whole school review of the curriculum!

Talking about innovation and transformation is only the first step of a long process. At Christ Down Juniors we feel that we have been able to take the second and third by beginning to put into practice ideas from the ALPS handbook and apply them to all classrooms within a whole school framework. Success will depend on many things, but up there amongst them are the reflections of emotionally intelligent leadership.