The Confederation of School Trusts is calling for a new approach to the way that the Government supports and regulates school standards, including some of the circumstances in which Ofsted inspections can automatically trigger intervention in schools.
CST is also recommending the creation of a bolder approach to helping schools in need of support, drawing on organisations with proven capacity for school improvement, replacing previous approaches that focused on individual expertise.
This should be backed by a long-term approach to deepening the research base about how effective trusts develop school improvement capacity.
CST Deputy Chief Executive Steve Rollett said: "School trusts are at the forefront of school improvement and have led to a rise in school standards across the board. We now have the chance to build on this and greater leverage the improvement expertise and capacity in effective trusts to support schools who need help.
"Government has an important role in enabling this but it is also a process that must be truly embedded and owned by schools and trusts themselves to really succeed. We hope our proposals help to show how this can be achieved.”
The six key recommendations in CST’s new report, School improvement architecture: Building an intelligent, proportionate, and connected system of improvement are:
- Set out a long-term plan to develop and test an approach to evaluating trust improvement capacity.
- Organisations such as effective trusts should be strategically commissioned, within a coherent regulatory strategy, to provide expertise and capacity (‘softer’ support) to schools, coordinated by Regional School Improvement Commissioning Teams.
- Slim and efficient DfE regional teams with a clear remit to regulate and commission improvement support.
- Proportionate use of ‘hard’ intervention where it is needed.
- Redesign the system of accountability triggers that lead to intervention.
- Expertise should be shared across all trusts, regionally and nationally, through high quality professional networks.
In addition to the report, CST is holding an ongoing inquiry on trust-led school improvement to investigate how school trusts can best support the wider education system.
The principles emerging from that inquiry will be discussed with hundreds of school leaders at CST’s School Improvement Conference in Birmingham in April.
