Steve Rollett, Deputy CEO, Confederation of School Trusts
In Part 2 I want to explore what this might look like in practice. As with the first part, I will draw on my own experiences as a teacher.
Early Career Connections
I was a very fortunate NQT. I taught in a good school, in a local authority which had a thriving network of fellow history teachers. In one of the first conversations with my head of department I was given the dates of the regular county subject network meetings and warmly encouraged to come along.
Attending these meetings might seem like an obvious thing to do but for me, fresh from a PGCE in which I’d been fed much of what I needed to know, it wasn’t immediately clear what professional learning looked like in the big wide world. Would this be something the school would organise for me? Would it be something I’d have to source myself?
Over the next few years I attended network meetings, got to know a range of colleagues and was exposed to an ongoing conversation about how best to construct and teach a history curriculum. There was a steering group of expert practitioners who helped to set the direction of the network, ensuring it responded to national and local priorities. They showcased the best elements of their own teaching, breaking down lessons and schemes and explaining the choices they had made, opening up to purposeful critique from colleagues. They also wove in new evidence and interpretations from historians, thus making sure the network remained connected to the evolving nature of historical knowledge, as well as to knowledge about pedagogy and so on. All of this was captured and therefore laid open to challenge in meetings, conferences, resources and a journal.
Such was the success of the network that HMI Mike Maddison carried out a good practice visit in 2013. The report was withdrawn in 2017 as a result of policy changes at Ofsted, but you can still view it here.
I’m told I was a decent teacher. I have no doubt that any successes I had in the classroom were attributable to, or enhanced by, good fortune in starting my teaching career where I did back in 2002.
Lessons learned
Fast forward twenty years and you might wonder how I’ve ended up representing school trusts. After all, the key takeaway from my early career was about the role of the local authority, wasn’t it?
Well, no. That isn’t the point I’m making. Rather, the learning I took from this experience was the importance of connecting teachers to each other and to the wider discourse of the subject and profession.
Indeed, in Part 1 of this blog I argued that our connection with this discourse is fundamental to how we collectively build knowledge. In this blog I am explaining what that looked like for me early in my career, within a school system shaped by local authorities.
My participation in the county history network was key to the ongoing development of my efficacy as a teacher and illustrative of how professionals can collectively shape, challenge and refine their concept of how best to teach and what to teach.
But there were some problems too. Perhaps the most challenging was one of maintaining engagement. For every teacher who chose to travel after school to the central location, to write for the journal, to share ideas at meetings, there were many others who didn’t engage with the network.
One might argue that such was their prerogative, especially given much of this took place outside of school hours. But I wonder whether we might have been able to draw some of these colleagues in if we’d had we the means at our disposal. For example, could we have run meetings and conferences on INSET days? Could we have aligned timetables for key individuals to make it easier for people to attend or be part of the steering group? It was practically impossible to do so across the range of schools involved at the time, each with their own school priorities and calendars.
But such alignment is proving to be possible at scale within school trusts, where even some of the very largest trusts run trust-wide conferences catering to specific subjects and roles.
What is the difference? Largely it’s down to leadership and governance.
The single structure of the trust means that strategic priorities are exactly that: priorities. And they can be shared across the group. Trusts have the potential to shape timetables, calendars and strategic plans in order to put this sort of professional connection at the heart of what they do and make it a reality for all teachers in the group.
Because of the governance arrangements underpinning it this was simply not something the landscape of local authority schools was able to do. Indeed, the county network I was fortunate to be a part of was not replicated in many other subjects or other parts of the country. Having access to this sort of professional connection was largely a matter of chance rather than system design.
And even within the network I had access to there was instability. There were times when network members and steering group members suddenly dropped out because school-level priorities changed. Perhaps a new headteacher didn’t value the involvement of their colleagues in the network, or they felt there were more pressing priorities.
The pre-academy school system was often more atomised and separated than some choose to remember, with school-level leadership and governance often pulling schools in differing directions.
The school trust is fundamentally different in that it allows for the strategic alignment of schools – and therefore teachers – at scale. The trust can create the conditions for teachers to connect in ways that were previously impossible for too many teachers.
The prospect of creating aligned leadership and governance so that all teachers within a group can be connected is potentially transformative and forms a big part of CST’s vision and advocacy for the sector. You can see this captured in publications like this, this and this.
The future of the school system resides in building on the best of what has come before. I hope that in this blog I’ve been able to describe some of the best practice that existed in local authorities and explain how professional connections can be built on, deepened and scaled up by school trusts in the coming years.
This is a vision of school trusts in which professional connections are not left to chance, or undermined by competing priorities, but rather hard wired into our schools.
Reflections and challenges
I’ll close by offering some reflections and gentle challenges.
- The history network I described above is still running and I’m sure continues to be very successful.
- This is not a blog denigrating local authorities. It is about the potential of the trust system to take us beyond what was possible in the old school system.
- For many people the move into the trust sector is not a matter of ideology; it’s deeply practical. I hope I’ve illustrated that in this blog. The notion of there being ‘LA teachers’ and ‘trust teachers’ is not helpful. Rather, there are simply ‘teachers.’ The challenge for policy makers is how to connect teachers in deep and long-term professional collaboration. The case I make here is that the trust system offers the best means of doing so at a scale previously not possible. Governments of all varieties need to move beyond viewing academisation and school trusts as a matter of ideology and see it through the practical lens described here.
- I’ve outlined a potential for trusts to put professional connections at the heart of their strategy and aims. Some are already doing this very well and there is learning to be shared about what this looks like at differing scales and geographical spreads.
- Others are yet to do so. While some of what I’ve described above is about the actions of policy makers, as much depends on trust leaders seizing the opportunity the structure offers. In some cases this will require trusts to reimagine what it means to be a trust, providing a compelling vision to explore where and how closer alignment between schools is necessary.
- Trusts will also want to consider how they locate their work within the wider discourse of roles and subjects. For example, connecting their subject networks to those of other trusts and connecting them to national and international conversations (for example, through subject associations).
- Perhaps most importantly, though, it shows that contrary to the narrative sometimes (and inaccurately) asserted about the sector, the trust system is not an expression of arbitrary hierarchical control. Connecting professionals in deep partnership has the potential to be highly democratizing, situating the locus of trust development and school improvement within the teacher workforce.
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
