Guy Shears, Chief Executive Officer, Central Region Schools Trust
To work, culture needs to be part of the fabric of how schools are run and experienced each day. In practice, this means ensuring all aspects of school life are working to support students in overcoming any barriers they may face and ensuring they are armed with the skills and knowledge to succeed.
For us, we knew we wanted to create a culture that reflected our core mission. We consulted with all stakeholders, including our founding organisation, the RSA, working with a cultural development expert from outside of education. We arrived at a clear definition of what has become our distinctive culture. To drive this, we put three core elements at the heart of our approach: People, Places and Processes.
Investing in your People
The leading priority of any culture strategy should be a commitment to people. For us, this includes prioritising staff development in order to nurture an environment where every student feels cared for and supported to succeed.
We are acutely aware our culture must support our staff to feel appreciated and inspired in their career. Our CPD courses and training opportunities enable them to continue developing professionally so we support people to become experts. Commitment to expert delivery of curriculum and pastoral care are equally paramount, and investment to secure this is high across our settings.
We have shared language around behaviours which strengthen culture so we can problem-solve together and role model to young people professionalism, acting with integrity and empathy.
For our students, we focus on developing their whole self. We invest widely in wellbeing support for our young people, so they know our staff care about ensuring they are flourishing both inside and outside of the classroom. Programmes that support all, such as strong thrive practice in our primary settings, as well as bespoke and sometimes individual support packages for young people, are heavily invested in from early years through to sixth form settings. Our students need to know we have the highest expectations for them both academically and in their behaviour.
This also includes passionately ensuring all our students, regardless of background or circumstance, are accessing the same opportunities. For example, our staff work to transform SEND provision by ensuring they are accessing mainstream provision where possible and offering bespoke support to enable them to get the most out of our ambitious curriculum. Our schools are also committed to instilling aspiration into students from disadvantaged backgrounds by creating targeted support plans and investing funds where it is needed most.
Creating Places that reflect our culture
We are committed to investing in creating learning spaces fit for the delivery of a broad and balanced curriculum and staff workspaces that allow a school’s culture to grow. Our people know how much the physical environment shapes and supports our distinctive culture to ensure the correct conditions for growth for all students. Leaders discuss whether our classrooms have ‘curriculum integrity.’ By this, we mean our environments must ensure our students feel valued, must inspire them and must provide the right resources for them to thrive in their learning. Basing requirements upon curriculum need and research enables allocation of funding to support integrity of environment.
We also recently worked with the Department for Education (DfE) to secure funding for a new building for the most recent school to join our trust, Waseley Hills High School, Rubery. This much-needed investment will transform the learning and working experience in the school thanks to a state-of-the-art building and new facilities that will place them in the best possible environment, as opposed to what they had when they joined us which wasn’t fit for purpose. We have recently also secured the same for Arrow Vale High School, Redditch.
In creating these positive environments, we are also committed to sustainability. For example, at trust level, procurement processes have sustainability and environmental impact as strong criteria in driving purchasing and contract decisions. At student level we are determined to lead by example by having a positive impact on the environment, and in turn our communities, to ensure students feel agency to do the same. Our Years 4 and 8 leadership programmes are specifically designed to train leaders to lead community action programmes, both in school and beyond the gate.
Finally, in recognition of the distinct communities we serve, our schools also proactively encourage and celebrate diversity. This is then reflected in our curriculum and our wider policies to create an environment where all our students feel supported, accepted and empowered to learn. We aim to celebrate the achievements and aspirations of all students in communal areas.
Clear and purposeful Processes both inside and outside the classroom
We are committed to creating clear processes that enable our schools and leaders to focus on what is most important: student learning.
Our schools are supported with otherwise time-consuming processes for areas such as safeguarding, SEND and recruitment, by the centralisation of standard processes and then tailoring them to the context of each community. We continue to strive to ensure each process is informed by evidence and supported by best practice so we are constantly pushing ourselves to deliver the greatest educational experience for our students.
By standardising these processes as a trust, we are able to ensure they are reflective of our wider culture and helping power our mission of supporting social justice.
From powerful thinking into practical action
The vision was derived through years of wide stakeholder consultation and was launched at our trust-wide conference.
When it comes to thinking about how the rhetoric of ‘People, Places, Processes’ are manifested daily in schools we have decided to conduct peer reviews across all settings. We have developed criteria against the People, Places, Processes headings for the review teams to use and capture evidence and thoughts. We have also spoken to our pupils and staff and make a conscious effort to observe various aspects of the school day to ensure the manifestations of this culture is coming to fruition.
We are still at the foothills of this process, and it is both challenging and illuminating, however we are determined to implement a distinctive, rich and cohesive culture to ensure we are achieving our mission and lifting up our communities.
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