The Duston School: TDNo or TDYes?!

In previous blogs, I’ve looked at the context of my visit, the importance of overcommunication, the behaviour for learning policy of the school and the engagement of the staff and parents with the school Principal Sam Strickland is working towards creating.  This blog will summarise my thoughts.

Summary

If you do not already do so, I would strongly advise you to follow Sam Strickland on Twitter (@Strickomaster) and to read the blogs he has written to get an idea of the kind of teacher and principal he is.  After spending a few hours with him during my visit, he is exactly as principled, focused and driven as his posts make him seem!

When Sam applied for the job, The Duston School was still rated ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted but only five days into his time as principal the school had received its first monitoring visit.  As mentioned in the first blog that I wrote about my visit to TDS, the core values of the school are respect, aspiration and resilience and the principal embodies all three of these in his early days at the school, but particularly resilience.  The monitoring visit was seen as an opportunity for external eyes to help triangulate what actions needed to be taken to turn the school around rather than another obstacle to be overcome.

While some staff may have initially been reticent about what the principal was (or wasn’t!) doing, after a full year under Sam Strickland there are no longer any doubters, at demonstrated by the exceptionally low staff turnover rate.  He has demonstrated time and time again that he will stick to what he says he will do, even if that means having to exclude students who refuse to meet the expectations of the school and will continue to do so when it is needed.  Too many schools proudly boast of not excluding students while simultaneously having appalling behaviour around the school, precisely because there is no ultimate sanction that students know poor behaviour will receive.

I haven’t even mentioned the common sense approaches to curriculum and data that TDS are using, reducing GCSE subjects from 11 to 9 to allow greater depth in those subjects while ensuring breadth is in key stage 3; a greater focus on knowledge rather than skills; and linked to this, a standardised approach to key stage 3 assessment that does away with rather meaningless and woolly skills descriptors that simply aren’t precise enough to generate any useful data.

Ultimately, when visiting any school the two questions everyone asks themselves are would I like to teach at this school and would I send my children to this school.  The answer to both is a resounding yes (if we could get in!).

However, don’t take my word for it, contact The Duston School or Sam Strickland directly on @Strickomaster and arrange a visit for yourself.

Thank you to Sam, the staff that gave up their time to share their part of The Duston School journey and also to you, the reader, for making it to the end of this series of blogs!

Winning (Parental) Hearts and Minds

In previous blogs, I’ve looked at the context of my visit, the importance of overcommunication, the behaviour for learning policy of the school and the engagement of the staff with the school Principal Sam Strickland is working towards creating.  This blog will look at parental engagement.

Parental Engagement

When speaking to the Assistant Principal in charge of Student Care, the first strategy that they mentioned was flipping the behaviour logs home.  Previously, parents would be flooded with communication from the school about negative behaviours, engendering a negative attitude towards the school itself.  Instead, the aim has been to flood parents’ inboxes with positive messages: therefore when a negative is raised, the parent is more likely to pay attention and engage with the school systems as negatives can also be perceived as part of a supportive system.

In addition, The Duston School aims to be transparent to the “nth degree” (my visit is proof of that!) so rather than having rather staged, glitzy open evenings for parents, TDS has held a series of open mornings for parents and even members of the wider community to come in and see how proud they are of their school and that they have nothing to hide.

When meetings for prospective parents are held, they too are very transparent, with the message made very clear that they choose the school on their applications, so make sure that the choose the right school.  If parents disagree with a particular school policy, for example, on mobile phones (they are confiscated for a week if seen out), then the policy isn’t going to change so maybe TDS isn’t the right school for them.  However, over 440 families last year did think it was the right school, with only 240 able to get this first choice.

Rather than being all about the parents compromising to the values of the school, however, several choices have been made with the parents firmly in mind.  The school hosts numerous events throughout the year, including coffee mornings and Christmas markets, to encourage visitors into the school.  They also changed the time of Parents Evenings to 5pm-8pm.  While extending the day for staff, it immediately allowed a greater proportion of parents to attend and receive key feedback about their children.  In the future, The Duston School is looking to develop a Parental Alumni group to tap into the expertise and experiences of parents to enrich the lives of all the children at TDS and not just the parent’s own children.

The final blog of my visit will summarise my thoughts on TDS.

On the Front Lines of Change

In my previous two blogs about The Duston School I’ve discussed the context of my visit, the importance of overcommunication and the behaviour for learning policy of the school.  This blog will look at my impressions of the staff.

Impressions of the Staff

As I explained in the first blog, my visit took place on Year 6 into 7 transition day (the first of two days) and it would be expected that the Principal, as the figurehead of the school, would be very on-message and focused.  What impressed me, however, was how clearly on the ball the rest of the staff were as well.  As students filed into the main hall, the Director of Year was at the front, monitoring the expectation for silence, but around the hall, the main work was being carried out by the form tutors who were modelling the Lemov ‘Warm/Strict’ approach with tutees as they came in.  Smiles started brief conversations which generally concluded with imperatives, starting to lay the foundation for the expectations the students would be expected to meet over the next five to seven years.  Once the Principal started speaking, the core values of respect, aspiration and resilience had already been exemplified by his staff in the preceding ten minutes, contributing further to the overcommunication taking place.

From speaking to staff, this impressive unified approach was not always in evidence at the school and was arguably one of the factors that led to TDS going from ‘Outstanding’ to ‘Requires Improvement’ over only a few months before Sam started (the first monitoring visit after RI was only 5 days into his tenure – more on this in a later blog).

Unlike many other new Principals in post, Sam didn’t bring in his own SLT, but worked with many of the staff he inherited, avoiding a perception by the wider staff body that they were being done to instead of with: a crucial distinction to ensure staff buy-in.  Also, he did (next to) nothing new for the first hundred days or so as Principal (Headship: Doing NOTHING During the First 100 Days), enabling him to meet all staff and take on board their fears, hopes and aspirations for the school.  Therefore, when changes started to take place and Sam clearly stuck to his principles in terms of expectations of behaviour (see previous blog), staff were happy to be part of the journey with the end result being the sort of unity demonstrated in the transition day assembly.

An additional strategy that has led to enormous amounts of staff buy-in has been the use of faculty away days where whole faculties can develop their subject knowledge and expertise and really be part of a research culture to ensure that the lessons being delivered are as effective as possible.  When one faculty is on their away day, another faculty covers for them, reducing cover costs but also adding to the sense of a professional community working together for a common goal as, for example, the science faculty enables the English faculty to improve so has a small stake in the English outcomes too.  The teachers I spoke to were in agreement about how lucky they to have the opportunity and are aware of the investment the school has made in them so they were determined to maximise the gains that they receive.  The benefits were clear as it was only afterwards that I discovered both teachers were NQTs as from their subject knowledge and expertise (partly brought about from the away days) they seemed to be far more experienced.

The clearest proof of how happy the staff are at TDS is the staff turnover this year: two are leaving at the end of term and both of these are due to relocations and are sorry to leave.  With practically the same staff next year, The Duston School will continue to be able to go from strength to strength.

The stakeholders not mentioned so far are the parents of TDS children, who are the focus of my next blog.

High Expectations and Behaviour for Learning

Previously I explained the context to my visit of The Duston School and looked at the importance of overcommunication to enable Principal Sam Strickland’s vision for the school to come to fruition.  Despite the expectations for students being abundantly clear, not all students meet these and many students, particularly at the start of Sam’s tenure were actively resistant.

Behaviour for Learning

The system at TDS is very clear, with a structured set of sanctions that are put in place.  These start with form tutors, escalating to directors of year, then to an Assistant Principal and then finally the Principal.  At each stage, centralised detentions (20 minutes for making two wrong choices; 40 minutes for making three wrong choices; isolation for more than three) are in place and a student has ten days on report to show progress; if they don’t, it moves up to the next stage.  This is not rocket science, but the difference is that by the time a student gets to being on report to the Principal, they have failed to meet the school’s expectations for 30 days, i.e. an entire half term, and the next 10 days on report may well end up being the student’s last ten days at the school.

Sam has written about his views on exclusions in detail here (‘The Exclusion Exorcists’) so I won’t repeat them all here, but the one particular reason for exclusion at The Duston School that I want to pick up on is what the post describes as ‘persistent opposition defiance’.

Many other reasons for exclusion that are cited, most schools would agree with as they include physical and verbal abuse, but in several schools I’ve worked in, a student who says “no” repeatedly is generally not sanctioned further than the lunchtime or after school detention level.  When I’ve challenged this policy, the response has generally been that the student hasn’t done anything severe enough to warrant exclusion.  I would argue that weeks, months or years of oppositional defiance are much more worthy of an exclusion that a heat of the moment lashing out, either physically or verbally, due to frustration (though, to be clear, I feel that they both merit exclusion).

I see the outcome of this policy every results day when students leave school with next to nothing after twelve years of education because they’ve been saying “no” for good portions of the last five.  Refusing to exclude in such cases only massages the school’s exclusion figures for the benefit of the school or MAT and does absolutely nothing for the child whose self-destructive behaviour goes unchallenged at best, promoted at worst: you promote what you permit.

The other effect of the clear behaviour and, where necessary, exclusion policy of TDS is that the staff feel well supported, which is the subject of the next blog.