Schools in Suffolk are beginning a radical partnership with their counterparts in inner-London Hackney. Such collaborations could dramatically improve pupil performance, according to the chief executive of the RSA
Today sees the publication of the RSA’s ten-month inquiry into school education in Suffolk. The background to the report is the erratic performance of the county's schools over the last decade.
Despite recent improvements, Suffolk still performs poorly in comparison with national averages and its statistical neighbours. Poor aggregate levels of pupil progress and attainment are combined with wide gaps in educational achievement between disadvantaged groups and other pupils. In the words of the county council, ‘Suffolk is stuck’.
Suffolk’s poor student outcomes appear particularly disappointing when judged against its relative prosperity, although the headline figures conceal significant variations in rates of employment and living standards.
We used a methodology that eschewed the usual closed-door commission and one-way consultation process, opting instead for a set of Solutions Groups. These engaged hundreds of people and developed solutions that are already being implemented even before the county council has responded to our analysis.
At the heart of the report is our belief in the power of collaboration. Our approach is to combine devolution of responsibility and resources to schools with an expectation that they commit to strong partnerships with:
- ‘Pyramids’ of secondary and their feeder primary schools and early years settings, where objectives and accountabilities are focused on the attainment and progression of every child;
- Other neighbouring schools and organisations working with young people and the wider community where the objectives and accountabilities are focused on the well-being of every child;
- Schools with a similar profile to themselves in ‘families’, where the objectives and accountabilities are focused on the quality of teaching and learning and school improvement.
For this collaboration to make a difference, it must be long-term, substantive, focused and based on measurable aims. We have called the report 'No school an island' to signal the importance that we attach to the principle that publicly funded institutions must take both individual and shared responsibility for the interests of the children and young people of Suffolk.
Schools need to open their doors more routinely and purposefully to a wider range of partners. They need to engage with employers to enable children and young people to have a richer understanding of the world of work, and to involve the wider community, especially parents, in valuing education and raising children's achievement.
Another key recommendation is that Suffolk should form a strong partnership with the London Borough of Hackney. This is partly to learn from Hackney’s success, but also to address the danger of insularity in Suffolk and to provide opportunities for schools, teachers and pupils to develop new relationships, insights and ambitions.
Yesterday saw the first step as pupils from Suffolk and Hackney met and studied together at Holy Trinity School, Dalston under the encouraging gaze of teachers and councillors from both councils.
Suffolk County Council has been supportive and encouraging, but officers and councillors will now take a few weeks to develop a considered response to the report. When exploring successful improvement strategies, there is a tendency to overlay a post hoc neatness on the process but, on closer inspection, these change processes turn out to have been multi-faceted and emergent.
Achieving a step-change in performance will require effort and adaptation. We hope many of our ideas will work well, but others will no doubt need to be refined.
Whatever emerges from the county, many of the ideas in our report are already progressing. For example, there is the collaboration between two clusters of schools around the development of a 9-14 ‘mid-Bacc’ focused among other things on ensuring a successful and substantive primary secondary transition.
There is also the work done by the employer engagement group, which rests on the powerful foundation of a set of core competencies – communication, responsibility, teamwork and initiative – jointly agreed by teachers, employers and young people.
Using this framework, Suffolk schools can benefit from the palpable enthusiasm among local employers to engage more fully not just with schools as institutions but with the content of teaching and learning.
Our approach is relevant not just to Suffolk, but represents a robust and imaginative way to address the issue facing all localities: how do we improve standards and maintain local public accountability and engagement in the context of councils’ losing their provider role and of the establishment of more and more academies and free schools?
Matthew Taylor is the chief executive of the RSA
