The STEP Academy Trust is on a mission to improve children’s life chances, and fast. Jacob Stow discovers just how much difference a shared vision and determined leadership can make...
What exactly does it take to transform a failing school? “PUPAC,” says the architect of the STEP – Striving Together for Excellence in Partnership – Academy Trust, before heading off our nonplussed expressions at the pass: “Passion. Urgency. Positivity. Aspiration. Commitment.” We’re inclined to believe him. Over the course of the last three years STEP has set three struggling primary schools firmly (and swiftly) on the road to recovery, at the same time building a collective greater than the sum of its parts.
We’re speaking to the Trust’s executive principal, Mark Ducker, at Gonville Academy in Croydon, about how the journey that has seen him progress from headteacher to CEO of a group of four schools came about, and why it’s working. With him is Paul Glover, executive headteacher of Wolsey Junior Academy, the most recent school to sign up to the STEP project, and latterly head of Applegarth Academy, its predecessor. Both are firm believers in the power of the shared values underpinning their work, and the successes that can be enjoyed by schools willing to operate together in partnership – and that’s not a euphemism for surrendering one’s identity to an academising predator, we’re reminded whenever we unwittingly use ‘takeover’ in relation to Gonville’s growing family.
“Some academy trusts come about through circumstance – maybe they want to work together because they are located close to one another. We’re joined by what we consider to be our mission,” Mark explains, referring back to their choice of name. “It’s not called the Gonville Academy Trust, though it started here. Our headteachers and senior leaders are academy focused, we’ve got local governing bodies; we haven’t gone for centralising because we want the character and the independence and autonomy of each school to come through. It’s founded purely on the principle that together we can achieve things that we couldn’t achieve on our own.”
What they have achieved certainly catches the attention. Praised by Ofsted for the impact of its work and named as sponsor of a new Croydon school by the DfE in December, STEP is showing how ambitious schools can make a difference beyond their own classrooms.
The academies programme is a means to an end; it’s given us the opportunity to create something unique, driven by a moral purpose, to make a difference to children’s life chances
Mark Ducker, Executive Principal
The partnerships linking the STEP Academy Trust’s schools have their roots in the frustrations Mark endured as a solitary head struggling to make changes without support, and later the limitations he encountered when lending his expertise to others on a temporary basis. “I came to a school that needed rapid improvement, but I wasn’t able to do it because I was on my own,” he says of his early days at Gonville. “You have to identify your ‘believers’ and then put in place the systems that are going to tackle those issues, particularly the quality of teaching. There were teachers who had been here for 10–15 years and the quality of their teaching needed to be addressed, and that took time.
“Later, when I was asked to be a Local Leader of Education in 2008 and work with a school in Lewisham that had dropped below floor targets, it was exciting on one level, in that it wasn’t just me – if I identified an issue I would pull in expertise at Gonville. But it was frustrating at the same time because we could still only move as quickly as the leadership team was able to move. Also, it was for a finite period of time, so once we had finished a year and got the school above floor targets then the partnership would end. That led us to think that if we were going to work closely with a school we firstly wanted to improve it rapidly, and therefore have more control over its leadership, and secondly to have a lasting, symbiotic relationship.”
The opportunity to put this approach into practice came when Mark became a National Leader of Education and Gonville gained support school status. Charged with turning around the fortunes of David Livingstone Primary School (now Academy), Mark and Gonville jumped at the chance: “We were slightly down on capacity – my deputy was on maternity leave – when I was asked to look around the school, but I couldn’t turn my back on it. The deputy there, Claire, who is now the headteacher, was fire fighting because the head was in and out for various reasons. There was a Year 3 class that’d had eight teachers in an academic year – there were 24 boys and behaviour was off the wall. It was a great schools in a lot of ways, but it was in crisis.
“Five days later I put in my assistant head as co-head of school with Claire, which gave a very clear symbol of partnership. I went in as executive head, working through the two co-heads of school. We transferred teachers into the most vulnerable classes, then three more staff went in at the start of the next year, all of whom were replaced by NQTs at Gonville. The school improved immediately.”
Mark stresses that whilst initially good practice flowed from Gonville into David Livingstone, soon the partnership became reciprocal. With a desire on both sides for the links between the schools to continue, and for the transformational results to be replicated in other struggling schools, the STEP Academy Trust was born.
Binding the STEP schools together, and responsible for their continuing success, is a shared ethos, based upon required standards of teaching and behaviour. All four of the Trust’s academies subscribe to the same 18 “non-negotiables”, perhaps the most important of which are the PUPAC values outlined earlier. “They are the heartbeat of the organisation,” Mark says. “We want people who are passionate about the difference they make to children’s lives. It’s the first thing we look for. The starting point must be that if we don’t do this properly, we can damage children’s life chances; whereas if we do it well, we can change them. Urgency is about not wasting time – improvement is rapid in the STEP Academy Trust because the children don’t have a second chance. Every minute of every day is precious. That’s communicated in everything we do, right down to simple things like lining up in the playground and moving round the school in a certain way so that children get to their classes and learning is maximised.
“It’s not for everybody, working for Paul or me, or within the Trust, but if you’re here, you’re positive,” he continues. “If you have a problem then you talk about it with someone who can help. We chase down moaning. If people aren’t positive then we ask them to look at something that’s more attuned to them. Our aspiration is to become better than we are. That drives the school. When we became ‘outstanding’, we began to look at how we could develop beyond that. As a group we’re never satisfied with the status quo.
“Finally, we have commitment. People here work incredibly hard. To a certain extent that’s the first conversation we have – if this is what you believe in and this is what you sign up to, brilliant, there’s a ticket on this bus for everyone. We want people to be involved. If you don’t feel that you can be as committed as we need you to be, if you don’t feel that sense of urgency – and if your school is in special measures, you have to have that sense of urgency – perhaps now is a good time to move on.”
Communicating these values is the key, we’re told, whether it’s Mark working to promote the mission of the Trust as a whole, heads like Paul working to improve practice on the ground, or teachers in the classroom working with the most important people of all. “If you’re clear about your expectations, people can never say, ‘I didn’t know it was going to be like this’,” Paul says of PUPAC’s significance. “There’s no blueprint for turning a school around because they’re all very different, but what underlines everything here are our expectations, for the curriculum, for behaviour, for presentation, and for staff.”
Embedding the Trust’s values and affecting change in what have been invariably challenging circumstances calls for strong leaders. STEP stipulates that a new partnership with a struggling school must involve the removal of any but the most recently appointed head, who is replaced with another capable of making the changes required. This, we’re told, is half the job – as Mark puts it, “Once we put in our strong leader with the additional support of the Trust around them, to a certain extent everything else takes care of itself.”
Paul’s history at the Trust illustrates the impact that can be made by the right leader: deployed to Applegarth Academy at short notice having completed his NPQH at Gonville, he oversaw a transformation that took the school from special measures to ‘good’ in under six months. Now the guiding hand at Wolsey, his efforts – and those of Alan Evans, head of school – have had, in the words of Ofsted, “a dramatic impact” in only 15 teaching days. “I’ve got this real thing with not having excuses about why something can’t be done,” Paul says. “It has to be done, and not tomorrow – now.” Urgency is the right word.
But as STEP’s expansion has continued (and there are no plans to call a halt), finding leaders capable of sustaining the progress made by this type of standard-raising blitzkrieg – and new teachers to replace them – is a challenge. To cope with the growing demands placed upon the leadership team Mark has adopted a flexible model in which staff members are given every opportunity to develop their management skills, wherever that might be. Heads of school, for example, are a pragmatic solution to the need to allow executive headteachers like Paul to spread their talents across multiple schools, but they’re also viewed as transitional posts, with their holders on the path to full headships themselves.
In order to ensure quality in this drive to develop managers, STEP has formed a partnership with the Future Leaders Programme (future-leaders.org.uk) and Roehampton University, in a bid to secure those with the talent to teach as early as possible. Once placed within a STEP Academy they’re PUPAC’d and prepared for the demands of the job to come.
“Nurturing new talent is very much a part of what we do,” Sarah Mitchell, co-head at Gonville, herself on the Future Leaders Programme, tells us. “I’ve been here since my second year of teaching, and when we get people as NQTs, we grow them through the Trust. There are a lot more opportunities for progression now there are four schools in our group. Future Leaders is one way of developing those leaders. It’s an amazing programme, and the development I’ve had in the last three months has been the best quality training I’ve had in my life. As a trust and a school it’s really beneficial because it means we can train the leaders we need really quickly.”
The altruism at the heart of STEP’s efforts to improve standards has come at a cost for Gonville Academy, which lost its ‘outstanding’ Ofsted after inspection in 2012. With its high numbers of NQTs filling the positions of senior staff who have left to support other schools in the Trust, a ‘good’ with ‘outstanding’ elements is hardly a disaster, but Mark feels that Ofsted’s refusal to take into account the kind of support work pioneered by Gonville will discourage other ‘outstanding’ schools from reaching out to their vulnerable neighbours. “Ofsted is a key barrier for us because it doesn’t recognise the work schools do to support others. If you deploy strong teachers elsewhere, it isn’t interested. We explained that we’d taken a school out of special measures to ‘good’ in six months, that we’d transformed David Livingstone, but the inspector said, ‘It’s wonderful, it’s amazing, it’s needed, but unfortunately we can’t judge that’.
“We’ve written to Michael Gove to say that if you want schools to be giving and generous and to do this sort of work, you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can’t not recognise the work they’re doing.”
“Paul and I are going to be travelling around the country to share our model and encourage other schools to do this, sharing our experiences. Not because we’re empire building – far from it – but because we recognise that in order for children to get a decent education, something like STEP has to start springing up in different areas of the country.”
“There are examples in the local area where schools will send their executive head to support another school for one day a week or a fortnight. I’m not sure how much would be achieved in such a short space of time. With STEP it’s a rapid transformation – we want to do things in weeks or months that might take other schools years to do.”
“Getting your school culture right is so important. It’s hard to define, but having that positive atmosphere and open and honest discussion is paramount. In the summer term, when we have new teachers coming in, we have a whole morning on mission and values – what PUPAC is, and what it looks like in the classroom. We talk to the children about it in assemblies, it’s everywhere.”
“The support given by all members of staff is tremendous. Seeing other teachers and how quickly they progress is a testament to the support they’ve had. We’re given all the training we need when it’s needed, and being part of the Trust makes that easier. Because we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, we can move between the schools and share ideas.”
“I’m on the school council. At the first meeting we discussed not just how to help Gonville to improve but other countries like the Philippines, where there was a big flood. We all gave our opinions and we’re going to raise money.”
“My favourite topic was Micro Society. We had our own business – we created a cinema where you could have snacks and watch movies on laptops; others had sweet shops or nail salons. We learnt that it’s quite hard to run a business…”
“We have a football team, and last year in the summer all of the STEP academies, Gonville’s family tree, came together and played a tournament against one another. Unfortunately we came second, but this year we’re going to win!”
“We have an Eco council where we talk about what we can do for the school. We decided to tell people how not to waste water, and to pick up rubbish. It was quite hard! It’s important because we have to respect the things that we have.”
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