Setting the Scene for 2024: Challenges, Priorities, and Hopes for North East Schools
This transcription is taken from the Schools North East podcast, where Director Chris Zarraga is joined by Jo Heaton, CEO of Northern Lights Learning Trust, and Kieran McGrane, CEO of Pele Trust. Together, they discuss the start of the academic year, key challenges, and the importance of community in education. You can listen to the full episode here
CZ: A new academic year, a new government, new challenges, or possibly just the same challenges as last year. I’m delighted to be joined by Jo Heaton, who’s the CEO of Northern Lights learning trust, and Kieran McGrane, who is the CEO of the Pele trust. Jo is based in the middle of the region, in Wearside and edging off towards Teesside, whereas Kieran is based in Northumberland, and spreading into North Tyneside now as well. Welcome to both Jo and Kieran. So just to get things started with this first podcast, how has the start of the academic year been for your schools? Any standout successes or challenges that emerged in the first few weeks?
KM: The start of the academic year is always a time of optimism. Everybody comes back in a positive frame of mind, and for our schools it’s actually been a really encouraging start to the year. I think we started the year off fully staffed, which is a blessing in itself. We’ve got some new Head Teachers in our schools as well, and it’s really been nice to support the Head Teachers in setting the tone and the expectations at the start of the academic year, and pupils have really responded to that well. Attendance has been really strong in the first couple of weeks. Visiting schools, seeing the pupils, engaging with the staff, getting into lessons, it’s been very calm, very orderly, and as I said, a very encouraging start to the year.
CZ:Brilliant. So no missing buses, no crumbling concrete, no disasters.
KM: Not So far.
CZ: That’s great. And what about yourself, Jo?
JH: It’s very similar. We’ve had a really positive start to the year, for staff, children and our partnerships across our trust, including our ITT. We’ve had a good uptake of our initial teacher training, and they’ve gone off to a really positive start as well. I think what’s interesting is there seems to be a real desire to work together as a community, particularly after the summer of unrest that we saw. A real renewed drive and optimism about the difference that we make, which is really lovely to see. And our children have come back with a similar drive. One of our schools was choosing their chosen charity for the year, and the charity they chose reflected the desire they had to reach out to aspects of their community that may have felt some of the effects of the summer of unrest.
CZ: Brilliant., and let’s hope it continues. What are your key priorities or areas of focus for this year, for your trusts, or anything particular that you’re working on that you’re excited about?
KM: The main thing in all of our schools is keeping the core business the core business. So the quality of teaching and learning, the quality of education that the pupils receive, that has to be the thing that we can’t lose sight of. How we operate and try and drive improvements in our areas through peer review. And we found that that’s been well welcomed by us, by our schools. It also gives us an opportunity to get colleagues, both senior leaders and middle leaders, into each other’s schools, and create more openness, more transparency about what we do within our schools, and create more opportunities for collaborative networks. So that’s exciting to see, and going into the third year of operation to see how that really develops. But in terms of a key priority, I think we just can’t get away from attendance. The summer results showed for us the stark difference that good attendance makes in terms of achieving really good qualifications at GCSE, particularly within English and maths. So that’s something that we’re setting out this year with a renewed focus on, trying to get back up to pre pandemic levels of attendance in all of our schools.
CZ: And what are you putting in place to achieve that goal?
KM: I think it comes back to the quality of education, the quality of experience in the classroom, the importance of relationships between staff and pupils, and trying to create within our schools a real sense of belonging. We very much feel that there have to be attractors to coming into school, and if it’s just purely about the curriculum, that’s not a strong enough drive for pupils to come into school. So it’s, how do we engage with pupils and encourage them to go beyond the curriculum, to invest in extracurricular activities and so on. And then the other aspect that we’re really trying to be much more proactive about is celebrating success with parents. I think parents’ perception still is that you only hear from the school when it’s something negative. So trying to flip that narrative and be much more willing to phone parents, to write to parents, celebrating little successes to change that dynamic and to encourage parents to be actively involved in a way that maybe some parents aren’t.
CZ: That’s very encouraging to hear. And certainly, the focus on those parental relationships seems to be missing from policy at the moment, but I’ll come back to that in a further question. So what about you, then, Jo? What are your key focuses for the year?
JH: Similarly, obviously, education is our core business. There is that drive for maintaining or improving outcomes and standards, including that drive on attendance, and Kieran is absolutely right, the impact it has on outcomes for our young people. I think probably an initiative or an approach we’re excited about in Northern Lights this year is that we’ve launched our year of community, and we are at the very beginning of this journey with an aspiration to work as a part of our communities. One of our trust values is community, because we really believe that schools are at the heart of their communities, and we realise that for all of our children to flourish, they’ve got to have access to a wide range of opportunities and support. Schools alone can’t do that, and I think that what we’re seeking to do is develop that across our communities where schools are based at the centre of those communities. It is a trust wide approach, but our individuality of the context of our schools is driving it. That may be a partnership with the NHS, it may be a partnership with a local support agency, but it’s really trying to unpick ‘what do we need to do for our young people to be successful’? And that’s really exciting, because it’s not an add on. It’s not asking us as school staff to do anything additional. Our core purpose is education, but we know that for our young people to access education in the best way possible, they need to have access to a wider range of opportunities and support. So that’s probably the part that we’d be most excited about this year.
CZ: That sounds really, really encouraging. It’s very interesting. You’re both stressing the community aspect of school, the extracurricular, how you get people to come in and feel that they belong as part of something which is, I think, very different to the focus that policy has had, or education policies had over the last few years since the pandemic, which has focused on, let’s do more maths, let’s do more English. Let’s catch up. It’s been very much an academic focus. And as you both know, schools in the north east face some very unique challenges. So what do you see as the biggest obstacles to your trust in schools?
KM: I think across all of our schools, the biggest challenge, and it sounds like a bit of a broken record, but it’s definitely around funding. And I think we’ve seen the government make some commitments to schools around the funding for teacher pension grants and funding the very welcome pay rise that teachers really deserve. However, there’s a difference between fully funding that at a national level and how that actually settles at school level. And what we’re finding is that in some of our secondary schools, they could find themselves with the pay grant being 100,000 pounds in one school, 85,000 pounds in another school, but less than the cost of pay rises. And then the teacher pension grant is seeing a similar picture. So on one hand, you’ve got national headlines saying that’s fully funded, but the reality at school level, at trust level, is very, very different. And therefore you’re trying to manage very tight budgets, trying to maintain the quality provision, and maintain the level of staffing that you’ve got yet with diminishing resources.
CZ: But that’s, I think, something which isn’t widely understood by the media, and certainly the structures that the government have mandated over the last 14 years or so, they need to be paid for, and they can’t all be found from existing school pay structures. What would you say about that, Jo?
JH: I would wholeheartedly agree with Kieran. To add to that, it’s the impact that the lack of funding has on the provision for our most vulnerable, including our students with special educational needs. And I think that we need to embrace as a sector work partnerships and working to come up with solutions. So it’s no good just saying it’s not working, or the phrase we’ve heard, it’s broken. But actually, collaboratively, can we think creatively and outside of the box? If there is a pot of money and it’s a limited pot of money, then let’s together decide what needs to be done about it. That’s hearing from the voices of everybody, because everybody has a different context and a different lived experience. And I include the young people in that. At every level, from parents, young people, primary, secondaries, our nurseries, right across the sectors, into our communities. What is the solution to this? Rather than ministers or the department thinking, here’s a solution. We’ve seen it in one region. It worked there. Maybe it’ll work here.
CZ: Certainly we’ve seen that quite a bit over the last couple of years. The National Tuition Programme, for instance, that’s had very limited impact in the North East compared to other areas. We’ve now got a new government. We’ve got a new chief inspector, lots of change at the moment. How do you feel the impact on your schools? Have you noticed any difference yet? Or is it just too early to say?
KM: I would say that it’s probably still very early days. However, what it feels like is that there seems to be an awful lot of policy announcements that are partially trailed in the media. For instance, the removal of performance related pay has been trailed quite frequently. However, the guidance and the clarity won’t come until the end of October. So you have staff coming into school, and their perception is performance related pay has disappeared already. Yet the reality is that it’s in train, but it’s not actually going to happen yet. It’s the same with the work in attendance. The new guidance was released in July. That was the same time that new guidance was released on appraisal, just at a time that everybody’s going on the summer break. So you just feel, as school leaders, sometimes you’re trying to play catch up with what the political narrative is, and it’s not quite in step with the rhythm of the school year. One of the things that you would hope is that the direction of travel seems to be positive. The current government seems to be very committed to education. My hope is that over the next six months to 12 months, that will become much clearer, and we’ll have some concrete policy positions that make that a reality, rather than it just being something that’s wishful thinking.
CZ:We are still, as you said, in very early days. We’re still within the first 100 days of the new administration. I think for me, though, the disappointment is what you said there, about policy trialed in the media, which is something which I think all stripes of government do. They think of a bright idea then, rather than consulting with the profession, they then announce that they’re going to do it and see how it lands with the press before pushing on with it.
JH: It is early days. And I sometimes think the media part, it’s a pinch of salt, because we do what we do and we do it because we know it’s right, that’s how we work in education. And I think the only thing I would add to Kieran, is just remembering the impact on the sector while all of this is going on. So we’re starting to hear policy, as Kieran described it, as wishful thinking, potential direction, but there’s an interim period, and that interim period impacts on all of us. And that then, in turn, impacts on retention in the sector. It’s great news that our DfE early years hub has been extended. There’s a real commitment in the sector. But again, extended for how long, and what does it look like in the future? My call would be for everybody is, when they have that opportunity to share with anybody across the sector, do they realise the impact of that time in between?
CZ: Certainly the impact on staff well being, which has become more and more important over the last three or four years since the pandemic. What do you think is missing most from the early policy announcements or any sort of disappointments that you’d hope to hear about A or B, and that hasn’t turned up yet.
KM: I think, rather than things that are missing, I think it’s just more about questions. So for instance, the seeming change of emphasis in the DfE towards school improvement teams has been again mentioned in the press quite frequently. But there’s no substance to that. There’s no context. There are no examples. And it just leaves people asking questions around, what is that going to look like? And within education, what we don’t want is for our schools to be distracted by things that are beyond their control and not in their sphere of influence. So I do think that that’s something that could have been addressed, and some before it was shared in the media. Actually have some concrete examples of what that was going to look like, rather than it feeling like making things up on the hoof and just trying to stay one step ahead of an announcement. I think the one thing that I was probably encouraged by was the Ofsted announcement around one word grades. However, I just didn’t think it went far enough. I thought there was an opportunity for more to be done in that, in that respect.
CZ: And do you have any sort of concern on that, though, on the impact on staff morale. It has been a really tough few years, with everything that’s going to come out of what happened during covid, re attendance, behaviour, and the increase in special needs. Do you think there’s a risk that these changes aren’t thought out properly, that they go off half cocked, and they have the opposite impact of what’s hoped.
KM: I think the reality is in school, that schools are quite frenetic places. They are fast paced. You’re constantly trying to focus on the quality of provision in classrooms, the quality of support and training for staff. So there are certain constants that you’re trying to focus on that you don’t want to be distracted. And also, you just want to know that you’re in step with government policy, that they’re focusing on the same things as well. I think my feeling is that when you get grand announcements about a change of direction or changes of emphasis, it’s great to hear that, but when there’s no substance that sits beneath it, as I said, it just prompts more questions. And that’s something that can become, for senior leaders in schools and for trust leaders, distracting because you’re second guessing what you do in case it’s out of step with potential government advice and guidance that may come down the line in six months or 12 months in time.
JH: There’s quite a lot missing, because we’re still waiting on the clarity that we mentioned. What will the answer be to the SEND system? We haven’t had anything, that’s still missing. But understandably, it’s the start of a new government, and what we don’t want is, ‘we’ll get something out quickly, because you want an answer’. It’s that fine balance of we need time to review, audit, and really see the true picture and hear from people with, now we know what we need to do and what we want to do in terms of the impact on staff.
Right across our secondary schools and our primary schools, I would say that our staff have, like I said at the start, come back with a renewed sense of purpose and optimism, and I haven’t seen that impact on them. I think one area that’s missing, particularly from policy announcements, is around staff development. There’s uncertainty around NPQs, whether they’ll be funded, whether they won’t be, what the NPQ suite will look like, will it even be in place? How’s that going to evolve with the NPQ for SEND in place?
And then there’s the announcement around developing leadership programs. Will they replace it? Because yes, for us as a teaching school hub, I hope that’s important, and for us to support our region, but equally as a trust and as a trust leader, I want our staff to have the best staff development. We know that if we get our staff the best development, we’ll get the best outcomes for our young people, but there is a lack of clarity on where the government sees that going and how that will then fit with the regional improvement teams. In the past, Trust School Improvement funding has come with recommendations for us to make around NPQs that might be useful to the school you’re supporting, and wider kinds of department and government programmes. If that’s changing, it affects everything. It’s the knock on effect. I think that we’ve got to really make sure that the government understands these policy announcements, they impact each other, because you’re planning ahead as a trust or a school leader and knowing that you want your staff to get the best. But actually, if there’s not the funding, or there is the funding, you can’t simply just change that at the drop of a hat. You’re planning professional development. These are professionals that we work with.
CZ: It’s interesting, it is an ecosystem. That one tweak will have a massive impact on all levels of the system. And sometimes it takes years for those to play out. So in the shorter term, then, if we just look at this academic year, it started so positively. So if you could achieve one key goal in your trust, over the course of year, what would it be?
JH: Only one. I’m only allowed one?! Obviously, I want everyone to flourish in our trust. I want our children, our staff, I want everybody to flourish, if I was to say about our trust. If I was to say wider it would be the success of the beginning of our journey, of our year of community, that real partnership work and the impacts on the families’ lives, particularly in our most disadvantaged communities. I would be over the moon if I had those two things.
KM: Yes, similar to Jo, I think one is a bit tight! I would say that given the summer that we’ve had and the civil unrest that we’ve seen across so many parts of the country, actually going back to our schools being communities where they’re really built on treating everybody with courtesy, dignity, respect, and dare I say, love, is something that I would like to see in all of our schools. It gives an indicator of what’s possible in communities of people that have massive differences between them in terms of age ranges and where they come from, but that we have a commonality around the humanity that we share. So that would be my one choice. Other things I’d like to see is attendance obviously going up, and pupils doing really well. And you know, that is relevant in the North East. We know that there is a significant achievement gap, and our young people are going to be competing with students from across the country, and we need to set them up to do the best they possibly can. So we need to be really ambitious for them. And that’s where attendance comes in, because of that strong link between attendance and attainment.
CZ: Absolutely. Our organisational strap line is, the future of our region is in school. And with attendance, you hope that the future of the region is in school, otherwise the future will be quite bleak. But thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us today. Thank you very much for the job that you do for so many children across the north east. I hope it’s a brilliant academic year, and it lives up to all of your hopes and that you’ve achieved all of your goals by the end of the next 12 months.