Introduction
There has always been debate about the relative merits of different school ‘types’ or ‘models’ and their characteristics – traditional or progressive; setted or mixed ability; formal or informal; large or small; strict or informal; subject-based or interdisciplinary etc etc. This piece is not about that debate. It is about what highly successful schools of any type have in common.
The Free School programme offered a (largely missed) opportunity to seed and evaluate the success of different school models – something I have written about elsewhere. However, given that all the UK’s Free Schools are start-ups, there is another comparative evaluative lens that can be applied: What do the most successful Free Schools, regardless of model, have in common? Some schools of all types have been highly successful, ranging from ‘strict/traditional’ to ‘progressive/relational’ – very different, but also very effective within their own terms.
In 2021 I was a member of a team of three that interviewed the leaders and founders of a small group of these schools – the schools deemed the most effective and successful in their own terms from the 600+ cohort of Free Schools. The original objective was to create case studies of these school for use with potential future cohorts of Free Schools, but the result was also a body of evidence across the cohort of schools from which it was possible to sift out common characteristics. That is what this piece is about. From the body of evidence we synthesised twelve common features. The way that each of these features manifested in practice varied, of course, but each was distinctly present.
TWELVE FEATURES COMMON TO THE SCHOOLS
1. A clear sense of mission and moral purpose – often strongly linked with the journey to founding a school, all had unusually strong and well articulated sense of purpose
2.Explicit emphasis on culture, cultural coherence and cultural buy-in (staff, students and parents) – usually part of the explicit ongoing narrative of the school, including the display of physical artefacts or maxims that enshrine the culture
3.Strong leadership: the leader as holder and narrator of the vision – the leaders were notably assertive; almost all had been founders of the school or internally appointed since its inception
4.Recruitment to the school’s values – a commitment to employing people who buy into the approach. Values coherence above teaching knowledge and experience
5.Internal succession of key internal leaders – there was a consistent commitment to developing and progressing their own leaders, in one case exclusively so
6.Advanced professional learning strategies – from training student teachers and developing NQTs, to middle and senior leaders’ progression pathways (and including induction and ongoing professional learning for all)
7.Sweating the small stuff – a preoccupation with getting the minutiae consistently aligned; a clear ‘grammar’ of behaviour and learning expectations
8.Unusually strong focus on the fundamentals of learning – a clear, well articulated and consistently applied model of learning (e.g. mastery teaching; cognitive science; project-based learning) and a shared body of knowledge about it
9.Internal strategies to ensure the rigour of classroom learning – from co-planning, to team teaching, to drop-in observations, to close monitoring
10.A strong connection with international models, schools and practices – most were informed about and influenced by well-evidenced international school and practice models (from Teach Like a Champion to Expeditionary Learning; from KIPP to High Tech High). Many had ongoing partnerships with particular models
11.Thriving on being publicly visible – being mission driven, they are energised by influencing others and value being seen as trailblazers
12.Codification and scaling as a part of their lexicon – scaling the model is a feature for some schools and MATs, but all have strategies to codify key practices and are open to visits and to sharing materials.
That is it, really, except to make a few additional overview comments.
- Three of these items (3, 5 and 6) emphasise the significance of developing internal personnel. In one sense this should be self-evident, yet many UK schools have poor internal adult learning strategies and consistently demonstrate through recruitment strategies at all levels (including headship) that they believe a random candidate from Cleethorpe or Clacton-on-Sea will be a better fit than their own personnel.
- A different three (8, 9 and 10) relate to the quality of the learning experience for students – drawing from best international practices, having shared models of practice, and taking quality assurance seriously, whether benignly or otherwise.
- Three (1, 2 and 4) address the issue of ‘loose coupling’ – Karl Weick’s term for the connections required between classrooms and between schools. In ‘tightly coupled’ organizations performance expectations can be mandated and are visible. In schools, historically, classroom behaviours are much more private and, Weick argues, need to become ‘loosely coupled’ by shared values, beliefs and practices.
- Two items (11 and 12) get to the essence of professional practice. Teachers, differently from those in professions like law or medicine, do not tend to see themselves as knowledge creators. In the schools in our study, they did.
- Finally, three (10, 11 and 12) describe schools that are unusually receptive to learning from international evidence of practice and who see themselves as active participants in this community of ‘missionary work’. This commitment to professional exchange requires them to codify their everyday practices (or ‘reify’ them in Wenger’s language) such that they are available for adoption or adaptation by others – whether internally or externally.
David Jackson 