The Hemel Hempstead School
This academic year I have been coaching all academic middle leaders. It is a confident school with a skilled and committed group of middle leaders. The ambition of the school is to improve further the learning experience of their students, in particular to provide equity to disadvantaged students. The headteacher and I believe that coaching this group of leaders will provide them with the opportunity to reflect on current practice and where changes will have the biggest impact.
The Hemel Hempstead School is a confident school with a good reputation wanting to develop further under a new Headteacher. He invited a team, including me, in to look at lessons. We observed a mixture of newer and experienced teachers, who delivered effective lessons to well-behaved students. We also met a number of skilled and committed Heads of Faculty. Nevertheless, the team believed that some tweaks to practice could lead to significant gains in student learning and skills acquisition.
To complement his ambition to move to outstanding, the new Headteacher has a vision for equity for the minority SEND and disadvantaged cohort. His belief in servant leadership is establishing an open and supportive, if ambitious, approach to teacher development and accountability, based around staff-led coaching trios. I agreed with the Headteacher after our observations of the school, that coaching the Academic Leaders was the key to sustained and significant classroom improvement. This approach ensured autonomy to key middle leaders, provided support, whilst maintaining high expectations of middle leaders. The middle leader group is a mix of colleagues, who have been in post for some time, brand new to the post and experienced leaders, who are new to the school. Coaching has, therefore, been differentiated to the individual need as agreed in the initial sessions. To ensure consistency of leadership across faculties and to equip new colleagues, there is an agreed focus for the first sessions, ranging from their vision for teaching and learning, visibility and maintaining high expectations to evidence-based monitoring and difficult conversations. It has been supported through the use of BASIC coaching by Andy Buck, which blends careful listening and skilled questioning with the sensible use of mentoring where agreed and beneficial.
The scope of the project is impressive in that the same coach is working with all academic middle leaders all year. It has clearly signalled the Head’s preparedness to invest and trust his middle leaders, whilst simultaneously providing value for money in focusing on core purpose and classroom practice. The sessions have been ongoing since September. We started with a face-to-face group sessions preceding one-to-one meetings in school. Individual coaching sessions take place online. It was important to me to establish rapport and trust in person as well as working with the group, who could test me out and raise their own ideas and concerns. The disadvantage of the approach is that colleagues have not volunteered, which is a normal prerequisite of successful coaching, so the coaching relationships have potentially been more challenging. Nevertheless initial feedback has been positive. Most have welcomed the opportunity to reflect on what they do and more importantly why they do it. In the Covid-torn environment, in which educators have been operating for nearly two years, an oasis of quiet and reflection has largely been appreciated. One colleague was disarmingly honest with me at the end of session 2, when saying she had never understood the point of coaching. However, she was now convinced as it had given her the chance to think through the ‘why’ and hone her strategies accordingly. Others have been pleased of the opportunity to think through strategy and action (and to be challenged to understand the difference) and the importance of ruthless prioritisation, when so much is expected. To focus on what matters (and be supported in doing what you believe) is not only a welcome tonic to excessively busy leaders, but essential to ensuring an outstanding learning experience for their students.
However, most intriguingly the project has taken on a life of its own. Talking to all middle leaders regularly I enjoy a unique insight into the workings and leadership of the school. I have become an intermediary and advocate for the vision of the new Headteacher, whilst exploring the understanding of and attitude towards that vision of the middle leaders. The role of coach is traditionally to allow the individual to improve through self-directed learning. This is certainly in train, but I am also able to feed back the views of middle leaders frankly, whilst preserving anonymity which is the foundation of effective coaching. I have a highly unusual and privileged view of the school: an outsider who hears the honest thoughts of key colleagues and can focus, refine and reflect these back to leadership. It is, again, underlines the health of the school, that senior leaders are willing and welcoming of this feedback. I meet regularly with the Assistant Headteacher responsible for CPD, who sees these sessions vital to the ongoing support of the project.