THE BONHOMIE OF A GAME SHOW HOST



‘If you can’t measure it then you can’t improve it’
Dr Eric Tope.

This article is a based on my Action Research Project I completed for my Masters in Education Management, so some of the journals and references I used will reflect that. Looking back on it now feels like a meditative piece, I have edited it to remove specific names. What is most striking about this case study is when I look back the vaticinal nature of the study, with the acadimisation programme that was soon to begin how this Action Research Project would become my modus operandi in this new fast changing landscape as my career unfolded.
In the application process for my PhD, I had to revisit my Masters which I completed in 2012. I have never considered myself a writer however, even though I am dyslexic I really enjoy writing. Re-reading my old work reminded me of the wonderful bizarre language that academics deliberately use when writing papers. This style of writing is compulsory when writing for an academic audience, I suppose to distance oneself for non-academics.



Why Leadership Style Matters

My teaching career began in South London in an all-boy Catholic School. The Headmaster was a formidable figure a truly Instructional  Leader. There a many ways to define leadership style but when you look at Viviane Robinson’s meta analysis it becomes clear very quickly which style is the most effective. You can lead schools around a shared vision, re-writing the ‘schools values’ trying your best to get everyone on the same page with ‘bonhomie of a game show host’. Or you can focus your attention on the impact that the teachers are having on the pupils in the school. At this school in the heart of South London the Headmaster focused all of his energy on creating discussions and having professional development sessions that asked staff to question how they know is their impact was good enough ( ‘know thy impact’ ). He was a stalwart who Staff and Pupils respected, revered in equal measure. His leadership style was defined by his depth of knowledge, unwavering dedication to raising attainment among some of the hardest to reach boys in this country that nationally consistentley fail to achieve their full potential at GCSE . He was a scholar not a ‘game show host’ solely interested in his own ego, he truly valued the life changing opportunities that education provided for children from the precarious inner-city streets. Statistically this school is one of only 9 all Boys’ Comprehensive Schools in the whole of England than manages to consistently achieve a positive Progress 8 score.  
Progress 8 is the governments measure that a school is adding value to a child’s educational. A score +0.5 or higher is the government’s benchmark that all schools aim to achieve. A Progress 8 score of 0 means that on average pupils make the same amount of progress as other pupils in England with similar results at KS2, or the overall quality of the secondary education pupils receive adds no additional value. Although there is criticism of Progress 8 – based on the veracity of KS2 results – it is a far better way of comparing the overall effectiveness of schools, it aims to compare pupils with similar backgrounds or starting points. In mixed schools the performance of girls can significantly mask the underperformance of boys giving the school’s Progress 8 score a more positive spin.
If you measure schools’ performance on attainment only you get a very distorted picture, you cannot accurately compare the results of a selective school against a non-selective school, or state schools with public schools. It is like comparing apples with oranges. By virtue of the fact Grammar School’s select intake from the top 25% nationally they are always going to have an advantage in achieving the higher percentage of the top grades. Progress 8 goes some way to redress the balance and acknowledge where schools are making better than ‘expected progress’. I will come back to the importance of this at the end of this article when I discuss Why Teaching and Learning Matters.
In education we have a moral responsibility to the pupils we teach to provide them with the highest standards of education possible as their life chances depend on this, it is far too big a responsibility to accept suboptimal inadequate leadership. One crucial aspect when raising attainment is the quality of leadership. In Ofsted’s Twelve outstanding secondary schools Excelling against the odds, they credit that Outstanding Schools ‘Building leadership capacity’, I do not believe that there is anyone who would argue that a key factor in the school’s success is its outstanding leadership and management. There are high expectations for all students and the staff, the ethos of the school is centred on achievement and the quality of students’ learning experiences.
Style of Leadership is something that I had never given a lot of thought before I became a teacher, however it is interdependently integral to the success of an organisation. The leadership style that will produce the best results is one that can motivate all staff to identify with the leader’s vision for the benefit of the organization as a whole. One of the first exercises that you undertake as part of the National Qualification for Senior Leaders (NPQSL) is analyse your own Leadership Style, because of how important leadership as a concept is. It can be a very difficult exercise to analyse one’s own leadership style, but it is an extremely valuable process, to have a level of self-awareness on the impact you are making is key. I especially found it illuminating when I invited others around me to carry out a 360* appraisal of my leadership.
Honesty and integrity are fundamental in this process. If you are serious about becoming a better leader, you must be prepared to take on other people’s opinions and act upon them not just ‘listen’ to them. To quote John Hattie ‘know thy impact’, everything we do in education has an impact on pupil progress (both positive and negative), to know what we ‘think’ or ‘believe’ that works is not sufficient, we need to know using evidence what has the greatest impact. We have all faced the iniquity of working with poor leaders that do not listen and believe they are always right, poor leadership leads to low engagement of staff, decreased productivity, increased turnover, increased stress, causes major health issues, and even death.



Why Management Matters

What defined The Headmaster’s Management was his teamwork, he built a formidable team around him of competent, highly skilled professionals that had a clear shared vision. The 2 key individuals were the Associate Vice Principle (AVP), The Director of the Training School (DTS). Together these three people were the holy trinity, their word was the Gospel. Working in a truly challenging environment, these 3 people were inspirational, they managed to create an oasis inside the high-rise monoliths of South London where gang culture ruled the streets. The Headmaster, AVP and DTS created a culture in which boys from a deprived area in who nationally were significant underachieving and inspired these boys to achieve outstanding exam results and buck national trends. The strong teamwork among the staff and parents meant the momentum of improvement continued apace year on year.
Enacting change management literature emphasizes the importance of the leader in organizations.
Key characteristics of successful schools in raising achievement including:
An effective school will seek to develop all these characteristics underpinned by the practical use of data to monitor the achievement of particular groups of pupils to pinpoint and tackle underperformance.
The evidence from the international literature demonstrates that effective leaders exercise an indirect and powerful influence on the effectiveness of the school and on the achievement of students in most countries. The Initiations comes from the Headmaster in a clear and structured way that involved all parties who hold a vested interest in the School. The culture created in a school is the hidden curriculum, as humans we form hegemonic beliefs together, there is an acquiescence that bonds us inextricably together. It manifests in how people treat each other and behave towards one and other. The Headmaster’s influence and values were evident everywhere you looked in the school, from how pupils held open doors for visitors or the way the whole school went into assemblies in complete silence, the values were shared by everyone.
Why data matters
It was through the analogous story telling Stephen Covey introduced the concept of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are essential if you are going to bring about change and improvement in any environment. To quote The Headmaster ‘if it can’t be measured then it can’t be improved’. The Headmaster Leadership ensured the schools focus was on teaching and learning. Analysis of data by the Senior Leadership Team meant that areas of underachievement were picked quickly and became a priority for targeted intervention. The key to this was being as proactive team and act as early as possible. The validity and reliability of the data is also important so that you are ensuring the best use of your limited time and resources.
The Headmaster fully understood that it was important having the confidence to use the data at all levels. He knew that there was a limit to how much information data you can convey to staff, it was treated like a score board in a tennis match, it should take you about 3 seconds to understand who is in the lead. The key point he would stress is it not about the actual data but about how you use it for improvement. Teachers were empowered to use data for teaching and learning, as a school at every level we identified underachieving groups to target interventions. The school put together its own package of support and effective training on the use of data. The school understood that data needed available in a simple format for their use and was published to staff, parents and pupils on a monthly basis at KS4.
As a Head of Year at the time attendance was a high priority as part of my role, I fully understood the impact poor attendance has on pupil progress. it is an often-overlooked aspect of pupil progress but is a very accurate predictor of pupil’s chances of success. Attendance data should be extensively used at all levels to support teaching and learning.
 
Raising achievement in schools requires, at the very least, an understanding of the factors influencing performance in schools. The art of teaching is to know what to measure in order to what needs to be improved. Or in other words when to intervene and how. Rudd and Davies in 2002 made the observation that The English education system now has a tremendously rich set of data on each pupil. For example
  1. CAT tests

  2. How do we compare with similar schools.

  3. What does the attainment data tell me about the performance of the school compared to national and LA averages.

  4. What are the overall strengths and areas of development.

  5. Tracking pupils’ performance and progress

  6. Do we have any underperforming groups of pupils

  7. Exactly who is underperforming.

  8. Where are the patterns that we need to identify.

  9. What is our value-added data.

  10. How are we supporting our subgroups.

  11. Using data to support allocation of staffing and resources, making sure that your timetable puts the best people in-front of the right classes

  12. Challenging the aspirations of staff, pupils and parents

  13. Supporting school self‐evaluation.

  14. Narrowing the achievement gap.

  15. What can be done to improve.

Which are in the main part summative measures and don’t take into account the seasons. To quote Jim Rohm Everyone has to get good at one of two things: planting in the spring or begging in the fall, pupils are natural learners.
I would argue that secondary teachers can predict the pupils in Year 7 that are likely to underachieve at GCSE, so early intervention is essential if we are going to support pupils’ progress. Data must enable schools to identify what steps they need to take to be fit for purpose. It needs be able to facilitate multi-level analysis for individuals, groups and cohort of pupils. Manipulation of the data must be possible so it can be easily interrogated and simply retrieved in many combinations at any time, to look at the performance of subgroups for example or compare data over time. This all needs to be accessible by all staff or a data manager.



Why Mentoring Matters

In his book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey teaches us that when it comes down to people ‘slow is fast’ and ‘fast is slow’. I have witnessed some very poor examples of so-called mentoring programs in schools, staff have a five minute, once a week or every fortnight, one-to-one with a pupil and the school expect this going to have a material impact that will be sufficient enough to motivate people to try harder and therefore achieve a higher level of attainment. 1. 2 Corinthians 9:6 The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.
The Headmaster created Mentors within the senior staff and mentoring groups. There was also targeted groups A-C, C-D and D-G. Along with this was the creation of weekly revision sessions within each department. It was the member of staff’s job to build a relationship with the pupil so that the pupil felt compelled to want to try harder and not let the member of staff down. Pupils were carefully chosen by members of the SLT that there was already some common ground to build on and therefore the relationship was there to start with, names were not just plucked out of a hat. The integrity behind the mentoring was fundamental in ensuring its success, there is no point in just doing this for the sake of it because it must be time-consuming when done properly, you are investing in young people’s lives, there is no quick fix here. The Headmaster understood the efficacy of mentoring, how trust is a key ingredient and how one goes about building a relationship.
One of the main roles of the learning mentor is to break down barriers to learning. Mentors would meet with their students every week to push them with their academic studies as well as guide them with any personal difficulties. It’s about the human side to the job and the personal interaction. It’s about motivating the pupils to do their best. You must get the relationship and trust right – that’s what matters.



Why Staff Development Matters

The Headmasters leadership style facilitated the introduction of change and improvements, he encouraged all his staff to be reflective practitioners. In a small but meaningful gesture The Headmaster would make a point of giving a copy the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey to every new member of staff (not just teachers, support staff as well) as a welcome gift to the school. This small but insightful book sowed the seed in my mind of how continued professional self-development is an important part of teaching.
Another aspect of the school that made it ahead of its time was they established their own fully paid (by the school) taught Masters program. Each year there was a rolling cohort of staff that enrolled on this program. So many staff were on the course that Lectures from Greenwich University would come into the school and deliver the program ‘in house’. In retrospect I can see how amazing this truly was at the time believed that all schools were learning environments for staff and pupils. It was studying for my Masters that I first wrote about Tracking Data, I didn’t stumble across Tracking Data by chance, it would be impressive to think that I was able to tap into the zeitgeist of the time and become an authority in raising attainment, unfortunately I do not possess unbelievable insight. The Headmaster and his team were the visionaries, they were using tracking data long before it became popular in the world of education to raise attainment. Working with them ensured that I gained a tacit first-hand experience of how it made a material impact on pupil progress that enabled me to write about it as part of my Action Research Project.



Why Teaching and Learning Matters

The quality of teaching is seen as crucial to raising achievement of pupils. When working is such a challenging environment ‘good’ teaching is not enough, because by definition then the pupils will only make ‘expected progress’ our aim was to make better than expected progress so therefore our teaching had to align with this. Only better than expected progress would suffice if we were going to have an impact on these boys and their life chances. There was very little room in the school for poor behaviour and an unremitting belief articulated with staff by AVP, but this relied on staff being up for the challenge. AVP was a little over 5ft tall but every boy in the school respected his authority, I never heard this man raise ever his voice once to pupils, but he had a way of engaging with the toughest, hardest to reach pupils I have ever encountered, he dismantled pupils’ behaviour and at the same time made them want to do better. AVP was the arbiter when it came to sanctions in the event of inappropriate behaviour.
The school was ahead of their time in many significant ways, they created their own Teacher Training school in line with the Local Authority and Canterbury College where they trained Newly Qualified Teachers, Teach Firsts as well as Graduate Trainees (GTP) like me. DTS was a no-nonsense Irish Nun that had a stern face and voice to go with it. DTS taught Maths at the school as well as being Director or the Training school all the way up until her retirement, her ability to teach was legendary, every boy in the school wanted to be taught by her.
It was under the guidance of DTS as a Graduate Trainee Teacher that I cut my teeth, my baptism of fire. It is fair to say that boys from South London are not going to give you an easy ride, you are fresh bait, you are going to have to prove yourself. They are going to test you, they are going to work together in teams to push your buttons and exploit any weaknesses you exhibit. Without a shadow of a doubt this experience helped define me as a teacher.
What makes this case study unique to me and compelled me to share it with you is the part that I have deliberately left out. I chose to work at this school in South London not by chance or coincidence, 15 Years earlier I had left the very same school as a 16-year-old boy. The Headmaster was my old Headmaster, Associate Vice-Principal was then the Head of Lower-school and Director of the Training School taught me Maths. I returned to the school where I was once a boy and had sat my GCSEs, and now stood there in front of pupils as a man, the same school trained me to be a qualified teacher and put me through a Masters in Education Management.
As Head of Year 11, I was the archetypal poacher turned game keeper.