Education for the 21st century is a medium-sized multi-academy trust of eight schools based in London and the Southeast with over 6000 pupils and 800 staff. The trust has been on a journey of transformation over the last three years, following a financial notice to improve in 2019.
One of the most powerful ways that leaders can improve schools is by learning from one another. As a trust, we wanted to share, through this blog post, some of the challenges we faced when improving our schools and how we focused on the professional development of our teachers and leaders to overcome them. As we came through the pandemic, it was clear that we needed a model of professional development across the trust that would accelerate learning, improve teaching, and build a positive culture amongst our staff. Through this, we would be able to create sustainable school improvement. As part of our development for leaders, the trust made the decision to enrol several headteachers and executive leaders in the Exemplary Leadership Programme. It was on this programme that we first heard of instructional coaching, and of Steplab. We made the decision to move towards an individualised professional development approach for staff, powered by instructional coaching. But we also knew that a whole-trust implementation approach like this needed to be carefully considered. So, how could we go about this?
First, we identified several barriers to effective professional development which in turn were acting as barriers to our school improvement.
Four Barriers
1. Professional Culture – How could we develop a culture of openness to feedback and commitment to ongoing development? (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Joyce & Showers, 2002; Marsh et al., 2017)
The pervasive culture in our schools was not conducive to supporting teachers to develop and get better in their practice. Schools had been used to graded systems of lesson evaluation with lesson observations often linked to quality assurance or external visits such as trust reviews, Ofsted, or ‘deep dives’.
Pay was closely linked to lesson observation and any feedback on teaching tended to be broad and vague. Observations would include feedback to ‘increase challenge’, ‘improve pace’ or ‘use data more effectively’. They rarely helped teachers focus on the mechanics of their practice or on their ingrained behaviours and as a result, most teachers found it extremely hard to respond to feedback.
The approach centred on judging lesson quality rather than supporting teachers to improve. Therefore, developing a culture of openness to feedback and commitment to ongoing development was a key challenge.
2. Training How we can recruit and train a team of skilled, knowledgeable coaches? (Gibbons et al., 2017; Gibbons & Cobb, 2016
Across the Trust, all eight schools had different approaches to professional development. Some were beginning to employ coaching models, but there were very few examples of deliberate practice and there was no common language for teaching or feedback.
Training, systems and frameworks for effective coaching were not in place so even where there were pockets of coaching happening in schools, this was not as effective as it could be. Furthermore, there was a small minority of leaders and staff that were unconvinced that coaching approaches to professional development were worthwhile as the models they had experienced to that point had not helped improve their practice.
Without this buy-in, or the models and training in place for good coaching, it was difficult to develop great coaches and in turn, to embed consistently high quality professional development across our schools that all teachers and leaders could see value in.
3. Systems – How should we structure our programme so that it delivers results in a way that balances with other school systems, and delivers efficiency? (Boguslav et al., 2022)
One of the greatest barriers was the different systems each school had in allocating time and structures for professional development. We had eight very different schools, with varied school days. Some closed early for CPD on a Friday. Some squeezed professional development into five inset days, whilst others allocated no time for professional development.
There were also, as there are in all schools, competing priorities such as budget, curriculum development, new behaviour systems and a newly introduced MIS and recruitment. The sheer quantity of what needed to be improved across our schools meant it was challenging to bring everyone together to help focus on a common aim.
In addition, our teaching allocations were not standardised. There was no expectation that in any given school, staff would have the same amount of time available. We therefore needed to structure a programme that delivered results in a way that balanced with other school systems.
4. Responsive leadership – How can we gather information about what’s happening when our programme is up and running? How can we respond effectively to address issues and deliver continued improvement? (Blasé & Blasé, 2003; Bryk et al., 2015)
Change management is challenging enough in a single school. We are by no means a large MAT but launching, developing, and sustaining wide-scale change, required considerable evaluation and responsiveness to ensure long-term success across all of our schools. Once we began to make changes to our professional development approach we had to ensure we could gather information and respond effectively to address issues and increase fidelity in what we wanted to achieve.
Finding effective ways to help evaluate progress and to support further training and refinement is particularly challenging at scale as it is difficult to get a strong picture of schools’ needs in order to adapt and support in the right places and in the right ways.
To address these challenges, we needed to find agile and effective approaches to professional development that would be most likely to make a real difference to our teachers and pupils. We decided that our ‘best bet’ for overcoming these barriers and for improving our schools through teacher development was to introduce instructional coaching. Throughout this process we have learned a number of important lessons about teaching, about leadership, about culture, and about how to overcome some of the barriers that we, like many schools, face.
Overcoming Barriers
At the heart of our approach has been drawing on the best evidence we have about professional development, instructional coaching and change management. We chose to work with Steplab because of the strong evidence base for their coaching model and because the resources and tools they provide helped us address many of the challenges we faced. Combining the EEF model for change management, alongside support from Steplab, we were able to overcome each of our barriers and begin to embed an effective trust-wide approach to professional development:
1. Professional Culture
To create a more conducive culture for effective professional development and to lay the foundations for coaching, we had to shift the focus from judgement-based lesson observations to ensuring that teachers received regular no-stakes feedback that genuinely supported their development.
To achieve this, we took a deliberate approach to changing our culture. We sought advice and models from generous trusts such as Dixons and we established teams to review areas like performance-related pay, lesson observation and quality assurance.
As a result, we changed our performance management policy and our pay policy to uncouple them from lesson observations. We cancelled our previous tri-yearly observations, consulted with unions, and agreed to pilot a model of drop-ins to support instructional coaching and begin building towards an open-door culture of ‘improving not proving’.
In the first year, we started with a ‘soft launch’ with a presentation from Jane Fletcher from the Aldridge Foundation who shared her expertise and experience on the power of coaching. We then developed our first team of twenty coaches, with advocates in each school, to slowly build our coaching culture through an initial light-touch approach; testing what worked and ensuring we could develop the systems we needed for our wider-scale launch.
2. Training
To improve the effectiveness of our coaching model, we needed to ensure that teachers could see its benefits. To do this, we needed to train skilled and knowledgeable coaches who could give valuable feedback to teachers that would help improve their practice. We set ourselves the target of ensuring every teacher in the trust had a skilled coach within two years. We fell slightly short of this initial target but it acted as a clear marker of our ambition and a reflection of our values.
Part of this commitment was to create extra capacity within our central team to help support schools to train their coaches and help with implementation. Of course, resources are finite and we had to make some deep changes to the central charge. The work of Dixons helped inspire us in this. We saw it as a ‘bold move’ and we needed to resource it so that we could build a strong team of coaches that could help our schools improve.
As our programme developed, we continued to build capacity, recruiting a Professional Growth Director across the trust. Throughout the year we invested in high quality training to continue to develop our coaching teams to ensure we had the capacity we needed. We also learnt quickly that unless the Headteacher is the champion and leader of instructional coaching within the school, the delivery will fail. Training heads was key and their buy-in determined success.
3. Systems
Another crucial element of implementation was in system design. The deeper we went into considering the changes we needed to make, the more we realised we needed to create real alignment across the schools to launch at scale. This included aligning our school days to allow for common twilights across the schools, plus adding two extra training days in the year to signal the value we were giving to instructional coaching. These additional days, disaggregated into twilight sessions, became the foundation for deliberate practice. We also aligned teaching allocations and allocated a protected time for coaching conversations to take place.
We then worked with schools to create a framework for teaching using a common language based on research-informed practices which schools then adapted to their contexts. We had long discussions about what we would standardise, align and leave autonomous. Some of our schools used trust frameworks whilst others thrived on creating their own.
Based on our work with Dixons, we provided schools with a decision-making grid to support schools’ autonomy in how they developed their coaching models. Schools chose whether to coach weekly or fortnightly or whether leaders should also coach and be coached. The decision-making grids provided the framework for delivery. This systematic approach ensured teachers and leaders had the time and capacity to embed effective coaching in ways that were flexible and context-specific for their schools.
4. Responsive leadership
Several of our schools now have incredibly effective coaching models in place. They have a full cohort of coaches and there are tangible signs that it is leading to less ‘in-school variation’, a higher quality culture for children and for staff, and a renewed sense of self-confidence.
We have learned it is vital to be responsive to the different contexts and experiences of our schools. We continually evaluate and refine our approaches, utilising our Steplab platform to identify patterns and provide support. We set clear targets for the numbers of coaches in each of our schools, we support twilight sessions, observe, and quality assure to support fidelity to our coaching models. Most importantly, the trust team stands side by side with schools in addressing issues and supporting delivery so that improvements are sustained. The conversations are challenging, candid, and open, but always supportive. We are in this together.
Final thoughts
We committed to viewing professional development and the implementation of coaching as a long-term, sustainable approach to school improvement and we embraced the process and energy required to make this successful. We learn every day: we see great successes and use these to improve, and we encounter challenges where we have to adapt and reset.
As a trust leader, I am as passionate about instructional coaching as I ever was because I see how our schools, our staff, and our pupils are benefiting from its implementation. There is less variation in the quality of teaching, between schools and within schools, and because of this, our pupils are better served by our trust.
We have systematically and intentionally leveraged the capacity we are able to offer as a trust to help make our professional development model effective. Over the course of the last two years, we have got as many things wrong as we have right and there’s no shame in that. The marker in the distance, the research that we followed, and the challenging target we set to ensure every teacher benefits from a highly skilled coach, remains our guiding light. We remember the lessons and remember this is a journey, and it should be fun!
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