Leadership
The First Federation has championed new and innovative leadership systems and structures. Distributed leadership is at the heart of our structure with each school being led by a Head of Teaching and Learning, a role which the Federation pioneered in 2006. This new leader of schools is a highly talented educationalist who is freed from the historic constraints of primary school headship to relentlessly focus on improving outcomes and experiences for every child in their school. They are challenged to improve the quality of everyone working with children year on year.
Senior Leadership Kernal Routines
The Leader of every Trust Academy ensures that the key Leadership Kernal Routines are embedded in their work. These ensure that the Leadership remains focussed on continually improving the outcomes for all children, they drive forward the Trust’s Internal Consistencies and ensure time and energy is released into every corner of the school.
Leaders of Learning
Leadership in the classroom is fundamental to our children’s futures and everyone in a school is a Leader of Learning. Collaboration ensures rapid and sustained school improvement when each school establishes a culture of leadership across the whole school community.
‘Leaders of Learning are ordinary people who, through extraordinary commitment, effort, and determination, have become extraordinary and have made everyone around them exceptional’
(Dean Fink)
Senior leaders and Leaders of Learning form high performing teams which meet every week through our system of Progress sand Standards meetings. These meetings ensure that children’s progress in core subjects is carefully monitored and assessed through book scrutiny, moderation and evaluation of planning. Our comprehensive web based assessment and tracking systems ensure that pupil data informs and supports all teaching and learning.
Professional Development
Research shows that the most effective professional development occurs when teachers and support staff actively engage in Joint Practice Development (JPD). Joint Practice Teams are created within and across our federation schools to examine, evaluate and learn from best practice and research. These may be linked to our Teaching School Research and Innovation hubs or standalone, focusing on one aspect of high quality teaching and learning. Working with our Teaching School HEI partners we are able to accredit the work of or hubs and teams enabling staff gain credits towards further qualifications up to Masters Level.
The First Federation is committed to ensuring all staff access high quality JPD ensuring that we are all lifelong learners.
We know we are in a high performing federation when these four things regularly happen:
Teachers talk about teaching and learning;
Teachers observe each other’s practice;
Teachers plan, organise, deliver, monitor and evaluate their work together;
Teachers teach each other
Judith Warren Little - The Power of Organisational Setting (1981)