Leadership

RandD Community: Flipping for Success @EnglishSMCC

Last year we established Research & Development Communities at St. Mary’s Catholic College.  The members of the communities were self-selecting and the aim was to develop and embed best or emerging good practice within the College.  Each R&D Community was set up to take forward an idea, innovation or approach by a group of staff that would lead to improved standards of attainment, levels of achievement, student well-being or student personal development. 

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#Vis2040: The Inverted Doughnut Curriculum

How will we use the next twenty five years to develop one of the highest performing school systems in the World?  There is possibly much we can learn from the analogy of the inverted doughnut (Handy, 1991).  This can be applied to the curriculum as well as the role of government in education and our own roles within schools.  It is hopeless to ever try to fully describe and then dictate the whole, there is always a need to leave space to allow professional judgement and distinctiveness to enter into our systems. Continue reading →

#Vis2040 – Our Top 3 Priorities: Teacher Quality, Quality, Quality

The problem in education is, too often, the current school system doesn’t actually add up to the sum of the parts, that is, the quality of the individual teachers in it are actually better than the system overall. The education system is currently nowhere near producing a synergistic professional capacity greater than the people working in it.  Too many teachers are still not able to perform at the optimum level of which they are capable.  Over the years politicians and school leaders have introduced a series of piecemeal changes that don’t link together into a coherent whole.  What is required is whole system change in a coherent, timely and appropriately paced manner.  The time scale for this is decades not years hence the need to start now. Continue reading →