Our School Improvement service is built around professional respect for colleagues and focuses on enabling capacity within organisations by supporting the following:-

• Curriculum planning – This has been supported through the school improvement officer and CEO. Curriculum days have been set aside to work with senior leaders to support them with curriculum development, some of this has been completed during the autumn term. This has been a successful approach in this academic year with the school development plan closely linked to the curriculum development. Support has been further given for monitoring and evaluation processes in line with individual school needs.

• Collaborative lesson planning – This is very much in each school’s hands to ensure that joint planning take place by making provision for year group teachers to be released at the same time for PPA. School organisation has been successful in enabling this. However, this could be further developed across schools if resources allowed it. Teachers do communicate via email between schools to share plans but this does not enable professional dialogue which is very important when planning, delivering and evaluating lessons.

• Enable teachers to share good practice – In August, at the first INSET day, teachers worked together to ensure that they shared good practice and set up the non-negotiables for the academic year. They shared ideas for teaching and learning along with pooling resources as required.

• Access to joint resources for teaching and learning – Teachers across the Trust regularly work together to pool resources and share ideas for best practice. This has happened for subject leaders and some year groups and now needs to be formalised further so that greater impact can be achieved in the coming years.

• Moderation between schools – Foundation staff, Year 2 and Year 6 teachers have been meeting regularly across the three schools to ensure that there is consistency in outcomes for our children. This has been a valuable process enabling teachers to have professional dialogue with each other. Whole school moderation is planned for the end of May, with teachers across the three schools meeting together to share findings and moderate the work before reporting to the DFE within key year groups. Teachers in years 1, 3, 4 and 5 will also meet to moderate the work within books.

• Intervention strategies for children – Headteachers are meeting together to discuss strategies which are then being taken back to schools for teachers to further develop and refine for the children in their care. The year group progress meetings with teachers are utilised to have the discussions about the strategies that can be deployed to support children.

• SEN audit and review to improve practice – The SEND staff meet regularly to discuss needs and view practice together. However, a SEND audit has not taken place this year due to the fact that Glenfield having had an Ofsted and are now undergoing a local authority SEN review.

• Subject quality assurance within and across academies – Subject development has been a key priority for all schools. The headteachers have collectively taken responsibility for this. This has ensured that headteachers challenge each other in terms of the approaches being developed and critically analyse the outcomes of subject development. Subject leaders have had training and timeout to refine their individual subjects. Time has also been allocated for them to monitor the subjects and provide senior leaders with accurate assessments of outcomes on teaching and learning. This is then verified by the headteachers through their own monitoring.

• Performance management advice – Headteachers met together in the autumn term to go through the policy and look at strategies to ensure best practice within performance management. There has been a consistent approach developed to performance management within the Trust, which has been welcomed by the teachers due to the fact that it is very personalised for each individual teacher. However, performance management targets are still in line with the school needs.

• Peer to peer review processes facilitated – This is very much happening at the headteacher level and with some senior staff. Strategies still need to be developed as to how we encourage peer to peer review processes at middle leader and class teacher level. In terms of senior staff peer-to-peer work has been invaluable in developing thinking and strategies within the Trust schools. The school improvement officer is now facilitating this further with the senior staff

• Access to high quality CPD – A significant number of teachers are either completing an NPQ or have just finished. The plan is that all teachers have access to an NPQ as part of their career pathways. In addition to the NPQs, staff have had to high-quality training from the leadership teams and from other providers.

• Career pathways are developed for individuals – As part of performance management, individual career pathways are designed for teachers and support staff. Interviews have taken place with the different groups of staff particularly teaching assistants so that plans for further professional development are considered as required. Headteachers and executive teams are receiving personalised psychometric tests to establish their long term professional needs. Coaches are being provided to support and challenge their thinking.