Andy Roberts is Headteacher of Outstanding Riverside School in Barking, and Executive Principal of Hornchurch High School. Both schools are partnered with Challenge Partners, and Andy was a facilitator for Extending Leading Practice last year, and a facilitator for Growing the Top this year.
Riverside School takes part in the Quality Assurance Review (QAR) and Growing the Top (GtT), and Hornchurch High School takes part in the QAR and Extending Leading Practice (ELP) programs. Both schools are involved in the Challenge Partners SEND Review pilot launching in January.
Andy kindly took the time to talk to Challenge Partners about his experience as a facilitator, as well as the impact of each school improvement programme.
When did you first hear about challenge Partners and why did you join us?
Riverside School is a relatively new school - when you're setting up a new school one of the key things that you want to do is go out there and look at best practice. So we've always been a very outward looking school. It’s very hard to get out into other schools to see best practice as a headteacher. We found our own way for many many years and we've been part of other organisations that have tried to help us find partners that we could do peer reviews with. It became apparent that Challenge partners were the leaders in this field; they have the largest pool of schools, so it was no problem to find really appropriate schools to do peer review work with. We certainly couldn’t do that on our own - it's not possible, so we joined Challenge Partners.
When did you become a Challenge Partners Facilitator and why?
I became a facilitator last year and I think it's quite an interesting role - it's not one that you would find natural as a headteacher because as a headteacher in your own school you carry your values and beliefs very strongly. I think as a facilitator you go into schools and you'll have to be much more neutral; you enable those in the room to have conversations. I found it quite an interesting challenge and I found it quite hard if I'm truly honest with you, but thoroughly enjoyable. It also gave me another three or four schools I was able to go and look at as a headteacher and see lots of excellent practice.
How does a practitioner facilitator enable knowledge exchange?
Your core role as a facilitator is to try to take the weight out of the process for the participants whether you are visiting or hosting, reducing cognitive load and giving them one less thing to worry about so they can really focus on the important stuff. You set the expectations in the schools with the group that you work with, and you get to know one another really well as you spend a whole year together. It's very much like a coaching role as the key thing is to make sure that everyone's thinking hard contributing whether they're hosting or visiting. Also making sure that they are following the rules of play which is agreed as a group when you do contracting at the start, for example not having your mobile phone out and to be present in the moment is actually quite important to remind senior leaders about.
Overall it's about engineering the dialogue to maximum effect while sitting above and out of the process as much as possible. There's a role in the Japanese learning study called the Koshi: It's the ‘knowledgeable other’ and they sit above the lesson study process and they’re there in an evaluative role. I see the facilitator role parallel with that role. It's quite a unique role and it's not like anything else I've ever done.
Could you share any examples of great knowledge exchange while facilitating Growing the Top?
You never know quite what's been left behind longer term if I'm really honest, for example when it comes to ‘has the leadership team's thinking shifted?’ But it's the little things often that you can catch onto, such as “why is there a second bell?” Well, one to leave a lesson and another to be at your next lesson, or you’re late. And participants say “why don't we do that!”.
Last week we went on one of our Quality Assurance Reviews and the host school was struggling with a range of issues that happened after their 40-minute lunchtime. We shared that we had a similar problem 10 years ago so we made both breaks half an hour rather than having a short break and a long lunch. I think they were trying to think really innovatively about how they use their break whereas it's as simple as a slight restructure of the day. It's the obvious stuff which catches you in the moment where you can see people take it away or which you notice at other schools.
How has your work as a challenge partners facilitator supported your development as a leader?
When I'm running a school it's very much about my vision and values and my team's vision of values which are firmly aligned. But when you're in that Growing the Top or Extending Leading Practice group, you've got a range of senior leaders from different schools with different contexts and different values.
For me it is the reflection that leadership is incredibly important and heads are phenomenally important. I don't think I realised quite how important heads are until I took on that facilitator role and understood how much heads’ values influence the direction of their schools. That's been very important to me. Having recently become executive head of Hornchurch as well, going out and seeing these other schools and leadership dynamics has been critically important to stepping into a school with a senior leadership team that is already there, to be able to navigate and support them. Rather than my style when setting up Riverside School which was very much ‘this is how we're doing it!’.
What is being your experience of the growing top program in your school
I'm in my third year of Growing the Top so I wouldn't still be doing it if I didn't think it worked well. It's quite high energy and the work that goes into thinking hard about your school is probably equal to writing the School Improvement Plan which is a massive piece of work.
When thinking about hosting others to your school you want to get the best value out of the day so you have to think very hard about what you want the focus to be on. That's as important as the day itself - what you do before and what you do after. You have to think: What's excellent as well as what's your real number one area of improvement that you want people to give you feedback on. And subsequently, what you do you prioritise to aim to improve after the day - that's the big work. But none of that happens without that one visit day. The day they come to your school is a pivotal part of the process.
We had Ofsted in October 2022. We had an Outstanding judgement and we had our Growing the Top meeting about a month later. The Growing the Top visit was more informative and had a greater impact on our improvement than the Ofsted visit. It is a core part of what we do every year. I don't think there's a better way to improve.
How has Growing the Top supported you to address any systemic challenges in your school?
We're a high performing school, we're a top 1% school nationally for progress and our disadvantaged cohort have no gap - they exceed other students nationally. We haven’t always been like that, and we're far from done, but the things that we're focusing on now are quite niche and small but still very important. For us as an Outstanding School you've got to stay ahead of the curve and know your environment.
Giving back is also important for me. In our first few years as a new school it was all about taking, because we had nothing to give! The way we built our school is we visited and looked at other schools, taking everything that we thought was good and would work in our setting. But it's quite nice for us now to give back. If you give a lot it makes you innovative because then you'll look for better things. It's as much about the giving away than it is about going and seeing innovative practice.
What value do you find from the whole cohort events?
I do enjoy those events; they're very different from the in school visit experience. The main reason I enjoyed them is to see colleagues who I have worked with over the years - old schools who we've partnered with or who I facilitated for. I like the element of having good, rich conversations with other professionals on your tables. And practitioners who partner with Challenge Partners are typically quite a certain type - they're generally quite open, they want to learn, and they want to make things better. There's an awful lot of potential there to share. There are really high quality guest speakers - there's always an element of interest. I quite enjoy the element of drawing parallels with business and I think they bring a lot of experience to the table.
How has the Quality Assurance Review benefitted your schools?
I use both programmes to develop senior leaders but in different ways. In QAR when we host, my less experienced senior leaders rehearse and practise their thinking about the strategies they are implementing, and particularly the impact those strategies are having. It's ok for them to get it wrong as it is a safe space. We choose to use the estimates as I feel like that gives a lot more rigour and a lot more value for us as a school but I can see how new schools into the process may not wish to do that. For Growing the Top I use my more experienced senior leaders because they need to be more open and critical.
We thank Andy for taking the time to talk to us. If you are a partner with Challenge Partners and would like to share your story, contact partnershipsteam@challengepartners.org and we would love to talk to you!