School improvement update - August 2023

Sensible stuff, no quick fixes

Dear colleague

I hope things are well with you and that you’ve had a good break.

If you have colleagues new to curriculum leadership, we’ve made a self-paced course where we take the journey from intent through to impact. There’s 8 hours of recordings and resources, live check-ins with John Tomsett and me plus 5 subscriptions to the Myatt & Co platform.

Here’s a sample from Huh Curriculum Leaders, it opens Monday 18th September and you can learn more here.

Cohort 2 of the Leadership Lobby launches on Friday 15th September. I’m running this with Andrew Morrish and it’s suitable for new and experienced leaders: ‘Wow there is SO much leadership gold here. Loved the session on leading trustfully and hearing Mary and Andrew discuss the ‘messy middle’ of getting this right.’

We’ve got exciting plans for new courses on Huh Academy, and we’ll be posting updates on the new Huh Academy Twitter handle, so well worth a follow!

A couple more subject reports were published by Ofsted in the summer, in case you missed them. Some promising findings in maths and history. There’s been an increase in quality support for subject knowledge development, so it’s worth checking out the subject associations – we’ve compiled a list on Myatt & Co where the subject network sessions for primary and secondary are a brilliant opportunity to see how colleagues develop the subjects in their schools. It’s also worth checking out a new website with subject knowledge in 5 minutes from Meno and when I was looking for some resources for primary science, I came across some funding for primary science projects from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

I’ve been working with a number of colleagues who’ve asked for subject overviews, so I developed the 5 steps for individual subjects: a link to the importance statement for the subject, a chapter from Primary Huh, a chapter from Secondary Huh, then links to the subject networks on Myatt & Co. Quick insights for anyone wanting to get up to speed in a short space of time.

Diane Pye at DPSI Knowledge Education is running a full set of half-day online live subject leadership and progress courses in autumn 2023. The CPD sessions cover types of knowledge and what meaningful progress looks like in different subjects. More details at DPSI Knowledge Education.

Marc Rowland has created a new platform as a place for articles, publications, video on addressing educational disadvantage, including the recent handbook on addressing disadvantage published in June.

I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be great to have support for developing confidence in public speaking and so was delighted to find out that Bukky Yusuf will be running a presentation boot camp in September. Bukky is brilliant, it’s going to be very popular, so worth checking out now!

Peps McCrea’s Evidence Based Snacks are a great way to keep up to speed with insights from the evidence. Beautifully illustrated, succinct and thought-provoking and I found it helpful to revisit this one from earlier in the year, about signalling status.

There’s an excellent new book from Alex Bedford of Unity Schools Partnership: EYFS: Language of Learning – a handbook to provoke, provide and evaluate language development. I’ve had the chance to review it and this is what I thought: ‘This is so helpful for colleagues. It provides an elegant structure on which to base our judgements about how well our pupils are getting on in EYFS. And just as importantly it provides prompts to elevate and deepen our practice. A really smart resource, great work!’

DISCO – what a great name for a data conference! The Data in Schools Conference is in London on Thursday 9th November and it’s organised by the top thinkers in sensible data: Jamie Pembroke, Richard Selfridge and Josh Perry.

 HFL (formerly Herts for Learning) provides reviews and support to develop inclusive approaches to the curriculum, learning and teaching. They are doing important work on anti-bullying, anti-prejudice, anti-abuse, more about their support here.

The Teachers’ Collection is going from strength to strength! The team have uploaded more resources to the library with texts, draft plans and vocabulary lists as a way to support curriculum planning with high quality texts. It now has its own Twitter page, where we’re updating new book suggestions and planning resources.

Daisy Christodoulu at No More Marking has scheduled a new set of Comparative Judgement intro webinars for the autumn term. More details here.

The IncludEd Conference 2024 organised by The Difference is returning after a sell-out affair in January 2023. The biggest conference for school inclusion, Saturday 13th January IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society. I’ll be speaking and further details here.

Sam Strickland will be running a one-hour workshop on Sunday 3rd September. It will cover an array of practical tips, hints, approaches and strategies to support teachers and trainee teachers alike to make a strong start to the new academic year. More on ‘Will they behave for me?’ here.

And a shout out to Teach Tapp which is a great way to keep in touch with stuff that really matters to teachers!

If you think there’s someone who would appreciate this update, you can forward the link here.

Until next time

Mary