School improvement update - September

Sensible stuff, no quick fixes

Dear colleague

I hope things are well with you.

We’ve been developing some great new programmes to support your work:

Finding My Voice, led by Rachel Higginson is a whole school personal development and oracy approach for secondary schools and FE settings. Finding My Voice provides a curriculum axis to support pupils navigating their education journey and their lives in the modern world. Rachel is joined by Emmanuel Awoyelu, Christian Foley and me for this exciting programme. We will be introducing the headlines of the course on Monday 16th October at 5.30pm and you can sign up for the free webinar introduction to this work here.

Being Your Best, Doing Your Best from Dr Emma Kell – leading a new course with practical, research-based coaching tools for school staff to promote and enhance self-efficacy, success and job-satisfaction. On Thursday 12th October at 7pm, I’ll be doing a live webinar with Emma to talk about the overview of the course and the range of resources, more details here.

Cohort 2 of the Leadership Lobby is now open. 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.’

Huh Curriculum Leaders self-paced course. 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.

Primary Subject Networks - A joy not a chore! If you have colleagues who are new to subject leadership or new to a subject. This term’s primary network sessions aim to capture the beauty of the individual subjects and also offer practical advice from those who know best, serving subject leads. The first session is for primary science and starts on Monday 2nd October 4pm with the brilliant Lauren Fayers talking with Rachel Higginson on how you can develop your subject and support your colleagues. To sign up to access the live sessions fill in the form here.

This term's Myatt & Co Secondary Subject Networks are focusing on diversity. Just launched for history, there's the brilliant Alex Fairlamb talking with Steve Willshaw about 'blended, not binary' and how the curriculum is both a 'window and a mirror'.

Ofsted’s school inspection update webinar has just been released and there have also been more subject reports published: Physical Education, Music and Geography.

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.

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 online courses on the curriculum and SEND in the core subjects on Monday 23rd October and the foundation subjects on Wednesday 11th October and Monday 11th December.

John Tomsett and Jonny Uttley have launched a new website ‘Putting Staff First’ with brilliant free resources for leaders.

Voice 21 will be running #OracyOctober to include a line-up of free webinars that will take place in October.

Culham St Gabriels runs excellent short courses to support religious education.

Allen Tsui a computing lead who generously shares his time and resources has sign posted the free support from The Digital Schoolhouse. There’s a range of self-directed, live webinar and in person modules, and opportunities to access courses and workshops from introducing block coding in Early Years to A-Level algorithmic structures.

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.

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.

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

Until next time

Mary