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As the world watched the American public vote on Tuesday last week, the DfE slipped out its new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) approach to school improvement in England.
And just as the Democrats have spent the time since searching for answers in response to a Trump victory, here, school trusts have been searching for answers about RISE and its place - and consequently their own place - in the school improvement system.
What troubles many is not necessarily the concept of the RISE teams (though a small group do believe the idea itself to be fatally flawed).
School improvement changes
The RISE approach aims to offer universal entitlement to school improvement resource, curated by the sector for the sector through rigorous commissioning of best-fit solutions, with local context put at the forefront. It’s a sound, sensible objective that builds on what is happening already.
Where the issues come for many trust leaders is in the implementation and messaging.
The implementation plan is not even half-baked; it is under a tea towel still proving.
We asked the DfE critical questions around RISE adviser conflict of interest, funding, where accountability sits for identifying schools for improvement and the improvement itself, and many more queries - the response to all was basically, “We don’t know yet.”
Ofsted and SEND
Meanwhile, RISE depends on Ofsted report cards that have yet to be fleshed out or trialled. The report cards need to be heavily influenced by a framework that will require input from the curriculum and assessment review, which is due to make recommendations after the report cards are finalised. All three will need to take into consideration plans for the SEND system that, despite advisers being appointed (as announced last week), won’t emerge for some time.
The DfE needed to explain how it is getting around this scheduling issue, but did not.
To make things worse, the communications strategy to deliver this idea was then clumsy. Much, if not most, of the capacity that RISE teams will need to call on currently sits in trusts, because they have spent the past 10 years building and honing that capacity - indeed, it is central to the core idea of the academy trusts system.
Trusts and government
RISE should have been seeded with a broad network of stakeholders in which trusts featured heavily. It should have been built in partnership with the sector to generate some consensus. And the work trusts have done to get us to this point should have been more clearly acknowledged. (I believe that some great people working on RISE behind the scenes agree with all this.)
Because this did not happen, the government now risks a key component for the success of RISE teams not backing it.
This speaks to a wider problem of a deteriorating relationship between the government and some in the trust sector that must be worked out quickly.
While the Labour position of making trusts fight for their place in education by proving their worth (rather than being the government default for everything) is a justified challenge, the government needs to find a better balance of provocation and praise to ensure it does not alienate and demotivate a core group that may be crucial to much of its future policy.
Meanwhile, those trust leaders fretting about what the government thinks about them need to put that aside and focus more than ever on showcasing what they can do - and define through example how we tackle education’s core challenges.
