“I’ve always felt if a school is doing well, one of the reasons is because it has a view to supporting the wider system, rather than just looking after itself,” says David Boyle, CEO of Dunraven Educational Trust.

Such a sentiment will no doubt be held by leaders across the country - after all, education has always prided itself on being willing to share expertise and best practice with one another.

Sometimes this is done via informal networks of leaders in an area who understand the context and situations they are facing. At the other end of the scale, there are initiatives like the Department for Education’s trust and school improvement offer, which provides up to 15 days of support from a multi-academy trust CEO or similar leader.

However, Boyle is involved in a new scheme in London that could offer a middle way of providing top-level structured support through a local, place-based approach - and that could offer a model for the whole nation.

The initiative is called Reconnect London, which began in 2020 when Boyle and Dr Vanessa Ogden, CEO of Mulberry Schools Trust, got together informally to discuss the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable children in London - where both trusts have schools - and identify research and ways of working that could tackle this, specifically in the capital.

They soon discovered there was little out there about this, though - something that surprised Ogden given her knowledge of the London Challenge (she wrote her PhD about it in 2012). So she and Boyle set about changing this: “Our aim was to fill the void,” Ogden says.

That meant working with other London leaders to produce research into the effect of the lockdown on disadvantaged children and a subsequent report on how schools were addressing these problems in the capital.

Practitioner-led initiative

Through this work and the “interesting things” being done by schools in London that were revealed, Ogden says it became clear there was scope for Reconnect London to become more than just a research group - as Katharine Vincent, who is now director of Reconnect London and is also director of research, improvement and innovation at Mulberry Schools Trust, outlines.

“[We realised we could] draw on the existing knowledge and expertise within the city - particularly the group of school leaders that have been leading London schools over the time when it’s become such a successful place,” says Vincent.

As such, in 2022, they formed a group of around 10 leaders to broker deployments of experienced heads in the city they know to go and help schools with challenges they are facing - from governance and safeguarding concerns to leadership vacuums and financial crises.

These placements can be funded by schools, trusts themselves or the local authority the school is based in, with the money used to pay for the leader’s time.

As part of this push, Reconnect London was also added to the aforementioned trust and school improvement offer initiative run by the DfE, which has already led to some placements.

One example Vincent gives of this is of a special school trust that was “experiencing some very significant financial difficulties” and so the DfE got in touch to request a leader who understood special school funding.

The Reconnect London’s brokering team sought out someone suitable who then went and worked with the school for 10 days, with a clear remit to help the team fix their finances and leave them in a stable position.

Specific goals

Boyle says having a clear purpose for a deployment, like the above, is key to ensuring they have an impact, and so Reconnect London always agrees on “very specific” goals for a deployment between itself, the leader helping and the school involved.

He gives an example of a school that had received three Ofsted “requires improvement” grades, adding that “there was a very significant safeguarding issue, which spoke to the heart of a problem with staff recruitment”.

As such, Boyle says the initial task was to understand “what the systems were and what it felt like on the ground...before helping the school leaders bring things to the appropriate standards”.

From this, the goal was set up to ensure the single central record was fit for purpose and provide training and support for the senior team to guarantee best safeguarding practice.

However, while an initial plan is key, it does not mean deployments cannot adapt as new challenges are uncovered, with Boyle noting that, in this case, while the deployment was agreed to be half a term, “it became clear that wouldn’t be sufficient to get the school to a point where they were able to function independently”, and so another half-term extension was agreed.

A ‘bespoke’ approach

Making deployments flexible is crucial, says Jo Dibb, a semi-retired former executive headteacher, whose experience working in “very challenging inner-city schools” meant she was asked to help with a recent deployment - the demands of which changed suddenly.

“I was originally meant to go in for one day a month,” she says. “Then the circumstances changed in the leadership, and we were able to move very quickly to support the new headteacher by changing my deployment to two days a week.”

During this time she worked with the school in numerous ways, such as mentoring the headteacher, meeting with the rest of the senior leadership team and working with HR.

Of course, for some headteachers, the idea of another senior figure turning up may sound like it could create tension in already stressful situations. Dibb acknowledges this could be a concern but says this is why deployments are dependent on “building a rapport with the leadership” to help build trust - a point Boyle emphasises, too.

He says: “Without the trust of the leaders, without the trust of the staff, it’s very difficult to do anything around school improvements, unless you’re going to go in and be absolutely dictatorial and sort of bully people into submission, which is not our way.”

Vincent explains that this is also why deployment length and focus are agreed up-front, so everyone knows the boundaries. “This is about working to strengthen a school, rather than staying around longer than is helpful,” she adds.

For those who have worked with Reconnect London, the impacts have been notable, with one leader saying the person who came to help “listened to us and got to know the school” before suggesting changes.

The result of the deployment, the leader says, is a school “in a very different place to the one we were in this time last year…I [now] have confidence we can ensure the focus is firmly on the students, something that, for a variety of reasons, had not been the case over the last few years”.

A CPD opportunity

This positive impact is clearly spreading, too, with Ogden saying Reconnect London is looking to bring more leaders into the network as requests grow - with Dibb happy to advocate for this.

“Everybody I know who is given an opportunity to go and work in a different school and different environment absolutely gains from it - and other people within their own institution gain from it as well,” says Dibb.

She adds that she thinks it could help “keep leaders in education for longer” by broadening the scope of their work, especially as they reach retirement, as she herself has done.

Furthermore, to validate the work being done by leaders through Reconnect London, the organisation has worked with ImpactEd to develop an evaluation framework for its work, something Vincent says will help “know where we are having an impact and where we need to improve”.

A national model?

Already, though, the work done by Reconnect London has caught the eye of the DfE, with plans for a meeting in the future with the Reconnect London team - this is perhaps no surprise given Labour’s pledge to establish regional improvement teams, which it says will “work as partners with schools in responding to areas of weakness”.

Vincent is hopeful they can help, noting there is “a lot of alignment between the idea of regional improvement groups and the work we’ve been doing”, she says, “and we think the moral purpose of this work would be a great starting point for them”.

She would, however, warn the government not to use the policy to “label schools as failing and to bring in ‘superheroes’ to help”. Instead, it is about schools working together to help one another and the challenges they face: “If that was what regional improvement groups were doing, then nationally, I can see that having huge benefits.”

Boyle, too, says that while he is confident it could work as a nationwide programme, it must be rooted in “place-based change”. Leaders “have a greater commitment” when a school is in their “backyard”, he adds.

Time will tell as to whether or not this is a model the DfE uses but, given the speed at which other decisions have been made in recent weeks, it may not be long until we find out.

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