When I was on my National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) course, the facilitator warned us against jumping into headship at “just any” school. I ignored it. I’d always dreamed of being a headteacher and if a school was going to offer me a role, I was going to take it.
After my second interview, I was asked to become the headteacher at Brighton Hill Community School. It was January 2017, and we had 502 students on roll despite having a room for 1,275.
There was a certain eeriness about walking around a half-empty school, but having listened intently to students, staff, parents and governors during the interview process, I knew there was great potential to rebuild the school’s shattered reputation.
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Parents were sending their children on 90-minute round-trip bus journeys out of town, disillusioned by what Brighton Hill could offer. It became my mission to show them that they had better on their doorstep. A handful of the readers of the local newspaper seemed desperate for me to fail and pondered about “how long this one will last”, but I knew I could build the team to bring the glory days back to the school.
This year, we have 1,096 students on roll. For the past two years, we have been oversubscribed, with waiting lists between 40-60 each year. When I sat with the county’s finance team in April 2017 and projected we would have 750 students on roll by September 2020, one of them laughed and said she would eat her hat if that came true. In the event, we hit 963.
While it’s really difficult to identify individual elements of our approach, I believe the following were major factors in re-instilling the community’s faith in us.
1. Belonging
I was invited to speak at the school’s open event, before I was officially in post. To begin with, I was encouraged by the slogan “We put our students first at Brighton Hill”, but the accompanying booklet (32 pages of text) contained not a single photograph and barely a mention of any of them.
When I spoke to the students in the first few weeks, they seemed delighted by my appointment. It became clear that it wasn’t anything complimentary, but simply an opportunity to persuade a new headteacher to get rid of their daffodil-yellow school shirts. Sensing my own opportunity, I stood firm and insisted that our yellow shirts were what set us apart from the crowd and that we could be keeping them and wearing them as a badge of honour. No longer would they be called “yellow bellies” on the streets of Basingstoke. They were now the #YellowArmy.
This features on the vast majority of student-facing communications and our colours are there to see on the numerous “belonging cues” we have dotted around our school.
What started as a lighthearted reference to the students on social media and grew to such an extent that our Ofsted report features the #YellowArmy hashtag in it, which I like to think is the only report from the pen of HMI that does so.
2. Brilliant staff
I was very fortunate to inherit an excellent staff team who were ready to be led to the very highest level. However, there will always be some staff who are not prepared to make the journey with you and, with the best interests of the students at the heart of every decision, it may be that you have to part company with those who don’t buy into the vision.
In my head, I divided the staff up into “cultural architects”, those who were the very best, and “cultural assassins”, who needed a bit of extra work. I surrounded myself with the cultural architects, and promoted the best to the SLT. They then helped to bring the assassins up to architect level.
My team works exceptionally hard and I try to reward them as much as I can, with a visiting coffee van bringing the most excitement. But treats aside, they are here for the right reasons and that is absolutely clear to every visitor who sets foot through the door.
Around 96 per cent of staff in a recent wellbeing survey said that they look forward to coming to work every day, which is incredibly unusual in the current climate. Small things, such as allowing each staff member a minimum of three days per year away from school during term time, go a long way towards ensuring that staff are committed and loyal.
3. Behaviour
One of the pet hates of the staff when I arrived was how little support they thought they were getting from senior staff with regard to student behaviour. There was frustration that students knew that they could get their punishments overturned if they made enough of a fuss, which led to some simply giving up on using the sanctions in the policy.
There were far too many levels of detentions, going up in 15-minute increments depending on how the teacher was feeling, with the escalation sanction for missing one simply being to add another 15 minutes on top. One visitor commented that we might as well bring in a 22-and-a-half-minute detention to give students another level to opt out of.
He was joking, of course, but the point struck home. We centralised all detentions, renaming them “reflections” and held them in one of our halls. Students now complete six reflective questions during this hour-long slot and only leave the room briefly for a short chat with the member of staff who set the reflection, to wipe the slate clean and agree the principles for ongoing success.
Any staff member who sets a sanction in line with our behaviour policy will be supported, no matter what. They know the system works. This leads to far fewer behaviour issues, and exclusions have dropped from 15.3 per cent of the school population to less than 1 per cent.
Chris Edwards is headteacher at Brighton Hill Community School in Basingstoke, Hampshire
