How to build trust in schools by creating a coaching culture
By Niall Alcock — Founder, We Are In Beta
Clare Rees, Headteacher at Havelock Primary School in Ealing has spent the last three years asking some big questions:
- How do you develop trust to move a school forward?
- How do you develop an openness that sometimes isn’t there?
- How do you develop a new style of leadership?
Not easy questions to answer, especially when you’re doing a research doctorate as well as your full-time headteacher role.
“I’ve completely changed my thoughts on the journey,” Clare said in her interview on the We Are in Beta podcast.
So how did she create trust using a culture?
First, she ran focus groups about effective CPD with her teachers where she asked “What works? What doesn’t work? What do people want to see more of?”
She then gave her senior leadership team one to one coaching. These sessions were painstakingly “recorded, transcribed and then coded and evaluated” which gave her an insight into the “language people were using, the feelings attached to what they were doing” so they could see how we could build a future.
From there, she worked with an external consultant who gave her senior leadership team training on how to coach. Over the course of a year, they began to use a coaching approach in staff appraisals.
All the while she was on hand to support her team to answer questions they had about the coaching in appraisals. “What happens if they say this or that?” they would ask.
As coaches do, she said she often replied with “What do you think you should say?” so that she could model the approach and that it began to trickle down through her team.
She gradually rolled the approach out beyond staff appraisals to learning walks. They “don’t have observations” anymore. The feedback is given in a coaching style where is the observer never says things like “I saw this” or “I didn’t see that”. She says it’s always about asking the class teacher about the lesson.
Where there were occasional disagreements between observers and teachers Clare would model the coaching by asking “Could you show me evidence of that?” so teachers could come to their own understanding, for themselves.
Her passion for developing her team is clear. “We have a real buzz and connection in the school sharing ideas on that front. That’s the bit I love and wanted to marry to the headship bit. So I’m very lucky I can do both these roles really.”
My very brief summary of her 3-year research journey could never do it justice. So to listen to her interview full:
Lybsyn, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or TuneIn or download the file here
(For a full transcript please head to the bottom of this post)
In his interview, Clare shares her thoughts on:
- Why it’s her ‘grandmother’s fault’ she became a teacher
- The advice her colleague gave her that she ignored
- Why she didn’t believe she could do a doctorate but took it on anyway
- How, over the course of three years, she gradually implemented and embedded a coaching culture
- The difficulties she and her team faced and how she overcame them
- What you need to get in place that makes building trust surprisingly easy
- Why looking to hospitals could help solve teacher retention
- What we need to do that will help teachers exceed all performance goals
- The problem they face when implementing a zero-tolerance behaviour policy and what they did to make it disappear
- How good behaviour for learning helps them to balance the books
- The one question she could ask every headteacher if she could
- Why she is optimistic about the future of education
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Below, I’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of my conversation with Clare.
Niall Alcock:[00:00:00] Headteacher at Havelock Primary in Ealing, also doing a research doctorate in education creating a coaching culture in schools. Clare Ress, Welcome.
Clare Rees: [00:00:07] Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here.
Niall Alcock: [00:00:09] Before we get into the conversation around policy, practice, retention, CPD. I wonder if we could take a look back and tell our listeners a little bit about how you became a teacher, how you became a headteacher, a little bit about your philosophy for education.
Clare Rees: [00:00:24] I think it was all my grandmother’s fault really. And when you do a doctorate, you have to look back on key moments in your life. My grandmother was a headteacher. So, I spent quite a lot of time with her in the holidays pretending to be a headteacher as a young girl. She was extremely strict and quite scary. I think it was just ingrained into me that I was quite bossy and actually this might be a good pathway for me. So, yeah, I followed many people in my family into education and have now created a teacher of my own and my daughter. So, there we go. It’s carrying on.
Niall Alcock: [00:00:59] How did your journey from becoming a teacher and then deciding to become a headteacher or was it always that I will be a head teacher from day one?
Clare Rees: [00:01:06] Well no. Then obviously becoming a teacher I realised well this is actually quite difficult. I loved the children and loved working with children. But managing people was really something that, to start with, was not my strength. I took a few of my grandmother’s traits with me and that didn’t help me. I just couldn’t understand how you know telling people what to do wasn’t really the way to do things.
Then there came a point where I was offered some work at the local authority. I had always thought I’d quite like to work in an office. This is my moment. Let’s see what it’s like.
So, I became a local authority cross phase advisor for ethnic minority achievement and bilingualism. Hence my love of research because I was given quite a free rein. This is National Strategies era. There was a little bit more money, shall we say, than there is now.
I was given projects and I could research them, I could write about them I could deliver conferences and resources on them. I began to see that’s where my interests lay in actually reading up, meeting people, trying to look at things across the whole piece, rather than just one individual school.
As things got a bit tight in 2010 and the National Strategies was disbanded, and I had to think about what I was going to do next, I thought, you know, I really liked going to schools. I’m sure it is very difficult but I’m willing to give it a go. At which point all my colleagues said, “Oh my goodness. Do you really know what it’s like being in a school? It’s really tough.”
They’d all gone through the conventional route, most of them had become headteachers and then advisors. I hadn’t done that. But I’m still here. Not in the same school. This is my second headship. Seven years later and I absolutely love it and I wish I’d done this sooner! It’s definitely the job for me!
Niall Alcock: [00:03:10] That’s amazing to hear.
Tell us a little bit about your doctorate.
Clare Rees: [00:03:14] So, in thinking about the love of researching, in my first headship in Hendon, northwest London, the school bordered Middlesex University. I saw the university looming there in the distance, huge buildings etc. and thought well surely my little school can work with the university somehow.
So, we approached them, and they immediately wanted to have that link with us and started doing research projects, with permission, and inviting me and some colleagues to go and do some lectures to students doing the B. Ed courses.
And again that the same old thing that happened at the local authority. I got the bug and then the head of education said to me “What about doing a doctorate?” And I said, “Well I haven’t even got a masters.” And she said “It doesn’t matter. You can get it on route.” And I thought “I can’t possibly. I’m really not clever enough. And she said “Look. Come on. Just have a go!” So, I started that three years ago at the same time that I actually moved this school and I’ve nearly finished it.
Niall Alcock: [00:04:18] Congratulations. That’s no small feat. For the benefit of our listeners, what’s that broad overview of the doctorate? What are you looking into and how you implementing at Havelock?
Clare Rees: [00:04:29]My doctorate is an exploration into developing a coaching culture to support school outcomes. So, it’s: can you develop that in a school? And really, if you don’t understand what that means, it is how to develop trust to move the school forward, to develop that openness but sometimes isn’t there. And it’s really calling for a new style of leadership, I suppose.
In doing this I’ve completely changed my thoughts on the journey because it’s been a three learning curve for me. But I’ve used my school as my guinea pig and ethically, obviously, I’ve had that signed off. But it was fantastic to use the staff here.
So, I had focus groups when I was asking questions around looking at effective CPD. What works? What doesn’t work? What do people want to see more of? So that was with all the main professional scale teachers. Then I had one to one coaching with my senior leadership team over a year.
Niall Alcock: [00:05:40] This is where you were the deliverer of coaching?
Clare Rees: [00:05:43] Yes. I gave them coaching and that, I feel, did all of us a lot of good actually. They were asked similar sort of questions and everything they answered was recorded, transcribed and then coded and evaluated and available soon for some very boring reading!
But I think that helped everybody. However, in a school, a coaching culture doesn’t really mean one to one coaching with your senior leadership team. You couldn’t really sustain that and it’s not a good idea for somebody who line-manages others to coach them.
But it was an insight really into the language people were using, the feelings attached to what they were doing to try and see how we could build a future. I think it worked really well. But the coaching culture is more around: how do we create that openness where you want people to be talking about education and sharing ideas and bouncing things off each other and bringing other ideas from other places for the good of all?
So we started to think about using working parties and really vertical change groups because they’re composed of people from different status groups across the school. So immediately, if you’re asking a TA to work with a fairly inexperienced class teacher, and then a senior leader, or maybe two of each, on something the whole school’s going to benefit from, and take them out to other schools and for them to come and bring back their ideas, and to share them during CPD sessions, I think the whole school benefited from that, because we had all sorts of people at different ranges getting very excited about what was going on. That they were feeding into the future of what we were doing.
Niall Alcock: [00:07:39] There are some really big ideas in there that I think warrant exploration into the practicalities of it.
So, I’m intrigued by how the research of what you understand coaching to be and how best to enact it.
What was the practical implementation like of firstly delivering that coaching to your senior leaders, upskilling them in their coaching skills, so those coaching skills were then proliferated across the school, eventually down to, I’m sure, the classroom level with the kids is what is what you’re looking for?
So take us through that journey in terms of practical implementation.
Clare Rees: [00:08:13] So all the senior leaders, first of all, I got somebody external to give them some training on coaching. Somebody I’ve worked with before called Tony Meehan. He’s quite well known. So, he delivered coaching training and training to support difficult conversations, shall we say because it seems almost as if coaching and difficult conversations go hand in hand.
What I was really trying to do is to show that they don’t necessarily. But often, if you’re having a coaching conversation, you’re trying to unearth from somebody else what they’re thinking and what’s going on and maybe how you can repackage things or they can, to create a better future.
So, we did need the leadership team to have a really good idea of that. They started to, with appraisals, use a coaching style. From their training,— it took a whole year to do this — now we just use it tactically in what we do.
It’s asking the big questions, trying to trust someone to deliver an answer, which then you could do something with that would give you enough to put within a framework of an appraisal. So they’d often ask questions [in coaching training] like “What happens if they say this?” You know, I’m terrible at answering with a question (I always do it!). I said, “What do you think you should say?” But then I coached them by doing their appraisal in that way. So, a lot of it’s been modelled and then they felt happy to go and do it. So it’s trickle down.
Then we use the same approach for, we don’t have observations. We have learning walks, and the feedback is in a coaching style. It’s just a contract, if you like, that is made with the class teacher and whoever observed them. It’s never “I saw this. I didn’t see that.” It’s always asking the class teacher.
Then maybe, again, the question to me [in coaching training] would be “What happens if they dispute or say “Oh. I think it went really well”.” But then you can model the process first. So I would always be the bad cop, shall we say. “Could you show me evidence of that?” It’s about being well prepared and knowing your stuff beforehand. You don’t want to create traps but you just need to know.
So, then if there’s a situation where someone thinks maybe their teaching standards are different to what you think, you’re able to make them see maybe they’re not. But they have to come to that understanding. It’s only occasionally, very occasionally, where people seem to find that problematic. I think we’ve got the culture now where people know they need support or they know they’re the champions and they’re the ones other people watch.
Niall Alcock: [00:11:15] It’s interesting to hear you say it’s not a short project. It’s a yearlong project, if not more, to make sure that your understanding of coaching has been modelled to senior your leaders well enough and that your senior leaders are then able to model that coaching to your teaching staff.
Clare Rees: [00:11:29] Just want to add something there… creating a coaching culture is about trying to develop people to their very best. To me there are so many analogies between what we do as class teachers for children. I very rarely hear anyone say “There’s no point bothering with that child because they’re not going to make any progress”. I mean you just wouldn’t hear that.
So why would we do the same with adults? There are reasons why people aren’t moving on. We’ve got to find those reasons and it is harder with adults, of course it is, but it’s not dissimilar in some ways. It’s about making people know you believe in them, that you respect them that you’re not going to be talking in an unprofessional way behind their back. You going to do everything possible to support them to get better.
Niall Alcock: [00:12:17] I think it’s spot on. I think teachers are made, not necessarily born. I’m intrigued… this has been a big project.
What have you seen as the main benefits of it?
Clare Rees: [00:12:27] Well it’s a terrible thing to say… but maybe I’m not as good at coaching as I first thought I was! I don’t know if the poor leaders I have coached in my own school could also attest that.
But I do coach people outside the school I find that slightly different because I really don’t know anything about their background. So, I have to search around a little bit more to think about, you know, how to frame questions and how to support.
In your own school, it’s a bit like teaching own children. Maybe that’s the part of the research that was less successful to me although I learned an awful lot from coding all the feelings and then thinking about the next sessions, which took hours and hours.
But what I have learned from the whole doctorate is developing trust isn’t actually that difficult. But you can’t do it in a false way. Everybody has to follow the same theme, the same tune, the same vision. Once you’ve got that in place, you know, the whole community comes forward.
I mean our parents — fantastic feedback from questionnaires etc. They even, when it’s a difficult conversation, I do everything I can to take the sting out of it, especially if it’s about bad behavior or something else or an accident that’s happened.
So, I think that the doctorate has also made me hugely disciplined and a bit of a monster when it comes to working a little bit too hard. So maybe something for me to consider. But not everyone can work at this rate. But it’s upped to my understanding of the theories and the pedagogy.
We have a real buzz and connection in the school sharing ideas on that front. That’s the bit I love and wanted to marry to the headship bit. So I’m very lucky I can do both these roles really.
Niall Alcock: [00:14:37] I’m amazed that you managed to do both at the same time. Very impressive.
Clare Rees: [00:14:41] Or stupid.
Niall Alcock: [00:14:44] Teacher retention.Lots of headlines around teachers leaving the profession in record numbers.
What’s the secret to solving that problem on a national scale and how are you and Havelock at addressing that problem to improve the retention of your best staff?
Clare Rees: [00:15:01] This is a really difficult one because I know I am not always the best role model. I try my hardest but I’ve got so many things that I’m interested in doing and I think people probably look at me from a distance and think, “Gosh, you know, if that’s what you have to do to be a head or senior leader, I don’t really want to do that!”
But nationally, I think we’ve got to do some of the things that we talked about earlier on, but really consider the whole person rather than just someone who’s going to churn out some data for us. Because it’s very soul destroying if, I know this happens at high school, if you’re judged on your GCSE results, your A level results and you spend the whole of the rest of the following year trying to right a situation that isn’t necessarily only of your own doing. So, I think it makes it a thankless task then for teachers.
What I feel, in this school we try to do is we have that analogy — maybe it’s a little bit crass, I don’t know — but if we were a hospital, everyone would get updated, good training all the time and feedback because they didn’t have that, literally it would be catastrophic.
So, what I try to do here and I think, you know, you’d like to think as a head that everything you did was successful, but, you know, I think we’re moving towards something, a vision of where I want to be, is to try and bring people out of a corner when maybe there are some concerns or issues around their teaching to make them understand that I do lots of training and I can learn from what I do. Just because I’m the head teacher doesn’t mean I’m any different. I ask for feedback. It’s about refining your training all the time to be better and better.
So how can we do that without people feeling “Ooh, you know, this isn’t great. They want to watch me again!”? We have to completely change the culture into a culture of high trust.
And I think, looking at the national picture, I actually quite like the idea that the NQT team will be a two-year induction. I think that will really help new teachers, hopefully, done in the right way. But I want to use a similar approach.
At every point of someone’s career, because people will need coaching, they’ll need support, they’ll need to be told sometimes that things need to change. You want to create an environment where they don’t feel coming out defensive because then they don’t perform properly. Then they create that ladder of inference, you know, where they think maybe “This is the first rung on that ‘She’s trying to show you the door ladder’.” No.
Let’s go back to the hospital analogy. We’re trying to make people the very best they can be. And for me, that means, you know, in a way you have to let people go. You grow people. We’ve got someone leaving this term, who’s done really well. It’s a real shame. But you know, they’ve got a promotion and off they go. For me, it’s developing trust and it’s not always very easy.
Niall Alcock:[00:18:28] You mentioned trust a couple of times. What particular strategies or approaches have you taken to improving trust?
Clare Rees: [00:18:35] Coaching. I mean I would mention it wouldn’t I? Because it’s part of my doctorate. I spend a lot of time thinking about: what is it that we can do in a school? Because I haven’t come via the traditional route, maybe that’s been a hindrance in some ways, but also maybe it’s been a blessing. I’ve worked across so many schools training and trying to quickly develop a relationship with a group of strangers, who don’t necessarily trust you when you come through the door. You could be an RI school and you’re working with them to try and pull them up. But I’ve got a knack for doing that. So, I’ve used all those strategies I used to use across the borough and with schools in my own school.
Niall Alcock: [00:19:17] You’ll have noticed headlines in the press recently and updates from the Ofsted framework. There’s a move from using data and assessment to judge performance to schools towards judging the quality of curriculum.
What are your thoughts on that? Is it the right way to go? If not what do you think the solutions are?
Clare Rees: [00:19:34] I mean, I think that’s slightly misleading and a very interesting point because I had the pleasure of inviting Sean Harford from Ofsted to a conference that I organised. He actually gave a really interesting insight into the new framework and it’s really linking the quality of teaching to outcomes for pupils because we all know, when we go into the classroom and you’re on the edge of your seat, you know that teacher is going to deliver good or very good lessons day in day out, it follows on that the progress is going to be fabulous. So I think that the emphasis is on that.
You can only have that it that teacher understands the pedagogy, the science of learning and has a very good grounding in the curriculum. The problem for primary schools really is that you’re a jack of all trades and master of none. You’ve got to know quite a lot really, about a lot of things. And that’s not always very easy. We’re all human. We all love certain subjects and not so keen on others.
So for me, it’s a good move but it’s how to move the whole staff set to become excited, and I think it was Alison Peacock who said, “Create that irresistible curriculum for all our children” so that they’re just there on the edge of their seat learning and we’re on the edge of that seat watching the teachers.
Brilliant move to move away from just the data because it forces people to teach to the test. But until Ofsted really can show that that’s going to change, I don’t think it’s going to be very easy for people like me, you know, we’re going to have to be very brave to just think “Oh well, forget that [data] and let’s just go for the curriculum.” We have to have an assurance that is going to happen. Perhaps it’s the schools that won’t have an Ofsted soon, who will be able to start that because they’ll have it three or four-year window to get going.
But we’re all measured by what people read. I find that very hard because in this school children do make very good progress but sometimes the attainment isn’t very good because they start at low starting points. But when you go out in the street and you talk to people they tend to look at attainment only. So it’s: how can we move the public perceptions away from that to look at the progress and the value added that children make in a school like this?
Niall Alcock: [00:22:06] I’ve asked that question a few times to a few headteachers lately and the conversation has generally focused on data or curriculum. It’s very nice to hear how you think that actually there’s a third aspect there and that’s linking the curriculum to the teaching and to the pedagogy. I’m sure you’ve got some answers around how we ensure there’s a good link between the quality teaching and the quality of the curriculum.
Clare Rees: [00:22:28] Married to that is the idea that you can’t really have an appraisal system that looks at holding people to account for progress measures, etc. attainment. That’s something… I’ve written an article for the Chartered College, which hopefully will be published in the Spring version of Impact… it’s trying to move away from that. Because as soon as you do that people react in a different way.
I’m really passionate about supporting people but they don’t want you to support them if at the end of it there’s this measure that they have to get to. When you take that away I feel it gives them the freedom and you’re building the trust with them, that they actually exceed what you would have put there as a measure.
It’s again going back to “Are we brave enough?” So, I’ve been brave enough to change appraisals in this school. That’s my first step and hopefully, slowly we can start changing people’s perceptions of just looking at outcomes or data for children.
Niall Alcock:[00:23:30] Thinking about Havelock more specifically now, moving away from the national picture. A chance to talk about some of the great work that’s going on here.
Tell us about a particularly unique project that you’ve been running at Havelock recently and what the outcomes have been.
Clare Rees: [00:23:46] Okay. Well, it was round behaviour, actually. This may be linked to the stuff out there at the moment on social media about zero tolerance versus other approaches or off-rolling.
In this school, we’d spent a lot of time thinking about behavior and everything I do tries to link into the research and what the research shows. So, you know, good old Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. Thinking about that in this school, we have highly vulnerable children. We’ve got to get that bottom section right really before we can build on the learning.
So we felt if we had a calm school that was caring, I mean, of course, in the school things do happen, it can’t always be calm, but if we made sure that vision and ethos was the thread that ran through everything and really gave children hope that everyone believed in them, that was probably quite a good starting point for our kids.
We had changed our approach to slightly zero tolerance of certain behaviors. What we found was that it just highlighted the same dozen kids over and over again in the school, who couldn’t cope with being told off and then the whole day was lost for them. They’re often quite bright kids too actually. They were often boys. So the data was that looking staring at us in the face.
At that point, I was put in touch with Paul Dix and read his book ‘When the Adults Change Everything Changes’. I bought that for the whole leadership team — we do have a book group, which I think they enjoy. But I don’t know!
So that was the book of the moment, last summer. The idea was: “read through this and pick out what can we adopt here to completely flip things” We don’t want consequences telling kids off, humiliation of any sort at all. We want to bathe children in positivity and see what happens to those twelve kids and the whole thing changed from day one.
Niall Alcock: [00:25:55] What happened?
Clare Rees: [00:25:56] Well we started shaking hands with children when they came into school. We started giving Friday Cookie Club — little bit unhealthy — but it’s for all the kids, who were always well-behaved because they were never highlighted. We started using a Dojo system where you’ve only got four things we look at. Our Havelock for R’s for behaviour and behaviour for learning and…
Niall Alcock:[00:26:25] What are the 4 R’s?
Clare Rees: [00:26:26] They are resilience, resourcefulness, relationships and reflectiveness. So, that seemed to work really, really well because it was linked to parents. Parents, including some of the kids who found their behaviour difficult, were only getting positive comments coming through. It was only for that and all of that linked to our UNICEF approach has meant and the behaviour in school is near perfect. Which as a headteacher is very pleasing.
So definitely going to move forward with this because it helps wellbeing for children and for staff not having to sort out all sorts of difficulties. The lovely thing is that when we do have problems, the kids… you don’t have to say anything. They’re sitting there and you ask “Okay. So, why are we sitting here?” And they tell you what they’ve done wrong and that they want to put it right. And you know the conversations are not difficult.
Of course, occasionally things happen, very occasionally. But even in those situations, we’ve got such good rapport with our parents and we often bring parents in and have that discussion with the child and try and make a sort of verbal contract.
Niall Alcock: [00:27:43] I think you’re right. My experience in classrooms is that students often know what the reason for the conversation is and what the positive path forward is. So giving them the opportunity to enact that is a great thing.
One of the questions we get asked quite a lot is: how are headteachers managing the budgets under such difficult financial conditions?
What have you found that’s that’s worked? What are the strategies that you’re using at Havelock to aid the situation?
Clare Rees: [00:28:08] We’re quite lucky here. I think, you know, I haven’t really got yet to the point where I’ve got issues. But I think that’s another thing do with wellbeing that I spend a huge amount of time thinking about the figures with my school business manager, the chair of governors and the deputy head, making sure that you know we really get value for money and we can save money.
But what we found in the school, as we’ve gone for a wholly inclusive approach where we have good behaviour, if we can sustain that in most classes, we don’t need as many additional adults as perhaps has been the case in the past. Again, if children are more engaged in their learning because you’ve got a sharp focus on the curriculum, and you know what makes learning stick and doing something irresistible with them, you won’t need to break them off into groups because they have been learning all the way through and there won’t be so many children with gaps in their learning.
But it’s still not very easy. I mean we have to do a little bit of fundraising. It doesn’t raise a huge amount of money. We are very careful with our resources. We, for example, managed to pull loads of books from our library for free which were given to us by an organisation, where people who perhaps have grown up children, who don’t want their books anymore, were looking to give them to school so we are on the lookout, on the scrounge all the time.
But we’re also doing other things to help our families so we know we have vouchers for the food bank. We make sure we’re not just an organisation which is about making money ourselves. We offer a free breakfast club. People have that need here.
But it’s about putting fewer people in front of children. That’s the big costing for a school. So doing lots of little small things, okay, they might add up to something but it’s how you can manage without so many adults. Which also involves me and the deputy teaching, which perhaps wasn’t something, certainly for a head, would have thought about in the past.
Niall Alcock: [00:30:23] It sounds like a forward-thinking approach to resolve some of the issues that might be more time consuming to then aid the need for additional personnel.
Clare Rees: [00:30:32] Yeah. We were doing the 30-hour offer for nursery. You know, we’re doing a few things like that to generate some income but it’s hard to generate a huge lump of it. So, you know, you can do lettings, etc. but then you’ve got to pay the caretaker to come and open and close the school. So, it sort of cancels out the profit. You have to keep quite sensible and how you can. I’ve got some ideas for the future but I’ll keep that under my hat.
Niall Alcock: [00:30:59] How do you protect the budget for professional development? Is there always a set amount that you set aside each year? Or is it a year by year approach?
Clare Rees: [00:31:06] Well, you know I’ve been really fortunate because I’ve always done so much professional development for schools in the past, I feel that we need to become experts in what we are going to put forward for our school.
So I’ve had an approach which means we could put a huge amount in the budget but actually in terms of getting external people in we don’t ever do that.
We always train ourselves hence the book group idea and lots of WhatsApp messages and Twitter and whatever. Then we think “what’s the best that we can offer?” So I’m really lucky I got some very talented people who can do that.
We do send people out to make sure that we have up to date training in certain areas but a lot of it’s about sharing things or going to another school or inviting people here. We’ve done a lot of leadership training for deputies and assistants in Ealing. So it means that we can call on favours. So as part of a learning community that I run across Ealing to do with reading, the learning community is going to another school around the corner that’s started a new approach that looks exciting. So we’re all going there to see what does it look like in the class and then we’re going to talk to the literacy subject leader. That is exciting.
Listening to somebody with a whole load of slides is not exciting anymore. In fact, the focus groups say ‘we don’t want any more of that’. So we tend to do magpie sessions, cherry-picking sessions, very interactive sessions. It can’t be about sitting and listening, especially not to me!
Niall Alcock:[00:32:50] I’ve asked this question to every head teacher I’ve interviewed so far. If there was one question that you could ask every head teacher in the country what would that question be and why?
Clare Rees: [00:33:01] If you could change one thing in the current education system what would it be and why?
Niall Alcock: [00:33:07] Okay. You know what I am going to do now, don’t you?
Clare Rees: [00:33:10] I do! You’re going to ask me what it would be!
Niall Alcock: [00:33:11] What would you change and why? I’d love to hear practical, solution-focused strategies if you can.
Clare Rees: [00:33:18] I do worry a lot about supporting parents because a lot of the issues here seem to stem from, maybe, a lack of understanding of the importance of parenting and how impressionable young minds are. Of course, all of our parents want the best for their children but they don’t always know how. I have created a suite of materials around that which we deliver in our school.
Niall Alcock:[00:33:45] To parents?
Clare Rees: [00:33:46] Yeah. What was interesting is, when we met Sean Harford, at the conference and he mentioned the 30 Million Word Gap research, which has been around for a long time by Hart and Risley.
It was looking at children from language poor backgrounds versus children from language-rich backgrounds and these are four-year-old children. You know, there are 30 million words difference in these two groups, and what can we do about it?
It made me think we can’t have that excuse, that the children come in with no English, with parents who can’t read or write English, and someone can’t read or write in their own language because we’ve got to do something with these young minds to set them alight.
Clearly, we need a bit more funding and support for this and it’s so difficult. I know, I’m obviously, probably one of many voices here, but I would love to have more support for parental engagement. What we try and do here is we invite parents in for a ‘soft start’ and in the lower years. They can learn the phonics and they can learn how to write and do a bit of reading with their child and understand how to do this successfully and they absolutely love it and the whole classroom -all the classrooms are rammed with parents- and then that sets them off. One parent came to me recently and “I’m learning to read!”
Niall Alcock: [00:35:12] For the very first time or in English?
Clare Rees: [00:35:15] In English. Yeah. You know, sitting with her child during the ‘soft starts’. It made us think, well we need to do some more workshops. I mean, we obviously do quite a few workshops but let’s do some English language workshops etc. but it always comes down to, we don’t always have enough people or enough money or the space.
I think that’s such a sort of short-sighted approach really in terms of our nation because if we did something with children when they’re young to set them on fire, set their parents on fire, I mean, it would change so many things for people’s futures.
So, that’s something I know that Ofsted are very interested in. But really this research has been around for so long. It’s the first bit of research that made me a researcher. It’s the first thing I shared with staff here and they just couldn’t believe what the data was showing us. So most of our children fit into the language poor category. So, are we just not going to bother or…? We have to put a huge amount of resource into helping the families. When we’ve done that it does make the difference.
The next thing would be around wellbeing. Again, I look at young teachers and the demands put on them. Some of the awful things we have to deal with at school to do with safeguarding, never mind the feedback, marking, planning. I do feel sometimes that people pay lip service to this and they don’t really understand how hard it is. So, I do feel that needs to be a bit more than just, “Oh let’s do some nice well-being thing in the staff room or let’s buy everyone treats or whatever.” We’ve got to do this properly because this is the thing driving people out of the profession.
You know, I’m too old now. I’ve only got a few years left but I’m not sure, and it’s sad to think, I don’t know if 30 years ago, if it was like this, if I was a teacher now, I would actually come into teaching. That’s just too much to juggle.
Niall Alcock: [00:37:32] You mentioned tackling wellbeing properly. What is tackling wellbeing properly look like?
Clare Rees:[00:37:35] Well, of course it’s developing trust and a coaching culture isn’t it?! It’s understanding and looking at people as a whole person. That’s hard. I understand that. Again time etc.
But it’s developing the systems in a school where everyone can flourish and no one feels they can’t come out and put their hand up and say “Do you know what? I don’t understand how to do this. I never have and unless you show me I might never. Please, could someone help?” That’s what we want our children to do. I’m a very good one saying “Look! I’m not good at Excel. Can someone show me how on earth to do this?” They’ll roll their eyes and someone comes over and helps. But why would I try and find out on my own if someone else would show me and maybe work with me? Then I might feel okay I could do that more often.
Niall Alcock: [00:38:31] So share skills and expertise?
Clare Rees:[00:38:34] And obviously paying people for the job that they do. People say that teachers get well-paid but no looking at my own family, my own daughter and she works all weekend, almost every evening marking, planning. That’s not a life and she doesn’t get paid a huge amount. I think there are other jobs out there that people do and they don’t have that sort of grinding pressure constantly and someone checking up that they’re actually doing a good job all the time. No one can flourish in those situations.
Niall Alcock: [00:39:10] So better wellbeing through improved funding, improved trust in schools, potentially lower accountability, lighter workloads. Is that the message?
Clare Rees:[00:39:19] Yes. Also getting people to use the evidence out there. How can we move things forward? Make learning stick? Look at the science of learning? It doesn’t anywhere say that over marking is helpful or giving loads of homework is going to help. So, why are we still advocating that? You’re really telling me a good teacher, because they are going to get children to do more of their own evaluative marking, or they’re going to do a whole class feedback, always going to be a short-sharp, is going to drop off the standards? I really don’t think so.
In fact, we did a little survey last year of our pupils and they said, “We never read what Miss has written because when we start a new lesson, we want to start afresh and it’s the feedback we get during the session that makes the difference”. So, that was a big step for us and we completely tore apart our policy and started again. The standards haven’t dropped as a consequence.
Niall Alcock:[00:40:33] That’s great to hear. Another big question for you. What does the future of education look like, what excites you about it and what do we need to do to make happen?
Clare Rees:[00:40:42] I am excited about the future because if it’s got anything to do with the senior leaders in this school and the people I work with it’s in a really good place! Another reason, I don’t think I would have come into education, is because I managed to scrape in because I got such shocking A Level results. I don’t think now they would take me, quite frankly. Looking at the standard of some of the young people coming in is first class. So that excites me.
But it’s looking at the evidence-based approaches and some other work. For example the Chartered College, looking at metacognition. We’ve already talked about the science of learning. We want to really look into this and I think that’s what excites me. That there’s so much more evidence out there. I cringe to think of the sort of things that I decided was good practice when I first came into teaching.
So my dream really would be, if I could create a future, to have research schools may be linked to a university offering master’s level courses. I think if I did that in this school, almost every teacher would get a master’s because they all carry out their own action research, their own mini-research projects. That’s another thing that has really helped them understand. This is a craft that they’re developing, their own specialism. You know, what they hold personal to them that they want to do in the future. And so, that’s my legacy and I hope in this school that everyone, anyone can do research. It’s really motivating.
Niall Alcock:[00:42:22] That’s a really lovely note to end on. Thank you for being so considered. Thanks for being so reflective. Clare Rees. Thank you very much for joining us.
Clare Rees: [00:42:31] My pleasure. Thank you.
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If you enjoyed this interview, check out Episode 5of the We Are In Beta Podcast with Ed Vainker, Executive Headteacher at Reach Academy Feltham on Lybsyn,Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and TuneIn or download the file here.
