A rising tide carries all boats.

All of us in schools are in the business of improvement. In particular, we want to improve student outcomes. Every year, we want to get better than the year before, assuming none of us are teaching classes where every student got a 9 the year before! A quote I like to use sometimes is one I nicked from The West Wing, which I think they nicked from John F Kennedy, is the idea that ‘a rising tide carries all boats’. I think it’s very apposite when we consider the issue of getting better in schools.

Unfortunately, we, especially at the middle leader level, tend to ‘silo-ise’ improvement. We focus disproportionate amounts of time on relatively small groups of students within the student body. Disadvantaged boys. Students 2 or more grades behind their target based on the last mock exam. High Attaining Pupils. We also work on these problems separately within our subject areas. The disadvantaged boys might be a focus for History, Science, MFL and Business Studies. Yet we work separately on trying to sort them out. We want to differentiate work for very specific groups of students, especially those with SEND, and this sometimes seems to involve (when it’s done badly) reducing the content and the richness of the knowledge that students engage with.

My strong belief is that this ‘targeting’ of intervention looks very nice, and it addresses the fact that Something Must Be Done ™ but I’m not persuaded it is going to have a long-lasting, sustained impact in the long run. That’s not to say it has no place, and clearly with students who, for example, have Education, Health and Care plans in place it is our legal obligation to fulfil the requirements of those — my point is about the balance of time spent by the staff body working on strategies for specific individual students, versus strategies designed to raise the performance of the entire school community.

We need to focus on the strategies we can all deploy to raise the achievement of everyone. I feel pretty confident that if our schools focused on, say, the following three things intensely, we’d probably have better outcomes and better schools as a result:

1. Improving student behaviour and attentiveness in and out of lessons, while ensuring all students and staff are kept safe in the school building, as per legal requirements.

2. Creating a climate for professional learning and dialogue among the teaching staff, where we are all self-motivated to little-by-little improve our pedagogy and subject knowledge.

3. Ensuring students read loads and loads and loads of good quality material — fiction and non-fiction — and are given the opportunity to write in a structured way about what they read.

I appreciate that doesn’t necessarily cover some subjects — if you’re a Maths teacher, for example, you might look at where you fit in here — clearly point 3 could be adapted in that case to say — students get lots and lots of opportunities to practice the Maths they learn. You may also disagree about the three things depending on your own context — that’s fine. I am merely an overly opinionated Head of History and I will acknowledge that I don’t fully understand the ins and outs of all the myriad things that crosses a Headteacher’s desk every day. Do please bear that in mind.

Ultimately, a lot of what I’m driving at is the idea of doing fewer things, but doing them really really well. When I was on SLT a few years ago, and being a bit wet behind the ears and underconfident and all that, one of the things I probably didn’t do well was really prioritise the one or two things I really needed to do, at the expense of some other, ultimately less important stuff.

Crucially — what isn’t here that we sometimes spend lots of time on (especially at middle leader level):

· Finickity marking policies that are designed for the benefit of parents and external observers rather than serving the dialogue between teacher and student.

· Lesson observation cycles that are in place for the sake of having evidence that we do lesson observation cycles but don’t actually lead to concrete improvements in the teaching.

· Work scrutiny activities that tend to shed more heat than light.

· Filling out the forms that ‘prove’ we did the lesson observation and the work scrutiny.

· The completion of pointless ‘action plans’ and analyses with unrealistic goals that no one ever reads or pays much attention to beyond the submission date. Seemingly it’s just there so it can sit in a folder ready to be whipped out in the event of an inspection.

Basically — things that keep me chained to the laptop writing stuff to prove to other people that I do the stuff that I’m told to do.

So to finish this with a question for the reader — what are the two or three things you might prioritise above all else, in the next academic year that will have the biggest impact on the largest number of people in your classroom(s)? And, what needs to be de-prioritised to make room for that?