SKEIN helps school partnerships, particularly Teaching School Alliances, map out the journey towards collective excellence and to sustain progress once there because SKEIN:
- means you can build on an accurate, research-informed and objective picture of starting points, beliefs, knowledge and practices regarding professional learning at all levels and for all staff across the Alliance;
- helps build coherence and a critical mass of shared understanding and CPD practice;
- identifies your local CPD capacities and talents thus enabling you to pinpoint areas of expertise you need to grow – amongst professional learners as well as those who support them;
- provides benchmarking data, where appropriate, so you can compare progress with other schools and partnerships;
- gives you the information you need to make strategic, cost effective decisions about professional learning issues and needs; and
- helps make powerful links between staff learning and pupil learning, (providing Alliance partners with the evidence they need for the emphasis on CPD in the new OfSTED framework).
“We are very happy with the overall judgements and would really appreciate a conversation around the use of tools, protocols and strategies we could harness to develop reciprocal vulnerability as a strategic learning tool.” - Melanie Warnes - Head of Castle School
Information about how CUREE's work has been used with teaching alliances along with a short video clip can be found here.
"Many thanks for your time yesterday and the professionalism in conducting the day. The day was extremely reflective for all staff involved and the visit along with the report will support us in driving forward CPD." - Paul Cowen - Biddick School Sports College
The Core Service
The core of the service is a diagnostic ‘sandwich’, initiated by SKEIN (CUREE or recognised providers trained by CUREE) staff, continued by the Alliance colleagues with SKEIN support and then revisited after a period, again with SKEIN help, to review progress. What follows is a description of how that process works for an alliance of several schools with several partners.
We recognise that time is a precious commodity and we aim to use yours as efficiently as possible. We limit group ‘activities’ to the essential minimum, expect to plan them around the normal rhythms of the school day and to make them intrinsically developmental as well as diagnostic – not to mention engaging!
Every alliance is different so we would expect to design with you the approach which matches your requirements. However, outlined here are three common models to give you some idea of the array of possibilities.
The key differences between the models are highlighted in bold and relate primarily to your starting point. Size (and budget) is obviously another factor. If you are working towards very big numbers you might want to consider either splitting this up into sub groups or becoming a SKEIN provider so that you can use the approach in waves across the partnership over time and build internal skills in evaluating staff learning environments with CUREE support.
Model 1 – rich evidence at whole alliance and individual partner level
This approach is likely to be the most useful for a newish alliance of schools (and other partners) without a long history of close, joint working on CPD. It will yield valuable diagnostic information at individual partner level and across the alliance as a whole. The process is summarised as follows:
- initial interview (usually by telephone) with alliance leaders to get their strategic perspective and agree the remainder of the process (including who should participate);
- collection of evidence from each partner (usually documentary);
- draw agreed participants together (usually 2 – 3 from each partner primary and 4-6 from partner secondary schools) in one location for some developmental, focus-group style activities and some training the use of the diagnostic tools (over the course of a single day);
- follow-up interviews (some may have taken place on ‘focus group day’;
- analysis of the evidence and production of a diagnostic report against the research based benchmarks for each alliance partner and an additional report synthesising that evidence for the alliance as a whole;
- comparison against broader benchmarking data;
- action plan and recommendations (again for each partner and an alliance synthesis);
- email and telephone support for the in-school and in-alliance development activities; and
- revisit to review progress and revised appraisal against the research base.
Model 2 – Rich evidence at whole alliance level with exemplar material at individual partner level
This approach would meet the needs of an established partnership where the CPD processes were already reasonably well known to the partners and the alliance leader but where the alliance wants to make a step function change in its approach to become fully integrated and more able to support schools beyond the alliance. The initial stages are identical to model 1 but the reporting and follow up activity relate to the alliance collectively:
- initial interview (usually by telephone) with alliance leaders to get their strategic perspective and agree the remainder of the process (including who should participate);
- collection of evidence from each partner (usually documentary);
- draw agreed participants together (usually 2 – 3 from each partner) in one location for some focus-group style activities and some training the use of the diagnostic tools (over the course of a single day);
- follow-up interviews (some may have taken place on ‘focus group day’;
- analysis of the evidence and production of a single diagnostic report against the benchmarks synthesising that evidence for the alliance drawing on illustrations and examples from individual alliance partners
- comparison against broader benchmarking data
- action plan and recommendations for the alliance;
- email and telephone support for in-alliance development activities;
- revisit to review progress and revised appraisal against the research based benchmarks.
Model 3 – Sampling of evidence at whole alliance level
This approach is suitable for a tightly integrated group of schools (eg with a single executive head, in a trust or chain for example), where many infrastructure processes (including CPD) are managed across the group as a whole. Evidence would be gathered from a representative sample of the group’s schools (around half) and reporting and follow-up would again be just at group level as follows:
- initial interview (usually by telephone) with group leaders and sample of other leaders to get their strategic perspective and agree the remainder of the process (including who should participate);
- collection of evidence from sub-set of partners (usually documentary);
- draw agreed participants together (usually 2 – 3 from each sample partner) in one location for some focus-group style activities and some training the use of the diagnostic tools (over the course of a single day);
- follow-up interviews (some may have taken place on ‘focus group day’);
- analysis of the evidence and production of a single diagnostic report against the benchmarks synthesising that evidence for the alliance;
- action plan and recommendations for the alliance;
- email and telephone support for in-alliance development activities;
- revisit to review progress and revised appraisal against the benchmarks.