Please note: Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) is now Lift Schools, this post may reference the name of the trust at time of posting.
At AET, we routinely talk about the need to ensure our pupils receive their entitlement to excellence. Delivering an entitlement to excellence is not only the duty of our schools, but it’s the language we use to codify and distil the purpose of our organisation.
Students need to be able to read excellently, so that they can unlock the curriculum; write in a way that makes them expert communicators and portrayers of great ideas; and excel in mathematics, so that they are prepared to thrive in an ever-evolving economy.
Last summer, across our primary schools the Expected Standard in Reading, Writing and Maths (RWM) was 63%. Although that is four percentage points above the national average, there is some startling variance beneath the surface.
The range of KS2 RWM, for example, is 32% to 84%. Between November 2021 and July 2022, two schools made 62 percentage points of progress. Whilst another made just 7.
At AET we are committed to reducing this variation. With urgency.
For now, it’s our priority for schools to work together so that every school reaches national standards - as a minimum requirement.
With the significant diversity of schools that comes with our impressive geographical spread, we also want to ensure that education quality in all of our schools transcends the standards of their local contexts, too.
These two aims are the baseline aims for now, but our mindset is already geared toward the delivery of sustainable excellence.
Sustainable excellence in practice is our commitment to reaching AET490. At primary, this means 90% of our children pass the phonics check, reading at least at their chronological reading age, and achieving the expected standard in RWM at Key Stage 2. All, by 2028.
The diversity of the schools, methods and contexts in our trust has undoubtedly contributed to the variance that is entrenched across our network of schools. But we can't make any excuse for AET pupils in one of our schools to receive a better deal than pupils at another.
To achieve AET490, we must resolve an intractable issue of our organisation working at cross-purposes, breaking out of our historical legacy of schools working in silos. We all have a collective responsibility to be agents of change.
Raising achievement in the context of AET primary education starts with a mentality that all schools can get better. All of the schools have something to offer so that across our network excellence is the norm in every classroom, of every school, year-on-year.
Every school has the capacity to improve. The school whose RWM score last year was 32%, has just as much to share in this journey as the school with 84% RWM. We are determined to build a culture which recognises that expertise from the many is better than the few - and drive behaviour from there.
Through our Raising Achievement Network Group, we reinforce our collective responsibility by talking about 'the 1435' - the number of Year 6 children across the trust in 2022/23. We only have one more year with these pupils to ensure that they are prepared for their next destination.
Our new, Y6 Raising Achievement Portal has become a command post to share outstanding practice and resources so that principals can exemplify the excellence taking place in their school. Here, trust leaders share their practice that has proved to be high-impact, which often will have a crucial focus like intervention and resources for pupils falling behind.
We have also recently established a Y6 High Leverage Action Framework. Many of the actions in this framework are well-known, but what separates success is the quality of their execution. The critical distinction between ‘we do that’ and ‘do that with rigour’; the latter requires clarity of and drive towards impact.
But if we are serious about achieving 90% RWM at Y6, by 2028, we can't rely on the emergency responses from the Key Stage 2 teams across our schools. At our most recent Principals Meeting, we also looked at our current Year 1 cohort, who will be our first 'AET490' cohort, and spoke about what it will take to ensure that their attainment builds year-on-year.
There are various points where issues can emerge in a child's education. It’s much easier to address issues in educational and social development when they emerge than it is to treat problems later. Failing to address issues downstream, at source, only creates upstream problems for those involved in the latter end of a child's education.
Our targets are bold, so the more we talk explicitly about our AET490 ambitions and how we will achieve them, the strength of our approach and conviction grows to get there.
And we must get there - if we are to lay claim to excellence being the standard of our trust.
Now, we are all pursuing a common aim, with a common language, and a common set of understanding. For us, the next step is finding common solutions. We’ve made a start in the foundation year of our journey, but we still have much more to achieve.
Pooling the diversity of our intelligence and expertise across our network is our method of raising achievement. As a mixed academy trust working in every region, it is a huge benefit to have so many possible sources of inspiration and sharing. And if we can fully leverage the power of our network, collectively we will step closer to our journey’s end - sustainable excellence.
In the final instalment of this three-part series, Gareth Howells, Executive Principal of Newlands Academy, shines a light on what achievement looks like for pupils in his special school and across AET.
In part one, Phil Humphreys, Director of Secondary, outlines the capacity of network groups to raise achievement in the context of AET's challenges at the secondary level.
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