Culture Rules

Creating Schools Where Children Want to Learn and Adults Want to Work

Jo Facer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000477689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Leadership in der Bildung

School culture is unarguably central to a school's success or failure. While there is no single "correct" school culture, there are lessons to be learned. Culture Rules examines the factors that create an environment where students want to learn, and adults want to teach.

Culture Rules explores staff culture, student culture, team building, establishing and maintaining norms inside and outside the classroom, and lessons learned from top-performing schools. By sharing her personal journey in school leadership, Jo Facer:

• 
  
  

• explores the different factors that can affect a school's culture;

• 
  
  

• considers hot topics such as teacher workload, discipline, marking, CPD and shows how these can influence a school's culture and success; and

• 
  
  

• includes real case studies to show how schools have developed a strong culture and the impact on performance.

Full of practical, sustainable ideas for schools to implement in the short and long term, this is essential reading for all school leaders in primary and secondary schools looking to build a great school culture in their organisations.

Part I

The adults

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097075-1

According to Eva Moscowitz, the founder of one of the most successful chains of Charter Schools in America, ‘Education is for kids, but about the adults.’¹ For Moscowitz, adults are the change-makers. A school succeeds or fails because of what adults do, not children. So this book starts with the adults, because children do not set school culture, adults do.

In a nutshell, what we need to do to create an environment where a scholarly culture can flourish is two things: recruit the right people, and then make sure they don’t leave. This is a simple idea which is difficult to do.

In Jim Collins’s Good to Great he famously talks about getting the ‘right people on the bus’.² It is widely accepted that to succeed as a school, you need the right people in the building. And what do we mean by the ‘right’ people? While every school in the country wants teachers to be qualified and kind, different schools have different values and priorities. Knowing what you stand for is a prerequisite for attracting and securing the right people who are not only qualified and kind, but who will work with you to further your mission for your community. And great people can only flourish in the right kinds of environments: I have spent my career working in schools which serve disadvantaged communities, but I’m not sure I’d adjust well to schools in rural areas – the challenges facing them are nothing I have ever contemplated – or to schools serving more affluent communities. Similarly, I’ve seen colleagues struggling in one school (and even, horrifyingly, told they ‘can’t teach’ in some institutions), only to go on to have enormous career success in a very different kind of school.

So recruitment matters, and we open this first part of the book with that.

Once you have your A team, the worst thing that can happen is they leave. Great people in the right subjects to serve your curriculum plan who are aligned to your vision are not the easiest to find. Moreover, high staff turnover is largely accepted to be a terrible thing for children. So much of learning relies on children being receptive to learn, and if they are spending time working out who this new teacher is, what their expectations are and if they mean them, and the particular ways they open up their subject to children, they are not using that brain-space to learn new material.

So, how can we create schools where people don’t want to leave? Although much is made of well-being initiatives and perks of certain multi-academy trusts with well-lined pockets (one local school to me boasts an indoor swimming pool that staff can use out of hours), what actually matters most is a sense of team. Ensuring your people buy into what the school is doing and feel their voice is heard in shaping the direction of travel is infinitely more useful to children in the long run and more effective in retaining them.

Of course, it is not all about vision and mission (and I have some colleagues who might scoff at the ‘airy vision’, but I’m going to argue for its importance, so do bear with me). Teachers are professionals like any other, and unlike the kinds of jobs I did to pay my way through university, they will not be happy doing the identical same thing ten hours a day for the forty-five-plus years of their career. A teacher is not, after all, a waitress. While waitressing, to my knowledge, has not appeared to change very much at all from when I did it twenty years ago, education does adapt. Education changes with different governments, different exam syllabuses, and, most crucially in my view, new research. We have a responsibility to develop the people we employ, and I’ll explore some ways we might do that.

Finally, while toxic internet memes might suggest that teachers are ‘candles’ who ‘consume themselves to light the way for others’, it is widely accepted now that teachers are in fact entitled to a life beyond their career. When I trained to teach, the Charter Schools of America and free schools of the UK were in their infancy and largely staffed by unencumbered twenty-something-year-olds; time (and, for some, additional responsibilities of family) has shown that a human cannot, in fact, sacrifice their entire life for their work for very long. We have a duty as school leaders to consider the workloads of our teachers and do something about it when that burden becomes excessive.

My hope in these chapters, and in this book, is not to indoctrinate the reader in a ‘right’ kind of school culture, but to rather share experience and research that any leader or teacher can make use of to build the culture they desire.

Notes

• 1 Eva Moscowitz, The Education of Eva Moskowitz: A Memoir (Harper, 2017).
• 2 Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t (Random House, 2001).

1

How can we recruit the right teachers?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097075-2

Recruitment is at the heart of what we do in schools. I once worked for a headteacher who insisted on meeting every individual who interviewed to work at their school. At the time, I was surprised they would invest so much time in this process. Once in the post myself, I thought this to be a stroke of genius. Indeed, if you’re going to invest a huge chunk of your time anywhere as a head it ought to be choosing the right people to staff your school!

Advertising for teachers: writing the ad

When you are appointed the principal of a new-start school, you have the enormous privilege of getting to hire every single member of staff from scratch. It is a blessing: if you hire every single person, you shape the direction of your school. The pressure to get it right is enormous. Every single person we hired for Ark Soane would be hired by me, and if any did not work out, I was the person who had made the mistake. Our ads needed to be worded perfectly.

Unfortunately, I did not recognise this until very late in the recruitment process.

My initial wake-up call came when interviewing a candidate. Describing applying to another school, he said: ‘they had the best worded advertisement I’ve ever read’. My pride was hurt, but my curiosity was piqued.

‘What was so good about it?’ I asked.

‘Oh, everything. They say what they stand for. Strong behaviour, a sensible approach to workload, their idea that the teacher is the expert. It’s just great, and it’s all backed up when you visit.’

I looked up the Magna Academy shortly after. Here is what I found:

Do you want to be part of a team where you will help make a lasting impact on our students, many of whom are disadvantaged, and rapidly accelerate their progress?

Do you want to work in a school where you are free to teach, with impeccable student behaviour and unhindered by bureaucracy?

Despite being a ‘secondary modern’ in a selective grammar school borough, our mind-set is that we are a ‘grammar school for all’. We are unapologetically ambitious for every child, no matter what their background, prior attainment or needs. Our mission is to prepare every student to be able to go to university or high-powered alternative. We believe in the traditional values of hard work and kindness. Our Academy is a vibrant and exciting place to work and was graded as outstanding in all areas by Ofsted in June 2015 and December 2018. In 2018, Magna achieved a Progress 8 score of 1.15, placing us 24th nationally (top 1%).

We believe that we are starting to do something for our pupils that is really special. However, we know that our results, whilst ground-breaking, are not yet enough to achieve the vision that we have for our academy: for all pupils to ‘climb their personal mountain to university or aspirational alternative.’ Addressing this, is the exciting next stage of our journey.

We value our staff highly, and treat workload very seriously. Our systems ensure you can really focus on your core purpose – teaching, in a sustainable way, unhindered by bureaucracy or poor behaviour.

What we offer:

• Great students who behave impeccably – you can make a massive difference to them
• Tight, robust ‘no-excuses’ behaviour systems
• Highly visible/supportive senior leaders who have your back
• Same-day centralised detentions, including homework detentions (you do not need to organise/run/chase them at all), helping to underpin impeccable behaviour, so you are free to teach
• A feedback policy focused on whole class feedback – we do not have onerous/impossible marking policies
• A centralised homework system at KS3 – you do not need to check/mark KS3 homework
• No formal graded lesson observations – just ongoing ‘no-stakes’ feedback, helping you to continuously develop – we believe that trusting our staff with autonomy helps to develop a strong staff culture
• Collaborative planning with centralised, shared units of work and resources
• CPD starts as soon as you are appointed
• Excellent ongoing CPD, career development and promotion opportunities
• A professional progression model to enable great teachers to remain in the classroom via our Lead Practitioner (LP) and Specialist Leaders of Education (SLE) routes
• State of the art facilities and a very pleasant location in beautiful Dorset

What we are looking for:

The successful candidate will be:

• an excellent teacher of Maths who will play an important role in helping to move Maths into its next stage of development.
• someone who does whatever it takes to ensure the life chances of all our students are maximised. They will blend extreme personal humility with intense professional will.
• totally aligned to our values and mission. If you are the type of person who fits with our culture, you will love working here.

It is an excellent opportunity for an NQT or ambitious practitioner wishing to further develop their career. As a Teaching School you would also have the opportunity to become a Specialist Leader of Education.

We actively welcome visits and would be delighted to show you around our Academy to fully appreciate our excellent learning environment.

Richard Tutt, headteacher at Magna Academy at the time this ad was out, now an executive principal for United Learning’s Bournemouth and Poole Cluster, and with whose kind permission this advert is reproduced, told me:

I realised over time that staff alignment to the vision and systems of a school is of critical importance (especially so when the school is doing something very different). And this needs to start with making the advert as explicit and honest as possible about what the school is about, otherwise it wastes everyone’s time. Demonstrating alignment at the interview is then critical. The interview process also included a thirty-minute presentation from me and a written exercise which tested alignment.

When writing job adverts, I learned, always include what is special about your school. Who are you serving, and what is your aim? What are your non-negotiables?

Shout your values loudly

When we struggled to recruit an art teacher, I realised that our advert was not explicit enough about what we believed in. Noting that those who came for interview were employing group work and ‘busy work’, we got explicit, adding that ‘our founding art teacher will believe in direct instruction and cultural capital: that all children can be artists, if taught well, and that all children deserve to know about the greatest artists who have lived’. For this position, the distinctive alignment we were looking for was two-fold: a belief in direct instruction, and a belief in teaching art as a vehicle for cultural capital.

Another great example of an advert that fronts its values is this from Bedford Free School’s search for a head of maths from February 2020:

At BFS our values drive everything that we do and as a result our teachers enjoy impeccable behaviour in lessons and hardworking, highly motivated students. Open for just 7 years, Bedford Free School is a genuinely comprehensive school that provides a knowledge-based education for students of all backgrounds. We teach an unashamedly academic curriculum consisting of the best that has been thought and said, and as you would expect, maths is at the heart of this.¹

The advert goes on to talk about leadership capacity, the department and the development on offer – all after this explicit paragraph on school culture.

Writing a job advertisement

What is it about your school’s culture and ethos that you’d like to front in your advert? Think carefully about your beliefs about education. Do you passionately believe in working with the most disadvantaged young people? This might be something you’d look for in prospective teachers. What is your pedagogy position – group and project work, or traditional and didactic? Again – be upfront about this. I had assumed my school was so obviously in the latter category that I did not need to say this, but this was not the case – as evidenced by not one but many interview lessons I watched centred on group work. What about your approach to extra-curricular: do you pare it down so teachers just teach, or does every teacher get to run a club that interests them? How about your ways of working – is all planning done centrally, saving workload? Or is planning devolved to teachers, ensuring absolute autonomy in lesson creation? Either extreme can be big draws for different professionals.

Of course, in a recruitment crisis it is understandable why schools are increasingly emphasising what they offer to staff, and not just the kind of person they are looking for. Teachers are increasingly looking for places which will nurture their development, as well as offer opportunities to progress, and it is, frankly, a buyer’s market.

Think about what makes your school a great place to work, and put it front and centre in the advert. Do you use a...