The Free School Final Checklist, point 1: agree your Red Lines.

(This is part of a series of posts looking at the final things to check before opening a new school: http://lehain.blogspot.com/2014/08/opening-free-school-next-week-few-last.html )

Working on the basis that people who had done it before would know far more about things than me, between the start of the Bedford Free School campaign and its eventual opening in September 2012, I made it my business to talk to as many people as possible who had already opened schools themselves.

Two (or more) heads are better than one when setting up a school

So many people were so generous with their time and experiences. Amongst others I spoke to Bruno Reddy & Max Haimendorf of King Solomon Academy, Sarah Counter of Canary Wharf College, Iain Denning (who was starting head at Hazeley in Milton Keynes & is now at Sharnbrook Upper School) and Peter Barnes (Head at Oak Grove in MK)

[Of course I also spoke with Toby Young, whose West London Free School opened in 2011, a year before BFS, and who wrote a great book about it called, of course, How To Set Up A Free School.]

Two things cropped up with every single one of them. The first wasn't a surprise to me: the importance of getting culture right from day one.

What I wasn't expecting - and what I would encourage all people about to open a school to get sorted NOW - was the other point: BEFORE THE SCHOOL OPENS make sure you have agreed with your Governors what your behaviour "red lines" are going to be.

Don't want no blurred lines at your school. (For SO many reasons.)

Every new school will have had to produce its behaviour policy & exclusions policies well in advance (these policies will have been checked during the pre-opening OFSTED inspection). However, it is one thing writing (copying?) and adopting these - it is another thing completely to have to implement them.

The last thing you want in any school - particularly a new school - is for there to be any differences of understanding between the Governors and those running the school when it comes to hard decisions, especially those as important and emotive as exclusions.

So, if you are about to open a school next week and haven't yet done so the most important thing I think you should do is:

1) find some time (somehow!) to meet with the Governors - at the very least those you have lined up to form your Governors' Discipline Committee in the event of any exclusions (and if you somehow haven't agreed who those will be and got them the necessary training, do it IMMEDIATELY)

2) talk through (again) the principles you want the culture and day-to-day behaviour to be based upon

3) more specifically, consider scenarios with more extreme breaches of behaviour & how they expect that they will be dealt with: do they want internal procedures to manage them - when might it have to be a FTE or even a PX? 

What exactly does "zero tolerance"
mean to your governors?

No one wants or expects poor behaviour in their brand new school, and the vast majority of schools won't need to draw upon the more serious aspects of their behaviour/exclusions policies any time soon. 

Having things clear in the minds of you and your governors means you can make things clearer in the minds of your staff and students come opening day - helping to prevent the kind of incidents that would require its use in the first place.


Next up: - Hold on to the Vision: keeping your eye on the ball amidst everything else.

Opening a free school next week? A few last minute things to consider...

It has been a real privilege to be involved with the free school programme right from the go.

I first got involved when I heard about the New Schools Network through a friend & met Rachel Wolf for a coffee to find out more. That would have been early 2009 I think - it's been around 5 and a half years since then and in that time free schools in England have gone from a Policy Exchange idea to Conservative party policy to a reality.



There's been a General Election & the 2010 Academies Act to make them happen, and processes for application and pre-opening set up (and relentlessly retweaked) by the DfE. As I type this 174 schools have opened, with another 156 approved to open in the future.

One of the best aspects of being in the first wave of free schools has been the goodwill and support available to us from so many sources - including, but not limited to, NSN and the DfE. We have been able to see how things evolve over time and to be able to share our experiences with new groups wanting to open their own schools.

Bedford Free School has now been open for two full academic years, and next summer we'll be (I think) the first brand new free school to have a set of GCSE results - 20th August 2015 is very much on all our minds already. (This will be only our third year of operation but Bedford still has lower/middle/upper schools, with transitions between years 4/5 and 8/9, and so we opened with both a year 7 and a year 9).

With around one hundred new free schools due to open in a week or so, I thought it might be worth sharing some of the main things we have learned since opening in September 2012. I don't particularly claim we are experts at anything, and we still have huge amounts to learn as a school - but I think our experiences to date provide some useful examples and pointers for those about to start on the next (and most important) part of their free school journey.

I've been pondering what lessons are most relevant with only a week to go, so I won't be discussing building works (too late now!) or the pre-opening OFSTED (presumably passed long ago).

For ease, I'll break them up into a few posts, and start with those most pertinent to getting off to a smooth start next week. (If there are any experienced free schoolers out there who think I've missed anything, or anyone about to open who wants me to write about something on their mind, get in touch to let me know: mark@lehain.com)

Topics:

- (No) Blurred Lines: things the Head & Governors need to agree before a student crosses the threshold.
- Hold on to the Vision: keeping your eye on the ball amidst everything else.
- Day 1 practicalities: things to have to hand.
- IT and other lesson resources: assume nothing.
- Student & staff records and your MIS: get it right first time.
- Bye bye friends & family: planning for term 1 survival.
- Sept '15: recruiting another intake whilst running a new school.
- Switching from start up to delivery: getting from ideas to implementation.

No ifs, no buts - what we can learn from Outliers & outliers

Like many teachers, a frustration I have is the lack of time (and energy) to read as much as I'd like during term time.

Fortunately, my birthday falls at the start of the summer holidays & I am blessed with friends who buy me great books as presents knowing that it's the one time of the year when I am likely to be able to commit to read them properly. Until I set off on the epic adventure that is setting up and running a free school, summer holidays were a festival of reading.

The Good Book

Summer 2009 one of my reads was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I love pretty much everything he has written. (I finally got around to his latest, David & Goliath, this holiday.)

The way he takes complex concepts and brings them to life through anecdotes, examples and evidence always leaves me wanting more. I love the way he gently but firmly forces his readers to confront counter-intuitive ideas. In Outliers he takes the reader on a journey, exploring what we can learn from exceptional individuals and organisations, climaxing with the tale of KIPP, and a brilliant telling of his own family's story.

It blew my mind, and was the single biggest thing that got me seriously working out how we could improve educational standards where I live. When I returned to work that autumn, I didn't know quite what I wanted to do, but I knew that I would be doing something different the following year.

And 5 years on, here I am at BFS, focused every day on how we can achieve our own outlier status next summer.

Why am I writing about this after results day 2014?

There were many fascinating concepts explored in Outliers that have stuck with me: "accumulative advantage", the 10,000 hours rule, and rice Vs wheat & the link with maths ability, to name but three. The one of most interest to me today though is the idea that by looking at persistent outliers we can nearly always learn something about how we can do things better. 

All too often in life, when we come across someone or something exceptional we revert to "yes... but-ery". We look for reasons why the success of others can be explained away and our own relative failures can be justified:

"Yes, it's great that artist has had such success, but he always had the backing of his family"

"I love what they've achieved, but they had a lucky break"

Since entering teaching in 2002, I have been amazed at how often people dismiss strong performances by others with "yes...but-ery". If students haven't done so well over time when compared with others, we have a whole litany of reasons to hand as to why ours underachieved or theirs did better:

"Yes, but that school has improved the intake of the kids it gets..."

"Yes, but in Bedford we lose loads of bright students to the private schools..."

"Yes, but that school doesn't have as many kids on FSM..."

Outliers suggests we should be doing the exact opposite: rather than dismiss outlandishly good results in individual schools, we should be knocking down their doors to see what they're doing & what (if anything) we can learn from them.

Mr Reddy's Secrets to Success

I was lucky enough to meet Bruno Reddy, one of the founders of King Solomon Academy in 2010. It turns out he grew up in Bedford & he heard we were setting up a new school, so he got in touch and insisted we meet so he could share what KSA had learned so far in their journey.

Clearly they continued to learn lots as yesterday they announced one of the most phenomenal set of GCSE results I've ever seen. Look them up. Amazing.

Yet if you go on Twitter right now and search "King Solomon Academy" or "Perry Beeches" or the name of other super-high performing schools, you will find teachers discussing their amazing results, and all too often it's done with a sense of "yes, but..."

Too much discussion is about whether their success is because they have small year groups/more funding/high attrition rates/sneaky selection etc etc etc - not "OMG, that's AMAZING, I want that for my students, tell me more!?"

And whilst these outliers are, by definition, relatively few and far between, they are starting to grow in number, thus making their success even harder to ignore. Maybe when it was just one school it would be forgivable - but just off the top of my head I can think of KSA, Perry Beeches and Mossbourne as three schools who seem to have bucked historical trends and shown that entire cohorts of kids can achieve.

So well done to Liam Nolan & Team PB, Max/Bruno/Natasha & the KSA crew, and everyone else engaged in the mission of bucking trends and becoming outliers. Thanks for showing us the way ahead & what is possible.

It's now for the rest of us to be humble and listen and learn from them.

(I've already blocked out time in my diary to go and visit. Guys - you teach me how you do it and I'll bring cake, that sound like a deal?)