School improvement

We seek to share best practice across our trust, recognising the unique expertise of our different schools within a clear operating model. Our four key levers of school improvement are:

• Curriculum content & structure
• Culture
• Coaching, and
• Data Driven Instruction

Our school improvement model is supported by an experienced team of senior teaching professionals and subject leads and focusses on:

• Developing the collective belief of Trust staff in their ability to positively affect students, thus supporting raised outcomes for learners.
• Building and deploying a full suite of resource, training and support for each of the Aldridge school improvement levers such that all schools embed these as the collective norm and the quality of learning is consistently excellent.
• Building and using a highly effective ‘review and refine’ process across all Aldridge sites which enables all to accurately see the gap, name it and fix it in a time-efficient manner, ensuring learning is strong for our students.
• Through rigorous expectations and work around culture, all Aldridge sites exceeding 90% compliance to expectation around student culture on a daily basis. This results in a strong focus on learning and high satisfaction rates around behaviour from all key stakeholders, including our student body.
• Building a curriculum model for applied academics which strongly complements our mainstream academic offer, supporting breadth of provision and enabling more students to succeed.
• An effective partnership with the Aldridge Foundation which supports the Trust in delivering a Gatsby+ programme and a set of extra-curricular opportunities which widen horizons and build social and cultural capital for pupils and students.
• A strong focus on the needs of SEND students and the most disadvantaged supports strong outcomes and clear next steps for these students, ensuring that they share equal success with their peers.

We have Trust-wide subject network groups run by Trust Leads in English, maths, science and humanities, who work directly with school subject leaders and leadership teams to support them in the everyday work which drives success for our students.

Our work on curriculum follows three core themes.

• Curriculum design and resources: working with core subject leaders on developing the Aldridge Standard - a set of criteria that we can all use when sequencing, planning and resourcing our curriculum - and schemes of work which ensure excellence. Our aim is to produce the highest quality fully resources curriculum in the core and then in non-core subjects as well that all academies can access.
• Curriculum delivery: what actually happens in the classroom. We work with the school coaching leads to coach staff in classroom practice, using a scope and sequence model focussed on classroom management and planning rigour.
• Closing gaps in learning: we help our schools ensure students reach their potential academically by closing gaps in learning through the use of data-driven instruction. This can range from helping in co-planning meetings to running a year11 intervention or developing regular gap closing cycles in the curriculum.

The Trust’s Growing Together CPD programme supports the training and development of all of our people. As well as an induction for all new staff joining the Trust, it is our intention to grow this programme to include:

• Coaching and mentoring programme for those on ITT pathways
• Middle leadership development
• Senior leadership development
• Preparing for headship
• New head/exec leader mentoring
• Master teacher accreditation
• SLE and NLE accreditation.

We also support Trust-wide ongoing CPD for all staff through regional inset days and subject networks.