How we opened our doors to another trust
David Lord is joined by Rula Kanona and Saqib Malik of CORE Education Trust, on what they came to Brooksbank and Honley High to see, and what they took back to Birmingham.
The Education Exchange in the West Midlands invited David Lord to speak at its first annual conference, about how Brooksbank had turned around its results in English and maths. Rula Kanona, Director of Education at CORE Education Trust, was in the audience. She asked whether a group from Birmingham could come and see it for themselves.
Eight senior leaders spent a day across two of our schools, sitting in on lessons, going through our intervention data and talking to the staff who run it. This film is what they made of it.
What they looked at most closely was our RAG process, the weekly meeting where every student in Years 10 and 11 is discussed by name and their progress rated. Saqib Malik, Deputy Head at Arena Academy, was clear that the spreadsheet is the least interesting part of it. What he wanted to understand was the thinking underneath: who is in the room, how a decision gets made, and how a school makes sure it is identifying the right children before deciding what to do for them.
Rula took away a phrase she heard repeated through the day.
“One of the phrases that’s been repeated is that intervention is interaction, and having that one to one connect with students down to a very granular level is really the message that we’re taking away.”
She also described a question the visit had left her asking of CORE's own schools: not only what adds value for students, but what could be stopped because it happens out of habit rather than because anyone has shown it works.
Visits like this go both ways. We learn from being asked to explain ourselves, and a day like this usually turns into a working relationship rather than a one-off. The Education Exchange calls it professional friendship and generosity, which is about right.
