Last November I gained a new niece, Ava, who joined the family aged 2 ½ years old. She is an absolute delight, and now at 3 ½ years old, she has just started pre-school as my brother and sister-in-law return to their substantive work roles.
Having been a teacher and school leader for the best part of 29 years I have understood disadvantage from an educationalist’s perspective, but it is only in the last year that I have begun to understand disadvantage from a different perspective, much closer to home and much more emotive.
Her cousin Carys, my daughter, is 18 years old and has just started at university. The question floating around my head is whether Ava will be able to make the same meaningful choices about her education, her career prospects, and her future, that Carys has been able to do.
A meaningful choice
A choice that has come about through an education built on equity, to achieve equality.
Ava is vulnerable; her disadvantage that she carries with her could ensure that when she reaches Carys’ age, she is likely to leave education almost 18 months behind her non-disadvantaged peers in terms of attainment. Fundamentally, this will prevent her from making a meaningful choice like her cousin Carys.
Ava is one of thousands of children in the same predicament, and many will not fare as well as I hope Ava will. The disadvantage gap continues to plague education, stubbornly refusing to close quickly enough, amplified by the pandemic and re-opening. The gap is Ava and the many, many children like her.
What is the cause?
The ‘gap’ is one of the key problems in education that refuses to go away. Often termed a ‘wicked problem’, there is no single underlying root cause. Post-pandemic, attendance is an obvious causal link and yet attendance itself has a plethora of causes which lead to students not being in school, each of these are in themselves difficult to solve.
Fear not, we aren’t heading down the rabbit hole of an infinite regress! The Education Endowment Foundation is providing research and optimum solutions into the problem of attendance and thus helping to reduce the attainment gap. Bromcom too, has mobilised its education team and mined into the data provided by its schools and produced this attendance whitepaper.
What’s the solution?
The solution part 1 – Address attendance
For pupils to thrive, for the disadvantaged to gain equity, for pupils to want to attend school there are six key themes. Simply put, these are:
- Know your pupils and families
- Build a culture of community and belonging
- Communicate with families
- Improve teaching and provision for all
- Deliver targeted intervention
- Monitor impact of all approaches
What is striking about these themes identified to address the problem of attendance, is that not only are they are far reaching but they are features of great schools and multi-academy trusts. Schools and trusts where there is no attendance problem and crucially, there is no disadvantage gap.
The solution part 2 – Effective MATs
The solution for Ava and others like her is to spend the next 14 ½ years in schools and MATs that have embraced these themes.
Our education landscape is mixed but at the vanguard of the system are multi-academy trusts. And driving the system forwards are trusts, which are most effective in eliminating disadvantage. These trusts have the following characteristics in common:
- Values Led – throughout the organisation, ‘the stick of rock’
- Standardisation – where it is needed and most effective
- Leadership – provided and encouraged at all levels
- Collaboration – within and across the trust
- High standards – for all, no compromise
The solution part 3 – System leadership
How do we take the work of the most effective MATs and share it across the wider education system? So, Ava and others, no matter where they are in the education landscape, can enjoy the same benefits that pupils in the most effective MATs experience. How do we take the principles of effective MATs and use them to build bridges throughout the system?
Leading the education system is tough. The system is complex, nebulous, and unique. Being the leader of a MAT necessitates being a system leader. It is not something our leaders can afford to opt out of and now more than ever, the need for MAT leaders to step beyond their MATs and help lead the system is vital. Because of Ava and her peers. Because we can’t let the disadvantage gap remain, let alone grow.
Seven themes have emerged from the studies Hargreaves and others have carried out on what’s required to lead the education system. As you can see, being a leader of a system (that in its current iteration has never been led) is, for want of an understatement, demanding.
Bromcom’s Cloud MIS and the solutions parts 1 and 2
For parts 1 and 2, our MIS can help with heavy lifting by providing you with a single point of truth, a single point of data that ripples through the system. For Ava, this means that her data, in a single point of entry can be seen by anyone from anywhere in the system no matter the size or scale of the school or trust.
- Customisable dashboards to suit your role and responsibilities
- Automated data collection improving workflows and reducing burden on schools and trusts
- Insights that move from the global to the granular for all school and trust data
The single point of truth, seen by all. Being an effective MAT means getting the right data, to the right people, at the right time.
But what of the solution part 3…?
Bromcom and system leadership
The most effective schools and MATS who have eradicated the disadvantage gap are using their MIS to do their heavy lifting. These MATs get to the single point of truth for the right people, at the right time, presented in the right way. This is built on the principles of trust through shared values, standardisation, leadership, collaboration, and high standards.
Bromcom and System Vision: the solution
Is it not the case that the most effective schools and MATs work on common principles and themes? That the size of the school or MAT is not the issue? That their MIS transcends any need to worry about size of scale, and what really matters is trust? When trust is baked into the system, people thrive.
How much of a leap is it to take these features of effective schools and MATs and run them across the system – our nebulous, complex unique education system?
If we can bake in the trust, from MAT to MAT, and MAT leader to MAT leader, all of whom are value led. All of whom want to serve those who need us most. To serve Ava and her peers.
Then what’s needed is MAT data shared with the right people at the right time, presented in the right way.
A Bromcom System Vision Solution which does the heavy lifting for our MAT leaders: our System Leaders.
This product doesn’t exist yet. We can build it, the technology is here, the data is here. What’s needed is the trust from our MAT leaders. Trust in the system they are leading to use their data for good. To make other MATS and Schools more effective and to make their MATs more effective by sharing their single points of truth.
When trust is built into the system, when leaders can share their data and see other’s data for the sole purpose of improving themselves and others, then change happens quickly and gaps close rapidly.
This is what we need to lead the system. MATs are maturing , merging consolidating. Now is the time to step out into the system and work across trusts with live data. So we have a vision of the system in the moment. So we can effect change based on information that is about the now and not the past. That is built on the condition of trust.
The system needs this because Ava and her peers need this. This is how we start to give her and her disadvantage equity. Bromcom will do the heavy lifting and give you a System Vision, we just need your trust.
