Trust me, school culture counts

In the Year 8 English class the boys were clapping their hands as they chanted lines from the famous American song Frankie and Johnny, a tragic tale of love, betrayal and murder. In another class a teacher excitedly showed us live progress graphs of all his Year 10 pupils as they crouched over their computers creating Javascript code. In a room on the roof of the school with windows looking up to the sky meanwhile pupils were carefully dabbing vivid colours to their impressive self-portraits.

These were but a few highlights of my ‘learning walk’ I was privileged to take part in this week as a school governor. Learning walks are in theory the least intrusive of observations for teachers. We dipped into each lesson for 15 minutes. The aim was to pick up just enough to provide constructive feedback on what appeared to be working well and how learning might be improved.

A rain sodden morning in a North London comprehensive may seem a far cry from an international summit on teacher development in Washington DC organised by the Sutton Trust and Gates Foundation earlier this month. But both experiences have got me reflecting on a trinity of fundamental education questions: what makes great teaching, can we observe it, and how can we enable more of it to happen in our classrooms?

These issues are clearly something that teachers are thinking a lot about given the attention our report What Makes Great Teaching received ahead of the summit. My colleague Conor Ryan tells me that the report and accompanying press release have now attracted 50,000 different visitors to the Sutton Trust website. I would like to think that this was all down to the slick communications machine at the Trust. But my sense is that the report has also tapped into the huge appetite among teachers to reflect on the core business of improving teaching. It is a much needed counterweight to the seemingly ever escalating pressures of Ofsted inspections and league table rankings. Our review concluded that in fact there is no easy recipe to describe the complex craft of great teaching – a message that resonated with teachers across the country. See Rob Coe’s slides on our report presented at the summit here.

A theme identified in our report was the need to create a culture of trust (and challenge) in schools to enable professional learning of teachers to prosper. I have to admit I was highly sceptical when our advisory group of UK and US teachers strongly urged us to include the topic of culture as part of our summit. As a former PhD in physics I live off numbers, data, evidence. Discussing culture to me sounded a bit wishy-washy. What exactly did they mean by culture? How would we encapsulate any conclusions that would be useful to other schools? How would this help us improve the outcomes for poorer pupils?

But the enriching experience of the summit has enabled me to see the light. One of my ‘take-aways’ from the many inspiring teachers we gathered together from the four corners of the globe was how universal and critical this issue is.

The wise headteacher of Huntingdon School in York John Tomsett summed it up in his review of the summit: “What became obvious … from our discussions with colleagues from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, the Netherlands, France and the UK is that the strategies we discussed to improve the quality of teaching can only be implemented effectively if the school culture is right. It was a global truth we all knew.”

One of the country’s leading edu-bloggers Tom Sherrington agreed : “Perhaps the strongest take-away is the affirmation of a view I’ve held for a long while that professional learning for teachers and leaders is the single most important factor in transforming outcomes for learners (as opposed to the raft of accountability systems schools are bogged down with.)  This is about developing a culture within which professional learning thrives – and developing practical tools.”

Dr Paul Browning, a Principal from St Paul’s School, in Sydney, Australia was for many teachers one of the stars of our summit. There are three basic tenets to Browning’s  thesis: effective learning is driven to some extent by transformational school leaders; effective leadership requires a culture of trust in the school; a set of proven practices can be pursued to establish that culture of trust. I would only add one hope to this: that such a cultural shift can lead to better learning and outcomes of poorer pupils in particular.

What is powerful about Browning’s work is that he has developed a practical self-appraisal tool for school leaders to measure the culture of trust in a school. Helpfully, John Tomsett has gathered other school culture tools from around the world here.

What I don’t know is how from a national policy perspective you enable this to happen across an entire school system, and particularly for schools in the most challenging circumstances. But it has confirmed my belief that you can get an immediate feel for a school as soon as you walk through its front doors.  If evidence can be provided to back that up that seems an incredibly valuable exercise.  “It’s about making the intangible tangible,” the assistant head teacher told me as I left the warm welcoming environment of the North London school.