In under a decade, school performance in Hackney, an inner London borough, was transformed. Pupil results and inspection outcomes placed us at the top of the national league tables. This success is attributed to leadership in an urban context to provide high quality places for every child. A first objective of this project was to maintain and develop this characteristic whilst creating capacity to grow and develop future leaders, especially from communities in this diverse area which are at present under-represented in leadership levels. A second objective was to work more closely with our neighbouring borough of Haringey, especially in the areas of coaching and mentoring of new leaders as well as of teachers new to the profession. A third objective was to develop the confidence of senior leaders in mentoring their middle leaders to support and empower them to be successful. This has been given an impetus by the role of middle leaders in the new Ofsted framework. This is linked to our fourth objective of learning from the experiences of known leaders in the field of school leadership in Finland and the delivery of Maths in Estonia, a country which scores highly on the PISA results tables.
In the previous year, we received funding for an Erasmus+ KA1 project which explored ways in which particular curriculum areas could be improved by courses held in regions of Europe with recognised excellent practice. We wanted to build on this work to explore themes of more strategic importance. We know that hand in hand with school improvement is always strong, ambitious leadership. Valuable experiences had been gained in Hackney in moving schools from failure to success. We have been working on leadership programmes with our neighbouring borough of Haringey, another LA open to learning from European experiences. The quest to spot talent and grow future leaders is a shared experience. In both boroughs the promotion of members of our diverse communities is a key objective. In both boroughs the Maths KS2 results dipped below the national average so we identified that we needed to learn from a place with excellent practice. The introduction of the Early Career Framework gave us the impetus to look at good practice in coaching and mentoring, both for teachers new to the profession and at all levels of leadership within schools.