Using shared leadership to create an inclusive environment

Background

Bryn Coch Primary School serves the town of Mold and the surrounding area in the county of Flintshire.  There are 648 pupils aged 3 to 11 years at the school, including 77 pupils in the nursery and 23 pupils in the learning resource classes.

The current headteacher took up her post in January 2009.  The school’s last inspection was in January 2019.

Strategy and Action

Over time, school leaders have developed the vision for how the school is managed.  They aim to provide an extremely inclusive and welcoming community that nurtures pupils to become happy, confident and resilient learners and gives a high priority to staff wellbeing.  They have achieved this by managing change effectively.

The management structure of the school allows leadership to be distributed and shared by nearly all staff.  This includes the headteacher, deputy headteacher, additional learning needs co-ordinator and nine heads of year.  Staff have clear, negotiated job descriptions.  Their line managers carry out regular annual reviews based on the professional standards for teaching staff and on individual roles and responsibilities for support staff.  All staff have valuable opportunities to learn from each other through sharing good practice, seeing each other teach and taking part in professional conversations each half term around the professional standards.  Through this, and their day to day practice, leaders encourage staff to identify their own training needs and source opportunities for development, including visiting other schools, and in-house and external training.

The headteacher and deputy headteacher make effective communication across the school a priority to ensure that all staff are fully involved with the day to day running of the school and the management of change.  This has a powerful impact on staff wellbeing.  For example, every fortnight the senior management team meets with the heads of year over a lunch provided by the school to discuss standards and updates to the school diary.  There are weekly staff meetings focusing on learners and regular year group and support staff meetings.  Leaders use weekly bulletins and share all meeting minutes quickly and effectively using a communication platform to ensure effective day to day communication across the school.  Staff wellbeing is at the heart of managing change.  This is embedded in the school’s approach, including the commitment to holding open conversations, listening to concerns and different viewpoints and being prepared to compromise where necessary.

There is a highly inclusive approach to school development.  A member of staff from each year group is responsible for driving one of three improvement areas identified in the school improvement plan within their team.  The school includes all staff in this, from newly qualified teachers to teachers who are well established in their careers.  It supports their professional development highly effectively, particularly in developing their professional learning skills from the new Professional Standards.  Priorities have clear timescales over the academic year to ensure the greatest impact and wellbeing of staff and pupils.

The school involves all stakeholders in managing change, including governors, parents and most importantly the pupils.  Pupils contribute through the relevant pupil voice committees and help to plan what they want to learn.  This ensures their enthusiasm for learning.  Governors are highly motivated and support and challenge the school’s vision exceptionally well.

Impact

The largest impact of inclusive leadership and management of change is on the wellbeing of the staff which, in turn, effects pupil wellbeing, which is at the heart of their ability to learn and achieve.

Many of the recent changes, particularly with priority areas in the School Improvement Plan, were brought about due to staff feeling overwhelmed with the number of demands being required at any one time.  As a result of this shift in culture, staff feel that their work is valued.  They embrace changes that help the school move forward because they are fully involved in the process.  This has allowed the vision of ‘Our Happy, Caring Bryn Coch School’ to be fulfilled.

How we have shared our good practice

• Case study paper written to be shared with GWE consortium
• Shared directly with other schools in the consortium