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Southwark Primary Schools In School Improvement Partnership
with Edison
Values and Inclusion Deemed Central to Raising Standards
The
group of schools includes: John Ruskin Primary, Keyworth
Primary, Dulwich Village CofE Infants, St. Johns and St.
Clements CofE Primary, Heber Primary, English Martyrs' RC
Primary and Dulwich Wood Nursery.
'In the short time we've been working with Edison, we've
already seen an incredibly positive impact, especially in
leadership skills with the subject leaders,’ said Ali Silke,
Headteacher of Dulwich Village Infants School. ‘We've been
able to push our high standards on behaviour management and
ethos still higher, and it's great to have the regular contact
and objective advice from Edison advisers to talk through
issues like TLR restructuring. Our recent Ofsted rated us
'outstanding' in nearly all areas, and with Edison's
curriculum design, I'm confident we'll extend that rating next
time.'
'In our
work with Edison we want to further enhance what the school
offers, through innovation and new ideas,' said Linda
Dickinson, Headteacher at John Ruskin Primary. 'A really good
school will always be striving to be even better: so for us,
although our recent Ofsted rated our curriculum work as
'outstanding' we'd like to take it still further, and Edison's
Core Learning Skills concepts would be a way for us to do
that.'
'This
is quite a diverse group of schools,' said Terry Reynolds,
Southwark's Deputy Director of Achievement, Access and
Inclusion, 'but they are all selected from those the authority
classified as needing 'light touch', and we wanted to be able
to challenge and support them, while engaging them in a
collaborative learning experience that will benefit others in
the authority.'
'There
are lots of schools we need to work quite intensively with and
we are devoting a great deal of attention to them, but that
left little capacity to spare for schools such as these that
are doing relatively well. Edison's programme allows us to
help them tackle a range of issues we'd like to improve.'
'Even
though ours is a successful school, we still want a challenge
in order to sustain our rate of improvement', said Edwina
Nummey, Deputy Headteacher at Keyworth Primary School.
'Working with Edison provides that challenge and an innovative
perspective, with the benefit of the continuity that comes
from week-by-week support. You can adapt the model that Edison
provides, so it's not inflexible, but it does give you a new
impetus and a completely fresh way of looking at things.'
'What
particularly appealed to us was Edison's emphasis, not just on
school improvement, but on values and ethos,’ Terry added.
‘Promoting inclusion is very important to us; we have a
mobile, diverse population, with lots of children joining
schools part of the way through, and we know that children
coming into school in years 5 and 6 do considerably less well
than those that come in at the beginning. A strengthened
culture of inclusion is key to raising standards and progress:
we can't change the fact of mobility, but we can put an ethos
in place that helps prevent it being a disadvantage to those
children.'
'Edison's method of building devolved leadership capacity at
all levels is an effective way of establishing systems and
processes that are robust enough to survive changes of
personnel. The scale of the help that Edison provides means
that dedicated resources are assigned to the schools
throughout the duration of the programme. The consistent
approach that arises from that gives us the opportunity to
link our Edison project with the other things we do as an
authority, and feed it into the bigger picture of work we do.' |
