Classroom Life: Burnt Mill Academ Trust

When the head of Burnt Mill Academy agreed to sponsor a struggling primary school, she had no idea how transformative the resulting learning journey would be for all concerned, says Jacob Stow…

Separated by a mere six-week holiday at their shared developmental border, primary and secondary schools nevertheless can seem disparate environments. Pass from the latter into the former and it’s impossible to miss the change in scale and philosophy. Buildings and budgets are bigger, to match the children. Gone are the open-plan classrooms, and teaching styles are geared to meeting the needs and challenges posed by adolescents, whose attitudes to learning can seem a world away from the fresh-faced enthusiasm of their pre-teen peers.

What, then, does either one have to offer the other, beyond a short handover at transition time? Well, quite a bit, if the experience of secondary school Burnt Mill Academy and its four feeder primaries is anything to go by. Under the leadership of Burnt Mill’s headteacher, Helena Mills, all five schools have come together as part of a cross-key stage multi-academy trust, and while at its core the arrangement is one designed to bolster the primaries’ flagging fortunes, it’s a relationship that even in its infancy is proving universally beneficial

A new challenge

“We hadn’t thought about sponsoring a primary school, but one of our feeder schools had gone into special measures and the DfE was looking for a volunteer,” Helena tells me as we discuss the origins of what is an unusual partnership – Burnt Mill Academy was one of the first secondaries in Essex to take this path, and only a handful have followed suit to date. “The head and the chair of governors at the primary school in question said they would rather work with us than one of the larger chains, because we’d been involved with our primary schools anyway – we were doing a lot with transition, and as we’re a performing arts college, with dance, drama and music too.

“I came here from a school in East London and some other staff came on the journey with me. They’d been up for transforming this very white working-class secondary school that was under-performing when we arrived, but by then they were ready for another challenge,” she continues. “So we said, ‘Okay, then – let’s have a look at supporting them.’ We knew there would be benefits to both sets of teachers.”

Agreeing was, Helena admits, the easy part of a plan that grew to encompass sponsorship of four local primary schools: Cook’s Spinney, Freshwaters, Little Pardon and Roydon – at the time, ‘requires improvement’, ‘satisfactory’, ‘requires improvement’ and ‘inadequate’, respectively. “The idea was that we were going to transform education in our little bit of Harlow, but we certainly didn’t have a clear idea of the size of the job from the outset,” she says. “It was September 2012 when we decided we would spend the whole of the following academic year setting ourselves up as a multi-academy trust, and that sponsorship would start from September 2013. In the end, two schools joined the Trust in September and two later, in April this year.

“I had planned that I would run this school four days a week – because I’ve only been here four-and-a-half years and it needs a bit of stability – and then run the Trust and line manage the heads of the primaries one day a week,” she explains. “But that’s proved impossible, so we’ve changed the model now: we’ve appointed an executive head, who started this term. I will line manage him, and he will manage the four heads of school.”

Providing support

The administration of the fledgling Trust may still be a work in progress, but Helena and her team have been quick to identify and tackle a range of issues they believe have held the four primary schools back. In the space of a year, the support that has been offered has been comprehensive, stretching from the outsourcing of administrative tasks and the pooling of budgets, to the sharing of teaching expertise and resources. Heads of school and classroom teachers alike are benefiting, and the formation of the Trust has already yielded impressive academic results. “Of the two schools that we’ve sponsored since September, one, Freshwaters, had never been above floor target,” Helena reveals. “In the past their results would have been around 54 per cent – this year they got 83 per cent in English, writing and maths.”

This near-instant success reflects both the freeing up of the Freshwaters head, Marios Solomonides, to focus on teaching and the Trust’s greater spending power. There’s more to the improvement, though – a new focus, led by Burnt Mill on boosting teaching standards across the Trust. This is being achieved through the merging, in parts, of primary and secondary CPD and the sharing of expertise. Staff from Burnt Mill have also been deployed in Freshwaters’ classrooms, working directly with children. “People ask what the benefits of a secondary working with a primary are, and for me it’s about the level of subject knowledge,” Helena says. “Although we have an argument about how far we can go with subject specialists teaching in primary schools. At KS2, I think we need to move towards a model where lessons are taught by subject specialists. But the heads of the primaries are worried about the pastoral care.”

Marios confirms this. “If you’ve got someone who knows that subject they can really inspire children, who then go on to secondary school with skills they might not otherwise have had,” he explains. “A primary teacher teachers 11 subjects and cannot possibly be the best at every one of those. A big part of the job, however, is the pastoral care, and that is huge. Child development, especially from a young age, is crucial, and having that one constant person, in the early years particularly, is more important than subject specialists.”

“Teaching in primary schools has been a complete shock,” admits Helena. “And actually, I think my staff have got more out of it than their primary colleagues. The differentiation in primary schools is fantastic, and the level of planning you have as a primary teacher is phenomenal compared to what secondary teachers have to do. The kids in KS1 and 2 are all at different levels and our primary colleagues have such a detailed knowledge of this. It’s incredible.”

All the way

At the moment the Trust teaches children from 2-16, but the ideas is ultimately to be an all-through organisation, including KS5. “There’s such a lot of crossover,” Helena points out. “One of the advantages to us as a secondary is that this year’s Y7 have probably made the greatest progress out of any Y7 cohort that we’ve ever had, and it’s because we know exactly what they’ve been doing in our primary schools.”

The story of the Trust is one that’s all the more interesting for the fact that, until recently, those in charge at Burnt Mill Academy wouldn’t have countenanced committing to supporting other schools, on account of its own struggles. Under Helena it has enjoyed a dramatic turnaround: “I arrived in January 2010, when the school had just been placed into National Challenge. It had got 27 per cent five A*–C, including English and maths,” she explains, “so from 2010 until 2013 we were absolutely inward facing. Nobody was allowed to go anywhere; no one left the school.”

No one, that is, except the significant numbers – 50–75 per cent, Helena offers as a rough figure – of staff who were removed or encouraged to move on. In conjunction with a change in leadership structure that saw the introduction of a deputy head with sole responsibility for recruiting and developing potentially ‘outstanding’ teachers, this move ushered in a swift improvement in results. In November 2013 the school was judged ‘outstanding’ in every category, and has for the last two years enjoyed results in excess of 70 per cent A*–C. Plans are now in place for Burnt Mill to sponsor a fellow secondary.

“We were rubbish; we’re now pretty solid and good, so we feel we have the capacity to help others,” Helena sums it up. You know it makes sense…