Community and Partnership Team Review 2016 to 2017

Community And Partnership Team Review 2016 to 2017

Barnet Partnership

We were approached in mid Feb 16 by Barnet FC around establishing some joint provision, this opened in July 16 and is now fully functioning, though we did not establish any formal performance indicators. We have;

-Established the legal, technical, governance and financial framework (both with Barnet FC and the LFE)

-Established provision across 2 sites, with at least 3 different staff teams

-Recruited and integrated the students and staff, the data from our systems and other sources suggests a positive integration to date

-There is good practice in place to support their learning and their professional (football) learning – with examples of Joint Practice Development and collaborative working

-The students and parents of this new partnership seem satisfied, from a difficult start as they knew nothing about Canons and had little time to prepare

-The partners (Barnet FC and the LFE)are happy with the partnership and we are starting to see and develop opportunities for our students using the expertise they bring to the partnership

The picture shows cup success to go with the students’ contribution to school life! This project has been supported and developed by some of our team of Canons‘system leaders’ – Rebecca Howard, Athena Pitsillis, Ali Raza, and with skill and professionalism from Ben Ashby and his team from Barnet.

Partnership with League Football Education (LFE) and Barnet FC

LFE is funded by the Skills Funding Agency, the European Social Fund and by football. The education programme has been designed by by the LFE sector skills council SkillsActive in partnership with football authorities and government agencies.

The Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence programme offers each apprentice the chance to fulfil his dream of becoming a professional footballer, whilst at the same time providing him with the opportunity to develop academic skills in an environment suitable for his all-round personal development.Canons delivers the BTEC Sport provision for the Barnet apprentices.

Canons, Barnet and the LFE came together from August 16 to run this programme for a cohort of scholars at Barnet. Of the 4 2nd Year scholars, 2 made first team debuts during the year, including Ephron Mason – Clarke featured in the LFE profile above. 2 have been offered professional contracts, we are hopeful for the other 2. Recruitment is now complete for the new cohort who start pre-season training and work right through the summer holidays.

London Bees (Women’s Super League 2)

Canons has been a sponsor for the summer season. As well as featuring on the shirt, Canons students have had the opportunity to watch the matches for free with large numbers taking advantage of the offer. The links went much further with the Bees Manager, Dave Edmondson teaching PE at Canons on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons (though he has now left his role with the Bees), joining Sophie Harris, the Bees goalkeeper, who teaches PE here already.We hope to see a programme like that available for Barnet FC, developing in the future and to the first Canons student getting a professional contract for the Bees.

Canons Extended Assurance

In partnership with the University of Hertfordshire, Canons had been looking at Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as a methodology for review. AI was considered in detail by the Professionalism and Partnerships team last year. This (AI) is an approach that looks to capture ‘surpluses’ andaligns closely with much of our work around staff effectiveness and professional learning.

We wanted to add a measure to AI, which would let us review against best practice and we have borrowed heavily from our own ‘extended assurance’ visits carried out by our auditors. This new process has been rolled out, with Kam Wahab leading this on behalf of the Community and Partnership team. Already completed is a review of PHSRE (the professional learning session at Inset in April was a follow up to this), as well as the ‘discovery’ phase of a pastoral review. From mid-April this process is being used for the first time externally, at the Misbourne School, with a review of Computing/ICT with both Kam Wahab and Ali Raza involved.

Parent Partnership The Community and Partnership team has Mary Campbell and Nuzhat Raja in Grassroots’ roles,both looking at parent partnership, something which has been a passion for each of them and had formed Mary’s MA research focus. This has led to a range of initiatives, like the Year 7 Parent Partnership evening. At the evening in September 16, Mary welcomed along Dr Kathy Weston to see exactly how we do things.

Dr Weston having carried our research at the University of Herts around parental engagement, now runs her own company and came to Canons on 22nd February 2017 to deliver a professional learning session to all staff. This was both thought provoking and research rich and left us all thinking about how we develop from where we are now.

The next steps for the Community and Partnership team has been to develop a new event for Year 6 Parents prior to joining Canons in July, which we have called‘Mission Transition’. We are also looking to build on that impetus with a series of parent workshops and other development, such as ‘parent advocates’. We know the difference that this partnership can make for every student at Canons.

Our wish to build further on parental engagement and work from Canons Digital Advocate, Darren Silver, have led us to look at the development of a parent and student ‘app’. Our ability to find innovative partners and also to being research driven led us to a young team just starting out with their ‘app’.

This was launched as a trial in Year 8 from April 17. As part of this trial Dr Kathy Weston is providing some of her ‘top tips’. The indications from the trial are very positive and we will now look at the next steps as to how we look to roll the trial out further.

2020 Leaders

We successfully secured funding from NCTL and the London Mayor to run our London Leaders course last year and we have adapted this, to something we called‘2020 Leaders’ for this year. Launched at the Canons Park Teaching School Alliance Conference in November 16, this programme ran through to the start of May 2017. As well as sessions delivered by Canons leaders, delivery comes from some of the CPTSA strategic partners, with sessions from NACE (Heather Clements), NTEN (Bridget Clay) and CUREE (PhillippaCordingly). Our medium term aim, is not just to create better leaders, but to work with the University of Herts to provide possible accreditation for these modules. One of the cohort this year, has already secured a promotion, and was clear that the professional learning from 2020 Leaders had very much played a part in that, but more importantly in providing some tools to be used in the new role. We will now evaluate the content and look for the next course to run from November 17.

Student Leadership

This has been a strong theme for a number of teams for some time. The current Year 10 team has looked at how we might develop the prefect team; the Students and Achievement team have a ‘Digital Leaders’ project led by Aarti Shah; the Professionalism and People team have Lindsay Jacobs leading on ‘Students as Researchers’; the Curriculum and Learning Team are driving the enrichment curriculum with great developments for ‘Sports Leaders’ amongst others; the Community and Partnership team has added real paid roles for students with Extended School workers in both the Library and Sports Camp, whilst Gareth Jones has used student leaders to support our primary school partnersand almost single handed, has transformed sports days for Edgware Primary and now Stag Lane

The model below tries to map just some of those opportunities for students and where they might lead.

Alumni

We have a trial of EMentors provided by Future First underway, these are alumni who are available to provide mentoring. This is a carefully regulated service to ensure that safeguarding is in place. For this initial trial it is aimed at 6 Year 11 students, with 2 mentors, one who left in 2013, and one who left in 2011. We know from research evidence, just how strong ‘peer to peer’ mentoring can be. We are very keen that we don’t just measure our alumni by counting numbers signing up to the Future First web site, though that is the first phase (and please encourage Year 11 and Year 13 leavers to do so), but that they are able to engage and make a difference for our current students. Engaging with ex-students is nothing new at Canons and it is something that we have often been good at, but we are certainly in a place to build on those successes for the future.

Research Schools

Perhaps one of the most important developments for our whole partnership approach was our application to become a Research School (for the 2nd time), the application driven by Helene Galdin-Oshea (Research Advocate from Park High School) and Katie Magee (previously Research Advocate for Canons and also a Canons ‘system leader’) and supported by the University of Herts and Glebe Primary, was shortlisted and then subject to an interview. The feedback was not quite what we wanted;

‘We regarded your expertise in using evidence, and your experience in supporting other schools as of the highest quality. Unfortunately, given the limited number of places available for Research Schools, and our commitment to designate one in each region, we are not able to fund all of the schools who met the high standard required of Research Schools. However, we feel that we all have much to gain from your involvement in the Research Schools Network, and we hope that you will continue to play a crucial role in the system, helping to connect schools with research’

Who knew that research could be geographically located, however despite this response, nothing is likely to stop us looking to deliver much of the content of the bid, it just means we will look fund it in other ways and build on the strengths of our own community and partnerships.

Community Heartbeat Initiative

Adam Litchfield has produced his own review of the first year of CHI. CHI is a new direction for Canons and although we have looked, it is new to schools generally. It is perhaps interesting to note that schools now want to engage their communities as a vehicle to fight funding changes, in what is quite a one- directional engagement. Like any project of this nature, it takes a lot of contact and work to just get one idea from the planning stage to delivery, but this will build incrementally over time. The initial contact with Involved, who have created the Parentapp, came to CHI, which sums up quite well how contacts develop and deepen in a way it is often difficult to forsee.