Shareen Wilkinson, executive director (education) for LEO Academy Trust, shares her 4 approaches to make sure your trust’s teaching and learning strategy is successful.
Developing a trust teaching and learning strategy
When I started at LEO Academy Trust 3 years ago, my first role was to develop a trust-wide approach to teaching and learning. Our chief executive officer (CEO), Phillip Hedger, involved all leaders in the process to make the strategy as effective as possible.
Following this experience, here are my 4 approaches for ensuring a successful trust-wide teaching and learning strategy:
1. Set a central teaching and learning strategy that allows all schools to personalise the strategy for their settings.
Look to build on the work of Sir David Carter*, who says that the trust’s school improvement model is responsive to the needs of each individual school. Your central strategy should be adapted for each school, but the essential ingredients, or core teaching and learning strategies, should stay the same.
We wanted all schools to have evidence-informed approaches to teaching and learning, as well as to support pupils to develop skills such as communication and collaboration. This follows Michael Fullan’s ‘6 Cs of education’, which are:
- Creativity
- Communication
- Citizenship
- Critical thinking
- Character
- Collaboration
At LEO, we recognise that education is not just about academic achievement, so we have an extensive range of curriculum enrichment opportunities that support the development of skills such as communication and citizenship.
2. Keep it simple: a strategy should be no longer than 2 pages long.
Another key to the implementation of the strategy was to keep it simple, and not too long to read. Training was then provided in each area over a 2-year period.
Some training was delivered in-house and, for some, we elicited the support of leading experts. For example, leader and author Kate Jones led a session on retrieval practice. Training provided on metacognition and adaptive teaching was recorded, so all staff and new staff could watch the key strategies. Recording sessions enables sustainability and reduces cognitive load for those attending.
We also host network learning communities for subject leaders of the same subjects to come together. These are organised by our assistant director of education, Amy Carlile, who ensures that these subject-specific sessions also cover an aspect of the teaching and learning strategy. After feedback from staff, a key focus this year has been on further refining the use of formative and summative assessment in all subjects.
LEO Training and Professional Development Website
3. Ensure that your strategy is evidence-informed and based on experience.
I wanted to make sure that our trust’s teaching and learning strategy was at the ‘cutting edge’ of educational thinking, and aligned to current evidence-informed approaches. I read about teaching and learning quite extensively – and during the pandemic and my maternity leave, I watched and devoured several webinars and YouTube videos on the subject.
Using the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) Teaching and Learning Toolkit, the LEO teaching and learning strategy encompasses some of the most effective evidence-informed approaches, including:
- Feedback with clear next steps, which is acted upon by pupils and addresses any errors or misconceptions
- Retrieval practice (such as generating answers to questions about previous learning)
- Metacognition and self-regulation
- Adaptive teaching
- Collaborative learning approaches, including group activities and paired work (oracy)
- The use of technology to enhance learning and opportunities across the curriculum
- Modelling and questioning
- '5-a-day' to improve outcomes for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)
It should be noted that our trust doesn’t have a separate technology strategy, as our approach to technology for learning (or Pedtech at LEO) is seamlessly embedded into our teaching and learning strategy.
4. Make sure all schools, trustees and senior leaders are involved in the process.
When launching the revised LEO teaching and learning strategy, we involved everyone across the trust. Everyone was asked to review and comment on any draft documents. All teams were involved in this process, and we found this to be important for success.
About the author
Shareen Wilkinson (FCCT) is executive director of education and leads on curriculum, teaching and learning and assessment across the LEO academy schools, as well as overseeing the central education team. She has been in education for over 20 years and has fulfilled a wide range of senior leadership roles, including being an LA lead primary adviser and English adviser. She’s also an education consultant for several organisations.
Shareen works as a DfE system leader on the Trust and School Improvement Offer (TSIO) programme, and supports local schools. For the past decade, she has worked with the DfE in various advisory roles, including as a Key Stage (KS) 1 and KS2 reading and grammar quality assurance subject-expert proofreader, and as a Standards and Testing Agency (STA) deputy standardisation team leader for the KS2 national writing training.
Shareen is an established educational author, writer and editor and has written educational resources and books for leading educational publishers.
You can find Shareen on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ShareenAdvice.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own. Any mention of commercial providers, resources or products is on the author’s recommendation and should not be considered an endorsement by The Key.
This article featured in the March edition of Trust Matters, The Key's newsletter for trust leaders, if you'd like to read future articles sign up to receive the monthly editions here: https://key.sc/trustsignup