Best Practice

How to build strong culture & high trust schools

School improvement
Looking after and developing staff will help you to create resilient, thriving, expert schools where culture is strong, and trust is high. But what does this look like? Ariana Wells offers some practical insights from the Teacher Development Trust national conference
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Two hundred leaders of professional learning gathered recently at the Teacher Development Trust national conference to explore and reflect on the highs and lows of developing school staff in a demanding but ultimately rewarding sector. Here are a few of the issues we discussed.

 

Culture and trust

Studies demonstrate that school culture is essential for improvement and success. Kraft and Falken (2020) found that within continuous growth cultures focused on innovation, the quality of instruction rises as teachers feel empowered to experiment. These environments are characterised by trust, communication, autonomy, and data-driven collaboration.

Bryk and Schneider’s (2002) concept of “relational trust”, meanwhile, also emerges as crucial, encompassing personal regard, respect, competence, and integrity.

When staff trust leaders and each other, the safety for risk-taking expands. Teachers who feel psychologically safe to try new approaches are more likely to grow and refine their practice.

During the conference, Sarah Botchway, director of the London South Teaching School Hub, reflected that in her work she aims to see a focus on school culture embedded in a school's planning and day-to-day running.

She would expect to see it as a key part of the School Improvement Plan and that when done well “it is woven into the very fabric of the school and the building”.

With regards to how you might see that tangibly in a school, Ms Botchway summarised key expectations around what good culture looks like:

  • Wellbeing: Colleagues' wellbeing is being addressed; you should be able to talk to any teacher or leader and they are very clear about how their wellbeing is being met.
  • Support: Strategies are in place to support teachers.
  • Planning: Meetings, curriculum, or planning time are all planned very carefully – they’re not just something that happens.
  • Communication: Communication in the school is apparent and it goes both ways. There is no guessing so teachers and leaders feel secure. When teachers and leaders feel safe it helps with their wellbeing.

Ms Botchway also discussed some of the critical mistakes that we see. Top of the list are the one-off activities – like cake in the staffroom. She explained: “I’m not anti-cake! It’s a nice thing to do, but it doesn’t enhance the school culture.”

Another mistake is leaders being inflexible in their thinking. She urged leaders to remember that their colleagues in school also have families and responsibilities – they are responsible for the pupils in their classes but also have other responsibilities at home.

 

Mindset & safety

Two vitally important areas to consider about leadership and culture were set out by Ella Roberts, director of the Learning and Development Network at the Kemnal Academies Trust.

First, mindset and the important part that the mindset of the staff and the mindset of the school play. Ms Roberts said that colleagues should feel that “we are all in this together”. She emphasised that this involved sharing both our challenges and successes as it’s all too common to focus on the latter and ignore the former.

Second, psychological safety. As teachers and leaders accountability is necessary, but with professional development Ms Roberts urged leaders to notice some of the language being used.

Preferring the word “evaluation” instead of “monitoring”, she explained that “evaluation means giving staff time to learn, practise, take risks, and have professional conversations about how things are going”.

Staff won’t engage in these professional development activities fully if psychological safety isn’t in place. She posed three questions for leaders to consider:

  • Where is that psychological safety in your school? 
  • When can staff take risks, try things out, and give ideas without worrying about the response?
  • When can they have feedback without judgement? 

My Roberts left us with a note about the changing landscape of CPD: “CPD has changed dramatically, but the school day hasn’t. We need to start thinking about the school day more creatively instead of just using school meetings or INSET days for professional development.”

 

It starts with wellbeing

Whatever you want to do with your staff and children in school starts with wellbeing, according to Ben Levinson, the executive headteacher at Kensington Primary School and the chair of the Well Schools initiative. He asked two questions:

  1. If you want better outcomes, how will you support teachers to support the children?
  2. How are you going to support the children?

Mr Levinson emphasised: “If the children are physically and mentally not well, they are not going to learn; they are not going to be coming to school, and they are not going to be able to regulate their emotions and therefore behave in that school environment. If they are physically and mentally not well, how will they succeed?”

Investment in our teachers makes the most significant difference to our children. Mr Levinson believes that professional development is a crucial part of that difference, and “how teachers turn up” daily to their jobs makes the most significant difference.

He continued: “When I turn up as a leader, I’m good at what I do! Humble right?! But only when I’m feeling relaxed, confident, and rested.

“I'm not very good when I’m stressed, anxious or exhausted. I know I have been counterproductive when I’m in that mindset.”

Mr Levinson explained that if we want our teachers to show up for the children, build those relationships and understand those challenges, they can’t do any of that if they aren’t well themselves in the first place.

 

A lack of trust in the system

Excessive scrutiny from the system severely constrains teacher agency – a worry that Mr Levinson expressed. He argued that Ofsted's rhetoric relies on trusting educators' expertise but yet intense accountability practices communicate a deep distrust.

With autonomy, respect, and space to creatively solve problems stripped away, teachers lose intrinsic motivation. Mr Levinson said that restoring staff ownership is an imperative for us amid the on-going recruitment and retention crisis.

Although external accountability has merits, leaders must push back on restrictive structures to ensure teachers retain latitude over significant decisions.

Sinéad McBrearty, CEO of teacher wellbeing charity Education Support, often observes concerning communication dynamics when visiting schools. She told the conference that she frequently enters environments where adults address fellow adults as if they are children – rigid, hierarchical power structures permeate the culture, draining staff enthusiasm and joy, she warned.

She spoke about the system and not just the schools themselves: “We can talk about culture in institutions and schools, but we also need to talk about the culture of the overall system, and I think we have a lot of punitivity in the system. There's no space for failure in our system, and that is very unsafe.

“Clearly, we can’t just fail children gratuitously, but the consequences of small errors can be too high. We have to have the sort of kindness and humanity in our systems to allow us to do our job well, take some risks, and push the envelope a bit because we want better outcomes. Currently, I think our system places too high a premium on productivity and too low a level of attention on wellbeing. And I don't think that's sustainable in the long run.”

Haili Hughes, director of education at IRIS Connect and a principal lecturer at the University of Sunderland, was also struck by the highly structured hierarchies embedded in the education sector when she career-changed from journalism.

Ms Hughes is a huge advocate of instructional coaching but feels that a focus on pedagogy and improving instruction is vital. However, there needs to be space for more informal, less structured coaching in schools alongside it.

With the loss of communal school staffrooms in recent decades, she feels that teachers also lost a crucial space to build camaraderie and gain informal support from colleagues.

Most troubling to Ms Hughes is the lack of differentiated, needs-based, continuous development opportunities tailored to teachers' backgrounds, strengths, weaknesses and career stages.

While appreciating the introduction of more robust training offerings like the National Professional Qualification (NPQ) courses, she advocates for more personalised, responsive, professional learning structures attuned to each teacher’s growth areas. 

Her final point was about what leaders can do to support wellbeing: “I’ve worked in schools where we have had three parents’ evenings in a week, and then cake on a Friday, those superficial gifts leaders give you are not good enough. Leaders need to look at pinch-points in the year and consider how they can practically make things better for staff.”

She quoted Mary Myatt: “Humans first, professionals second.”

 

Final thoughts

Specific, practical strategies our experts shared included coordinating schedules and planning to support staff carefully; facilitating open, bi-directional communication; creating personalised development opportunities responsive to teachers’ needs and backgrounds; welcoming feedback; and encouraging reasonable risk-taking without severe consequences for failure.

The bottom line, according to the experts? School culture serves as an essential conduit, either enabling or hindering improvement.

Prioritising trust, above all, establishes the conditions in which teachers and leaders can work together towards that unwavering focus, ultimately helping pupils thrive.

  • Ariana Wells has more than 15 years’ experience in education and is now a curriculum designer at the Teacher Development Trust. She began her career as a secondary English teacher before taking on leadership positions, including head of English and lead practitioner for teaching and learning. The TDT is a national charity for schools and colleges focused on creating workplaces where teachers thrive and become expert so that pupils succeed. Find out more at https://tdtrust.org/. Find previous TDT articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/teacher-development-trust

 

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