School improvement support

School Improvement Journey

School Improvement Journey, “Fixing to Facilitation”

All schools within Discovery serve their local community and focus on raising outcomes for all children, particularly those who are disadvantaged. Our aim is for schools and colleagues to work closely together to raise outcomes for all children and adults.

All our work is routed in academic research. This is used to guide our leaders to work on tried and tested initiatives through collaboration. We are an outward-facing Trust, we seek to learn from the absolute best practices within our education system.

School improvement is about making incremental gains to ensure all children achieve their potential and receive limitless learning opportunities. Colleagues are empowered to become self-led learners who seek to improve their practice to rise outcomes for children.

Developing leadership expertise and ensuring our leaders have the capacity to lead school improvement is vital to ensure they make an impact on improving children’s lives. Improvements must be sustainable and distributed so all expertise is utilised for a common goal.

Schools are provided with frameworks to develop excellence within their schools. As a Trust, we use intelligent accountability structures to inform key areas of support and action. We have a culture where underperformance is reviewed supported and challenged whilst celebrating successes.

The use of data and trends informs decision-making processes, and the use of central data sets provides our leaders with the tools they need to prioritise and focus their improvements. The use of benchmarking within and beyond the Trust is commonplace and used a tool to pose the question of how well we are doing and what could we do better.

Discovery Schools Trust has shared responsibility for outcomes for all children regardless of location or phase. School improvement is facilitated through collaboration between leaders of schools and sharing knowledge for the benefit of all children.