Undoubtedly the pandemic has brought change and challenge in unprecedented levels. It has highlighted vulnerabilities in the schools system and encouraged educators and leaders to question and reflect on what is required to sustain and ultimately enhance education of the future.
The ambition and drive to advocate and deliver change is embodied in Rebecca Boomer-Clark, with an honesty and commitment to learning, and a recognition that difficulty can’t be dismissed. Her focus on community has far reaching potential not just for the Trust that she leads, but for the wider educational and local communities across England. We were delighted that she was able to share her thoughts, hopes and vision so openly.
You took on the role as Chief Executive at Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) in the midst of the pandemic in June 2021. Can you share some of your experiences and learnings realised during this time?
My start at Academies Enterprise Trust coincided with a significant period of transition for the education sector more broadly. Schools were facing their first full academic year with no lockdown and more generally, people were returning to the office for the first time in two years, and this combination provided a helpful pivot point as a new leader. To an extent, the transition of CEO was such a large change for the organisation that it diluted the impact of some of the wider post pandemic which all school trusts were facing.
When your organisation operates across 58 physical sites, addressing the cultural and physical elements of being more remote for an extended period was always going to be an interesting challenge. I was more focused on the longer-term impact of the pandemic for schools and the wider education system. Particularly in terms of the attainment deficit, the social and interpersonal legacy and the permanent changes in the way that educational organisations operate.
Teachers and leaders in education were simply incredible during the whole pandemic. For a profession which had looked fairly similar for many, many years to pivot so dramatically to extensive remote learning overnight was nothing short of remarkable. We need to keep on reminding teachers and leaders exactly how much they achieved and the huge difference they made to the lives of children and families.
There was an illusion that we were “back to normal” last year – the reality was not so visible for the public at large. We had higher rates of Covid in our schools than at any other time during the pandemic. In different ways last year often felt more challenging than being in a period of lockdown where schools had some on-site provision but the majority of learning was remote.
In truth, the full impact of COVID has yet to reveal itself and is certainly being accentuated by the ongoing cost-of-living challenges and inflationary increases. I have confidence that the resilience shown by our young people throughout the pandemic will give them hope and strength to draw upon in the coming months. A whole generation of young people were prematurely exposed to our shared vulnerability to external events which are outside our control and beyond protection; that is quite an incredible lesson to learn so early on in their lives.
“Teachers and leaders in education were simply incredible during the whole pandemic.”
AET incorporates 57 schools. How do you prioritise successfully where support, development and intervention are required?
It’s important to recognise that every school has bright spots and something they can contribute to a wider network of schools regardless of their current OFSTED rating!
We use a quadrant model to segment our schools according to their level of performance and stability and then differentiate support in line with their identified needs.
Some of that support is provided by specialist central teams, but the majority comes from within our schools. This does mean that our schools must be sufficiently well-aligned to be able to work together effectively, but equally don’t want to stifle creativity and innovation. We create lots of opportunities for colleagues to come together organically to share their expertise. This ‘Architecture for Collaboration’ was a big year one priority for us.
Technology has made collaboration easier, like many school networks, we have invested significantly in this space. It is now much more straightforward for teachers and leaders who live at opposite ends of the country to connect and work together. Equally we don’t want to feel like a distant or impersonal organisation which only interacts virtually, so we do like to keep personal relationships and ties as strong as they can be. Our move to a regional structure was an important part of building a sense of proximate teams. All of our school principals are simultaneously the leader of their schools and part of a regional leadership team which provides real opportunity, strength and support – both professionally and personally.
We’ve set ourselves some really ambitious goals over the next six years; to achieve them we all recognise that success at scale isn’t a destination: it is a cultural approach to continuous improvement.
How do you envisage the role of AET in the expanding Academy Trust model?
It’s certainly an interesting period. There are only a handful of national trusts and we have one of the most extensive footprints covering all nine Department for Education regions and 26 local authorities. This scale and distribution allows us to see the sector and the system from a rare and important perspective. That same scale and breadth underpins our most significant challenge –demonstrating that it is possible to secure an excellent education for every child regardless of where they may live and what their local context brings.
Within a fully academised system the importance of coherence is going to be vital. We must avoid fragmentation and maintain a clear view of how the system should be configured, operate and act in the best interests of all young people.
The most significant contribution AET can make to the system is to deliver excellent outcomes for the 33,000 children in our schools. We frame that challenge as AET 490. Simply asking ourselves what it would take to break 90% four key headline metrics: chronological reading age; phonics; expected standard in Key Stage 2 SATs; and English and maths basics at GCSE. Headline academic measures are not the only output of a great school, but they are important. When I first asked our principals whether they thought AET 490 was achievable, their collective response could probably be summarised as “we’re not sure, but we’re up for the challenge”!
“We want to invite fresh debate about what works and what doesn’t. We want to narrate the process of improvement as we go.”
How important are networks and collaboration in the future development of this model?
They are absolutely fundamental if we are to identify and harness the expertise and experience that resides across our organisation. The challenge of AET 490 has had a galvanising effect on our leaders and teachers but we know that to achieve something that has never been done before, we cannot work in isolation.
Launching our network groups was a big priority for year one, and in time I want every teacher and leader across our schools to be actively involved so that they can truly see the contribution they are making day to day to delivering AET 490. In part, our networks exist to release talent across our schools, but they also exist to develop talent. I want us to be known for our exacting expectations and our commitment to helping and enabling our teachers and leaders do their best work.
Our sector can often feel polarised on key issues and debate can become quite tribal. Both internally, and externally, we want to be a refreshing antidote to that through our system generosity. To support this, we have launched an initiative called Project H. Project H is both a platform, and a commitment to going fully open source. We want to invite fresh debate about what works and what doesn’t. We want to narrate the process of improvement as we go. If you look back through the history of the academies movement there are repetitive examples of individual school failure where the system did not share its lessons learned effectively – we want to do something practical to counter that. And arguably, there is no better time to be embarking upon this: the sector is facing its toughest few years ever, and systematising collaboration will be an essential part of helping everyone not just ‘get through’ this period, but to do some of our best work.
Prior to joining Ark Schools you were a Regional Schools Commissioner (RSC). How has that experience influenced your approach since then?
Being an RSC was an incredible opportunity to work with, literally hundreds of schools and leaders. It gave me an understanding of the whole sector and the wider system, as well as an optimistic sense of the possibility for change.
The nature of the job at the time – it has changed a lot – meant that I was exposed to incidents of failure more often than excellence but that helped to develop my sense of perspective. To observe repeatable patterns of failure, and know that not only were they mostly avoidable, but the solutions were also typically close by has strengthened my personal commitment to collaboration, transparency and the power of networks.
In reality, many of the earliest trusts quickly became quite insular, through encouraging initiatives like the CEO network in the South West we were able to reinforce that sense of collective responsibility for a region.
You were the youngest Head of a secondary school in England and have been described as an educationalist at heart. How well is the sector evolving to attract, retain and reward the talent and dedication it needs?
Fundamentally we have to be realistic about what it is actually like to be a teacher with a full teaching load, particularly in schools facing complex contextual or performance challenges. All of the friends I started teaching with would recognise that the job of a teacher is now much bigger and more complex than it was twenty odd years ago.
We should be our sector’s loudest ambassadors, but too frequently we are not. There is a real need to shift the narrative about teachers and teaching, but fundamentally we have to make teaching feel like a doable job. A vocation that you can balance alongside having a life and a family away from work and time to do the things that make each of us more interesting. No-one enters the classroom to get rich, but you should be guaranteed to a fulfilling, fun and challenging job which is fairly remunerated.
One of the clear benefits of working in a large network of schools should be many more opportunities for personal development and advancement. We need to make it easier for dynamic, ambitious young people coming in to our profession to see the possibilities that it can open up for them and there needs to be a clear route through that rewards success. Equally we need to respect and celebrate expertise and offer alternative career paths and recognition.
The recent changes to personal development through the Early Career Framework and the revised NPQs are hugely important. The quality of training that someone joining teaching now will receive is unrecognisable from where it was even just a few years ago. Particularly in the context of pressurised budgets, we need to be realistic about the cost of really top-drawer professional development and invest in our talent to the same extent as other professions.
There has been an increasing level of focus on the gender pay gap which exists in Education. What moves are being made to actively address this and what more, in your view, needs to be done?
The gender pay gap at AET has been decreasing in real terms over the last couple of years, although that’s a real positive, I am cautious about strongly attributing that improvement to direct action. It is quite difficult to know what has had the biggest impact and where.
Fundamentally there are three things that we need to focus on: firstly, we need to resist being drawn into the noise around the highest paid individuals. It is important to shine a light on public sector salaries but changing the salaries of the highest paid people in the sector is not going to reduce the gender pay gap.
Secondly, or alternatively, we need to focus on the salaries of the lowest paid people in our sector and particularly support staff, which means we must look at the structure of our profession. Put simply, there are more women in lower paid jobs than men and it is that balance which needs to shift.
Finally, we really need to think much more creatively about how we offer flexibility in this sector. In a competitive recruitment context, we need to open up career progression if we are serious about attracting and retaining talent.
Is the Education sector doing enough to encourage diversity, in its many forms, amongst its current and future leaders?
Everyone in leadership recognises the challenge to ensure that our workforce reflects the communities that our schools serve. Interestingly, there is no other profession that has direct access to its potential future workforce, to a certain extent we get a head start!
I am optimistic that we will start to see a significant shift, our young people show higher degrees of inclusion and tolerance than any generation that has gone before and involving them directly in encouraging and promoting diversity has huge potential to teach all of us.
“There is no other profession that has direct access to its potential future workforce, to a certain extent we get a head start!”
You are also a Trustee of the Ambition Institute – can you share more about how you work with educators to help disadvantaged communities?
From the early days of Ambition’s predecessor organisations – Future Leaders, Teaching Leaders and the Institute for Teaching, we were focused on developing high-quality training and development for teachers and leaders and accelerating progression. The focus was particularly on those schools with a high proportion of disadvantaged young people. Our reach has expanded with the Early Career Framework and new NPQs – last year we trained 25,000 educators which is incredible. This scale gives us a real opportunity to change the narrative and recognise that if we can provide mission-driven high-quality training and development we will galvanise a much bigger pool of educators in the important work of closing the achievement gap.
That work isn’t exclusive to schools where there is a high density of disadvantaged young people. We need to instil an absolute sense of driving ambition for every child. Ambition really has been a real trailblazer for high-quality professional development and has set the bar for the sector on what high quality training looks like.
How can government (national and local) better enhance the educational commitment to support more disadvantaged pupils to give them more opportunity?
So much comes down to the right level of resourcing. The Pupil Premium was revolutionary when it was first introduced and whilst it has become part of the everyday fabric of both funding and expectation, it remains a very important mechanism for the children that need it most.
We also need to keep working hard to encourage localism and a more collaborative approach with specialist agencies and services. Providing timely access to the right support is absolutely essential.
That sense of partnership extends to parents and families. I’ve never met a parent who is not ambitious for their child. Some may not always find it as easy to navigate school, but you can come a really long way by encouraging parental engagement in all its forms. To an extent schools and homes came closer together through the pandemic, we must build on those bonds and connections.
Find out more about Academies Enterprise Trust
