School to School Support

We designate and broker Specialist Leaders of Education.

We will lead the co-ordination of school-to-school support, including brokerage of national leaders of education (NLE), specialist leaders of education (SLE) and national leaders of governance (NLG) when required. This usually involves working with a school or academy in challenging circumstances to bring about improvement.

Symphony is recruiting SLEs with the following specialisms:

• Leadership of continuing professional development (CPD)
• School business management and financial management
• Closing the gap (we have a trained Pupil Premium Reviewer)
• Early years
• English
• Maths
• Phonics
• Physical Education (PE)
• Science
• Special educational needs (SEN)
• Support for most able pupils
• Initial teacher training (ITT) and newly qualified teacher (NQT) development
• Assessment
• Behaviour and discipline

We need to identify priorities in Leicestershire and South Derbyshire and support under-performing schools and academies.

We ensure that the best leaders are working to improve the quality of teaching and leadership where it is most needed.

This includes deciding how to use the services of system leaders to provide support to other schools, such as:

• middle and senior leaders working as specialist leaders of education
• Head teachers working as local and national leaders of education
• chairs of governors working as national leaders of governance

We are looking to recruit and manage the placements of SLEs. This involves:

• identifying subject area priorities within our alliance as described above and any others as identified by Derbyshire
• using our panel of Executive Head teachers to assess applicants
• using DfE eligibility criteria to select SLEs
• ensuring that the recruitment process is fair
• notifying NCTL of outcomes and confirming them to applicants
• dealing with applicant appeals
• organising training for SLEs
• negotiating SLE work within our alliance
• ensuring that specialist leaders of education are providing high-quality support that is having a positive impact

We offer a bespoke service for any school (or clusters of schools) to support many aspects of school improvement. We are not consultants, just practitioners facing the same issues as you. We offer realistic, practical support, advice and most importantly, resources and ideas that work in classroom settings.

We do not offer a ’one size fits all model’ of support to any school, but aim to work closely with any client school to agree an  agenda of support based its own  prioritised aims for successful outcomes. We believe we can offer practical, dynamic and effective solutions, which are arrived at collaboratively, that have the greatest positive impact for a school community.

We are experienced in offering support in a variety of ways:

• Colleagues working together in either client or host school. We will put together a package of resources based on your needs
• Working with the staff at the client school to develop INSET programmes
• Host school staff leading your staff meetings
• Observing good practice at the host school
• Joint observations, with an agreed focus (not for monitoring) using a lesson study model
• School visits from our Education Development Group

Availability for deployment

We have NLEs providing consultancy support, with staff from the Teaching School, for 1–2 days a week as an external source of support. Available from now, for day and part day support (£500 per day) release.

Preference for authorities close to Leicestershire, e.g. Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire Leicester City.

Support from other staff (e.g. SLEs, Executive Heads, NLGs) will be negotiated

Our School to School Support contacts

Contact Tim Sutcliffe ceo@symphonylearningtrust.co.uk