And the winners are...; Where the best curriculum work is happening; Spotting the spinach.
Hello everyone,
Yesterday was the Tes Awards. Congratulations to all the nominees and award winners. Special mention to the We Are In Beta community members who picked up gongs. Great work all round! 🎉
Learn more about the winners below.
We - schools - Are In Beta - always learning (from great folk like these👇)
👋 Welcome to all you new subscribers and everyone who’s joined us from last week’s masterclass with the team at Northampton Academy on character education.
Catch up on previous editions, podcasts and webinars via the archive below.
This week:
🎥 Panel: How can schools best collaborate on curriculum?
📝 Article: Spotting the spinach.
🏆 Community news: Meet the Tes Awards winners.
🎥 How can schools best collaborate on curriculum?
Want to meet and learn from the sharpest curriculum leaders, from the highest performing, most rapidly improving, knowledge rich schools? Then read on.
On Tuesday we’re launching a brand new community within We Are In Beta for Curriculum Thinkers.
Join us online as a panel of experts discuss how schools can best collaborate on curriculum.
Why are we having this discussion?
What we teach students is a powerful tool for social justice. Your curriculum leads every student to realise their potential, regardless of their background. It should be informed by expert curriculum thinking. Collaborating with colleagues and other schools is the key to its success. Of course, we know this is hard, so we've brought together those who’ve have managed it.
They'll show you:
What the critical conditions needed are for the successful curriculum collaboration both within and across schools.
What's getting in the way of curriculum collaboration and what you can do to work around these.
Where really great curriculum collaboration is happening right now and what you can learn from it.
How to transition really good curriculum talk into practice that has impact.
How you'll be able to know you are doing a good job of curriculum collaboration.
🎁 Attendees will receive an exclusive invitation to a brand new community within We Are In Beta for Curriculum Thinkers: a dedicated online space for you and your curriculum team to connect with others in the same roles and engage with over 25 masterclasses from incredible schools - with all recordings and resources on demand.
Join us to learn from the panel and access this exclusive offer.
📅 Tuesday 17th November
🕖 7pm
📝 Spotting the Spinach
“‘What will you do to make sure FGCS continues achieving the excellent outcomes it has been achieving?’
“It is a question I was often asked as a new headteacher and though there is sometimes the assumption that our results were achieved in a vacuum, it is still an important question to explore. First of all, consider the following excerpt from Jim Collins’ ‘Good to Great’:
“Picture an egg just sitting there. No one pays it much attention until, one day, the egg cracks open and out jumps a chicken! All the major magazines and newspapers jump on the event, writing feature stories—“The Transformation of Egg to Chicken!” “The Remarkable Revolution of the Egg!” “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!”—as if the egg had undergone some overnight metamorphosis, radically altering itself into a chicken. But what does it look like from the chicken’s point of view? It’s a completely different story. While the world ignored this dormant-looking egg, the chicken was evolving, growing, developing, incubating. From the chicken’s point of view, cracking the egg is simply one more step in a long chain of steps leading up to that moment—a big step, to be sure, but hardly the radical, single-step transformation it looks like to those watching from outside the egg.”
Thahmina Begum shares how she plans for Forest Gate Community School to keep achieving. She also explains why this has anything to do with spinach!
🏆 Learn more about the Tes Awards winners.
Evelyn Forde won Headteacher of the year in recognition of her leadership at Copthall School.
🎧 Listen to her story, which played a pivotal role in defining We Are In Beta’s values.
Thahmina Begum (Headteacher), Yamina Bibi (Assistant Headteacher) and the English Team at Forest Gate Community School won English team of the year.
🎥 Learn how Thahmina and team implement explicit direct instruction.
Jenny Clegg (Headteacher) at Heartlands E-Act Academy won secondary school of the year and overall school of the year.
📈 Heartlands featured at #4 in both our analysis of the top 75 most improved schools for progress and top 144 schools for progress 8 for disadvantaged schools.
🎉 Congratulations again to all nominees and award winners.
Want to meet and learn from more incredible leaders like these?
Thanks for reading and playing your part in making education the place we all know it can be.
Speak soon.
@NiallAlcock
If you were forwarded this email and learning about great schools doing great things is your bag…
🆕 New here? Catch up with previous editions, podcasts and webinars via the archive
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