Data or relationships?
Curriculum policy data from 45 schools; pastoral leaders steering group and resources; a huge milestone.
Is it better to go for breadth or depth? What do I mean by that?
When looking for answers to school improvement, is it better to scan the horizon and look for patterns in data across lots of contexts?
Or build personal relationships to understand as much nuance as possible in a smaller number of contexts?
Whichever side you stand on, this week, I have something for you.
The opportunity to learn patters in data (from curriculum policies) and build relationships (with other pastoral leaders).
We - schools - Are In Beta - always learning (when we have both data and networks at our fingertips).
This week:
🔬📚 Curriculum policies: what do they look like across 45 impressive schools?
📅🛡Pastoral leaders Steering Group (November) and meeting notes (October).
🎉 📈A huge milestone…15,000 members.
🔬📚 Curriculum policies: what do they look like across 45 impressive schools?
Writing policies is hard work.
What should they include?
What does good look like and where do I find examples?
How am I going to find the time to research them?
All questions, you've probably asked yourself before.
To get you answers to these questions, Fozia Iqbal - Assistant Head (and member of the We Are In Beta research team) - has been busy:
researching 45 successful schools
downloading their curriculum policies and
analysing how they’re written.
If you want to know what she learned…
Sent this by a friend?
📅🛡Pastoral leaders Steering Group (November).
When you get people together to share their successes, they can’t help but want to know how they were achieved.
Equally, when you give them to the space and safety to share what’s making life difficult, they immediately want to help.
This is exactly what happened last month.
Resources were shared 📝
Introductions were offered 📧
Follow up calls were made 📞
Join us for the monthly Pastoral Leaders Steering Group - designed to:
get you the inspiration and support you need
help build the brand new Pastoral Champions Community* inside We Are In Beta
*only open to attendees of this group and those who join the waiting list.
Keen?
📅 Thur 10/11 either 🕟 4.30pm or 🕠 5.45pm
Limited to 10 seats
📝🛡Pastoral meeting notes (October).
Resources shared last month included:
One page behaviour report for Ofsted
Recommended high impact training provider
Script for emotional coaching
Translation apps to support Ukrainian students
🎉 📈A huge milestone - We Are In Beta hits 15,000 members.
Two weeks ago I mentioned we were approaching a big mile stone. This week we hit it. 15,000 members!
Huge thanks to:
you for joining
all of our guests and contributors for sharing wisdom
the MATS we’ve partnered with since we launched
They believe in collaboration and investing in their staff. Learn more about them or check out their vacancy pages below:
On a personal note.
I have to admit something.
My opening comments represent a completely false dichotomy.
If you’ve been a part of the We Are In Beta community for a while, it won’t surprise to hear me say that.
If you believe learning from others is key to your success, you have to leverage both data and relationships.
Data gives you perspective and confidence the strategies you choose are worth pursuing.
Relationships help you understand their nuance and get feedback on how you’re getting on when putting them into practice.
The trouble is they are both hugely expensive to leverage properly.
Let’s take the curriculum policy research above, for example. It took 5 full days complete. If every* senior curriculum leader did that at their own desks (costing c. £1,150 each), that’s 17,500 days work (or £4million+).
What about the cost of building relationships? Setting up just a single meeting can involve half an hour’s work. If every* pastoral leader was to try and meet 4 others per month (costing c. £690/mo) that’s 10,500 work days (£2.4million+)
(* assumes 3,500 secondary schools in the country)
Why am I telling you this?
I’m proud to say that We Are In Beta is a truly data informed network. One that can save you huge amounts of time and money researching and building relationships.
The next time you’re thinking about doing some policy research or setting up a working group, ask yourself two questions:
how much time will this cost me?
could the We Are In Beta team help me?
Spoiler alert: the answers are most likely: 1. A lot. 2. Yes.
Got some research planned?
If you’ve done or you’re planning to do some desk based research - like the policy stuff above - get in touch.
We can do it for you. Or you can join our growing team of researchers, who we commission on a project basis.
Research we have in the pipeline:
EDI policies
Attendance policies
Behaviour policies
PPM spending plans
Assessment policies
Homework policies
What can we work on together?
Reply to this email. Happy to have a chat about it :)
Thanks for reading.
@NiallAlcock and the We Are In Beta team.
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