Why does the SW100 exist?
Why now, and why here?
What’s the problem?
The South West has the worst educational outcomes for children experiencing disadvantage in the country.
Not many people know that. It’s a massive issue with a relatively low profile.
Children experiencing disadvantage are starting primary school around five months behind their peers. And the gap widens while they’re in our schools. When they leave secondary school twelve years later, the most vulnerable children in our communities are finishing school almost two years behind their friends [🔗].
Why?
In their seminal report published last year, Dr Anne-Marie Sim and Professor Lee Elliot Major offered a major contribution towards improving our shared knowledge and understanding about this issue.
Let’s pick out two statistics from that report.
In 2019, only 40% of disadvantaged pupils attained a standard pass in GCSE English—compared with almost 60% in Inner London [🔗].
Why?
The year before that, only 17% of disadvantaged students went on to university—the lowest rate of all English regions (vs. 45% in London) [🔗].
Why?
The answer’s not straightforward but we know one thing for sure: place matters.
Place produces the structures through which systemic issues are refracted.
Plus, less abstractly, places are real things! It’s where we live, it’s where stuff happens, it’s where stuff is done and feelings are felt.
It’s where the action happens.
Context affects how systemic issues manifest themselves in our own communities; producing location-specific challenges that demand context-sensitive solutions.
Context really matters. It’s important we say that aloud.
What works over there might work here—but it makes sense to be sensitive to our surroundings and work with the many assets available to us here. Because we’ve got a lot going for us too—lest we forget…
Local Plymouth professors, Tanya Ovenden-Hope and Rowena Passy, have been exploring the endemic nature of ‘educational isolation’—and their 2019 report is well worth a read in full.
Within which, they identify three main challenges facing rural and coastal schools:
Geographic remoteness,
Socioeconomic disadvantage, and
Cultural isolation.
So what?
We know that the three challenges above do not result in educational isolation when schools have access to the necessary resources for school improvement.
While there are many urban inner-city schools with high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage, the research shows that they generally have greater access to resources that support school improvement.
That’s the problem with some of the known solutions to these challenges.
For instance, we all know how important it is to recruit, develop and retain great teachers. It’s harder to recruit people where the cost of housing and commuting is skyrocketing right now. As Professor Ovenden-Hope posed during last week’s Summit,
‘How many high-potential teachers does this factor alone preclude from teaching in our schools?’.
It’s harder to retain high-potential people where budgets are fixed and there are fewer leadership opportunities within a given geographical area.
Moreover, while many schools in the South West belong to strong trusts, collaboration is simply more cumbersome than it is in other parts of the country—long travel times inhibit us from getting together in person for school improvement, peer reviews, and networking; the cost of sending staff to major urban cities for CPD can be prohibitive.
Now what?
Eight leading school trusts in Devon and Cornwall, plus the Reach Foundation and LSSW, reckon that the desire to grasp the nettle is there; what’s been missing is a structure to hold people together; to ensure those with the determination and agency to do something about it can do so.
The SW100 school leadership programme is our contribution to that end.
Our goal is to identify and nurture 100 future school leaders—and to create the conditions for them to initiate systems-level change through local action.
And we hope that by uniting the best bits of a first-class school leadership development programme and a collective impact project—we can achieve just that.
In a nutshell: the SW100 is an internationally-informed, regionally-led, and community-focused school leadership development programme; supporting high-impact school leaders into—and during—their first headships in Devon and Cornwall.
Ok, got it—but what does it look like in practice?
You can find out more information about that here.