Case study: Oli Knight

"The knowledge that the school valued and acted on staff feedback in a timely manner created a more collegiate culture"

Oli Knight is Principal at Ark Acton Academy, a West London secondary school. Oli has been using Edxite to gain insight into his teachers' experiences and reactions across the last year. Here, he describes how the ability to gain rapid, trustworthy insight into teachers' perspectives helped him navigate the challenges of the year successfully.

Ark Acton Academy’s predecessor school was placed in Special Measures and academised in July 2017. The school serves an area of significant disadvantage and the majority of students arrive well behind their peers in reading, writing and maths. The turbulence of a special measures judgement and the transition to a multi-academy trust created a wave of uncertainty and the school was subject to strike action during the summer term of 2017.

This year has been complex as we navigate the processes of re-opening safely for our students and staff, continue the work required to rapidly improve outcomes and behaviour and carry out a restructure to secure the long-term financial security of the organisation. Coupled to this we have been learning how to switch between remote, hybrid and live teaching as students and staff self-isolate, move our entire curriculum online and issue laptops to 1000 students alongside moving to year group corridors and teachers moving to different classrooms.

The survey was a key element of the weekly data I used to keep a check on the climate in the academy and any emerging issues that needed to be addressed. The speed of the feedback and its honest nature, given the survey in anonymous, meant we could act quickly. Through the formulation of the questions and the recurrence of these at set points in the year we could identify trends and assess the impact of our work. This meant that we could solve small problems such as HDMI cables that created stress for staff moving between classrooms and big problems such as SLT communication. The knowledge that the school valued and acted on staff feedback in a timely manner created a more collegiate culture during a period of rapid change and helped to break down some entrenched and historic issues around management relationships.

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