Full Transcript for Step 6: Impactful Quality Assurance - A School Leadership Podcast with Lianne Lomas

hospitality industry. So they've been to a number of schools. And so the resources that are available within a really small school with a tiny budget can be really big and really challenging. Being part of a multi-academy trust, I think, is one of the greatest gifts for tiny schools like that to work together. Because you're right, Paul, we can work on shared problems. We've got a lot of rural schools, so a lot of schools that are kind of in little villages. and lot of coastal skills as well. Down the west coast of Cumbria, it's an area of significant deprivation, ⁓ right into Barrow and Furness, where we do have some really big employers, but actually a really, really disadvantaged and deprived community in some of our schools. So that's something that when I moved into this role, finding the capacity and the resources that you want on hand. and then factoring in the geographical spread between the schools. To do simple things like bringing leaders together, that can take a long time if you've got a leader that's in Lancaster and a leader that's in Carlisle. Where do meet? Where's the middle ground? So practical operational challenges, I think, can be quite complex for some of our schools. The fact that we only have two secondary schools as well, but they're really far apart is, again, just one of the challenges. When you're thinking about building capacity and building relational trust and building belonging as a new ⁓ mat, you know, we are four years old, but I still classify us as a fairly new mat. That's been a really big thing that we've had to think carefully about. So we've evolved into a model where we have clusters for our primary schools so they feel connected to other leaders and staff can feel connected as part of the trust. even though we acknowledge that we can't bring everybody together in the same way that some multi-academy trusts can do very, very easily and regularly. We utilise online ⁓ opportunities to meet very, very regularly and we really have thought about a very comprehensive communication policy with our school staff and with our leaders and our governors and our trustees so that everyone knows what's happening and what we're working on at this moment in time. Paul Ainsworth: so much in there that resonates. A lot of listeners will be thinking that executive headship models is a real answer to those small school issues, that kind of forming that federation and maybe three schools with 60 pupils in. And also one of our other guests talked about the difficulty of Catholic leadership and trying to find new head teachers. And that's when the executive headship model can work really well. Lianne Lomas: Absolutely. Paul Ainsworth: So just tell us a little bit more about the growth of the trust. I know you've been there for four years now, but how has the trust developed over time? I mean, I'm imagining, as with many Catholic multi-academy trusts, that the Bishop had a vision of kind of wanting multi-academy trusts, and it's

been around colleagues like yourself and your CEO who've had to try and turn that into practicalities. So tell us a little bit about that journey of growth over the last four years. Lianne Lomas: Yeah, so when the trust began, I think it began ⁓ probably as we reflect and look back now with some plans and principles and frameworks, but perhaps they weren't as established or as codified or as sort of researched and evidence informed as we are now. I think that's our first acknowledgement. We've grown not just in systems and in codifying our practice. but also numbers of schools. So the Bishop's vision obviously was over a three year plan, you know, those milestones and timeframes have changed slightly. But within the vision for this trust, it's to be a trust of 35 schools. So we're currently at 18. So whenever I'm working on anything within our school improvement offer or our professional development offer, I'm always thinking about the future and about making it easier for staff as they join us. making ⁓ that growth and ⁓ the capacity building kind of clear to everyone about how we're all going to work effectively together. But the trust started really with a CEO and a COO and they didn't have a school improvement team. That was the reality. There wasn't a school improvement team based within the trust. There was kind of some brokered hours and days of support from ⁓ I guess, know, Ofsted inspectors who'd come in and do some quality assurance, local authority officers that schools maintained relationships with. But obviously that led to a great deal of variability and there wasn't an offer that had fidelity to make sure that everyone was really looked after well, there was real disparity in the quality of service across the patch as I call it. So one of my first jobs three years ago was to come in as the primary lead and start looking at primary provision and how we could bring that together. And of course, as I've already talked about that geographical challenge of me on the road, literally trying to get around those primary schools and do an effective job was quite a challenge because again, was thinking about school improvement being one person's responsibility. So how I've grown and how we've grown as a trust is that. collective responsibility model and that everyone's accountable for school improvement and our quality improvement model. So yeah, we've been building and growing, but we've been really thinking about that growing at scale model. And that is such a different model to being a head teacher or even an exec head as I was across two schools. and having just a small group of people or a small number of classrooms and children and parents to look after. Paul Ainsworth: I'm sure lots of listeners will be thinking about what could this mean and that kind of growth and how do we kind of deal with that. So let's just kind of go back to a little bit more of the detail. So in the nine steps to executive headship, step six is that impactful quality assurance and that's trying to work out that what's happening in those schools when you're not there. That's the thing, it's Schrodinger's cat, is the cat still alive in the box? Lianne Lomas: Yeah. Paul Ainsworth: What's been your vision for that quality assurance across the trust and how do you complete that accurate quality assurance of schools which you are not in every day? I'm sure you kind of utilise capacity of people. So can you tell us a little bit about that process? Lianne Lomas: Yeah, so we've designed what we call a quality development review cycle. So I guess that's kind of really quite familiar for leaders. We come in and we are going to work together with leaders to audit provision, look at particular areas of the school improvement plan, look at areas that leaders are telling us that they would like support with. But beyond that, I think the where I've tried to focus most of my work is on the professional development model that we've got in place to support high quality teaching and learning in every classroom, which actually is what leads to telling us was always the problem. You know, my standards aren't really good enough yet in phonics or in maths, but I'm struggling with the teaching in that area. So we've kind of continued with that review cycle and auditing, but we temper that and we balance that with a huge amount. professional development too. And because of the difficulties we've got with our own internal capacity as a central team, I don't have millions of people available to facilitate conferences and even if I did, how would I get my staff to them in a timely manner to get the best value out of it? We have a number of online platforms that we use. So we use the Catholic Partnership in Birmingham, which focuses on our primary professional development offer. We use the Greater Teaching Toolkit across all of our schools. So we've looked at system based professional development. We obviously use National College too for statutory training, but we do that and we codify that practice across the trust. And what we're trying to do is to decrease variance and make sure that all of our schools can then work collectively together. And if we're all speaking the same language and we've all had the same training and we can all identify our strengths and vulnerabilities, then collectively we're empowered to work together on them. quality development model. So peer review is really important. We bring other leaders through our clusters together and that gives that collective responsibility. It builds belonging to our trust and I think that the feedback from that has worked really well. We've moved quite quickly to ⁓ one curriculum model for our primary schools. So we use CUSP. We implemented that this year and of course that we've moved at pace. we've needed to move at pace because of the vulnerability around the standards in some of our schools and outcomes. But the feedback that we get from our stakeholders is that feels

really supportive. Paul Ainsworth: There's a couple of things in there that I'm really intrigued by. So moving to that common curriculum, that CUSP model, how have you been checking the kind of quality of that delivery in the schools? You she said it's that real challenge, that geographical challenge. So how are you managing that process that you can look at how effective that delivery is across your 14, 16 primary schools? Lianne Lomas: So we do that through the cluster model and each cluster has a cluster lead. Obviously what we ensure that we do is that we work with the partners at Cusp. So we work with Alex Bedford and Lauren Meadows to ensure that all of our staff have been trained really well so they know what they're looking for when they go in. But it's about that collective responsibility for our leaders to be helping and looking at each other. My role couldn't possibly be to go into every single classroom and look at the Cusp curriculum. That's an impossibility. But I have to work with my leaders to... There's a huge amount of trust involved, isn't there? I'm trusting that their view of what they're seeing and feeding back is actually a realistic view of what's happening within classrooms. But we do that by building the capacity within the cluster model. So actually, we've got some real experts in Cusp now who've been out... We've been on a really rapid journey of implementation. But actually they've become skilled in being able to see how CUSP should work, how it looks, and what effective practice looks like in the classroom. And class teachers, we do a lot of stakeholder voice. So class teachers are telling us that they feel really reassured that they're seeing the impact of our codified curriculum, if you like, within children's work, within books, they're seeing things. So we do a lot of pupil book study. a lot of work scrutiny. So it's not always about going into our classrooms and doing a formal lesson observation and deciding that on Tuesday, know, Mrs Smith was brilliant in that English lesson and going away back to the main office here in Carlisle and saying teaching and learning is great in that school because I don't believe that model works for anyone. It's about leaders on site being able to be reassured that their classrooms are really, really, you know, great places of learning. that children are really enjoying. And actually that parents are delighted with what their children are talking about when they come home from school. And you can only really capture that with really clear stakeholder voice, ⁓ you know, with making sure we ask regularly, okay, we've got a challenge with standards in phonics, we've still got to get up to the dizzy heights of whatever the latest DFE kind of ⁓ measure is. But what are our children telling us about whether they're enjoying reading and phonics and are they participating well and is attendance good? So we look at all of those metrics and we gather all of that data and information on our

schools. But we really do place a great emphasis on professional voice of our staff and stakeholder voice too. Paul Ainsworth: Fantastic. And you talked about peer review. And I know that's something that lots of head teachers think about and how do you do it. And if you're an executive head of say two or three schools, you've got your group there for your peer review. So how did you build that model and what does that model look like in your clusters, Leanne? Lianne Lomas: I mean, I was initially very, very outward facing and looked at where I felt other trusts were doing that work really successfully, who were more established, had been around for longer, who were able to advise and deliver some of that kind of, this is how we do it and this worked for us and we made this mistake. So we tend to communicate that as a central team, ⁓ a school improvement team. I'm really lucky enough now in year four to have a primary lead. have an executive lead who goes out and supports some of the work within our schools and I have a secondary lead. I have an inclusion lead who's working in one of our secondaries at the moment but we've got an attendance lead and I've got an ECT lead so we're building that collective capacity within our trust which is really different to what I was doing three years ago when as the primary lead it was me doing all of that looking at attendance, looking at behaviour, looking at everything else. Paul Ainsworth: ⁓ So I'm really interested in that peer review model. if we take ourselves back to when you were primary lead, and you couldn't quality assure all those schools on your own, so I'd imagine your peer review model allowed you to get that information so that then you could work out what CPD was required. So can you take yourself back about how you developed that peer review model and actually what it looked Lianne Lomas: ⁓ Paul Ainsworth: like for those leaders? How did they implement it? What was the scale? What was the number of visits? Those type of things, those real practicalities. Lianne Lomas: great. So the peer review that we have established ⁓ ⁓ this is the first year that we have been kind of confident enough, I think, to feel that all of our leaders collectively ⁓ able to talk the same language because we've got the same curriculum in our schools. ⁓ all on the same calendar events. We've got a primary lead who coordinates that. ⁓ in terms of the operational communication about what we're doing on peer review. It feels really different, I guess, to perhaps thinking back to as an executive lead. When I was involved with peer review then you would perhaps get a phone call to say, can you come and have a look at a school with me as part of the school improvement plan to get some leaders on site and have a look around and do some critical friend conversation. This feels much more systematic because the systems we have in place are familiar to all the people involved in the peer review. So we all know that when we're going on site to a school and that's with the leaders, you know, kind of please come and help. It's my turn this half term or whatever to be involved in the quality review cycle or the quality review. So it's quite an intense time, but quite supportive. And it's done with leaders, not to leaders. And I think that's been something in the feedback that we've had from leaders that's been super important. We're very clear about what we're looking at. So, you know, we have the performers, we have the metrics, we have the previous plans, we know where the journey is for the school. It's not about comparing like for like always and the sense of, in my school, we've got we've got this. But we're looking at the school's individual journey. And because we we collect all of that kind of data analysis at central team level, that's all pre-populated for information for the peer review going in. And I think Because we then meet as a cluster with the same group and do the support stuff or the training stuff, it's a really familiar model, ⁓ but not without challenge, if that makes sense. There's a real balance of we meet as a cluster. We also meet as a really big group, the whole trust of leaders, because that's how I can be assured that the North cluster isn't a breakaway cluster from the Southeast or the West are not doing something really random. So we do still do the kind of regular meetings together on a timely basis with all of our heads, but we have to be assured that between the cluster model and then the peer models, the peer review that's going on at school level, we've got a real consistency of language, of pro forma, of system, of expectation. So I've spent probably two years, I think. writing and then rewriting what that looks like. So it's the whole playbook isn't it? It's the being so explicit about what we should do whilst balancing that your school is your individual school and whilst there's some really great research evidence informed practice that peer review can all acknowledge and know about working walls or what classrooms should look like this We might be on site in St Cuthbert's today and their mantra and their lean is into forest schooling. And so they're really big on that in that school. And we have to acknowledge that within the peer review. And that might not be the case somewhere else yet. So it's about that balance between making sure the systems are very supportive to the peer review process whilst not depersonalizing it for a school. Paul Ainsworth: You must have learned so much over the last four or five years. just could you kind of think about if you were back being an executive head, if you were kind of one of your cluster leads or you were back in two or three primary schools, what advice would you give to an executive head trying to do their quality assurance, trying to work out what is happening in that school that them visiting maybe two days a week? you know, the kind of the challenge that you used to have when I worked

with you. What advice would you give to that executive head of how do you quality assure across those that small group of schools of limited capacity? Lianne Lomas: Yeah. It's a really great question because when you think about what would I do kind of if I'm thinking back differently, so many things, so many things. But I guess the biggest thing would be I'd be leaning into kind of the support of others. So what I hear from our leaders now and what I wished I'd had then was that ability to lean into that established framework, those established principles around what does teaching and learning look like within this trust. So I think I'd prioritise getting that right first. What is it we actually want to see in every single classroom and who's going to support that? Because I might not be the right person to do that support right now because I might be dealing with a hundred other things and therefore I can't prioritise it. So I think making sure that I've created that culture of relational trust, first of all, built that capacity up, made sure I've got the right the right people in the right places. And then being able to say, we all know what it looks like now. Now we can start and kind of begin the rapid improvement. Because I think thinking back to being an executive leader over quite challenging schools, trying to improve them without that practice being in place was actually just treading water, not really getting anywhere. So it's about really kind of refocusing. where you want your work to be first. So I've learnt so much about that. That yeah, if you could go back in time and do it all again, I probably would do it incredibly differently. But you know, hindsight is a great thing, isn't it? And I think I've always been a leader who's been committed to continuing to learn, develop and grow. And I don't ever see that stopping. So I guess you could say, as a head teacher, what would you do differently if you were a teacher? And everybody's going to go back in time and think, I'd do something differently. But for me, it would be about making sure that the frameworks around the culture, around the relational trust, the two schools that I was with were very secure before beginning a really rapid improvement journey because you get progress in a much swifter fashion. if that had been in place. And I think as well, thinking about the amount of time I spent as an executive leader on HR issues, parental complaints, and thinking about my role now in the central team support to headteachers in our trust around HR issues, parental complaints, safeguarding, you we've got safeguarding supervision set up. I've made sure that every one of our headteachers has a coach to lean into. That wasn't in place. is an exec head and I think you know if I could make a top 10 list it would be have a really good coach, lean into those systems and stop trying to do it all on your own. You know acknowledge that it might not be your preferred model you know greater teaching toolkit might not be your preferred model but lean into it because it's going to sustain you in the long term of what is a really really challenging role as an exec leader and making sure you've got capacity in the right places. to enable you to shift from head teacher of two schools to system leader of two schools. So being able to see that something, you can trust something, you can trust early years to that early years leader because they're brilliant at what they do. And they're so much more knowledgeable than you as the exec head now about that, but you know that they're great. So that talent building, I think is super important. So as an executive leader, that was a real... challenge for me post-COVID and in my time as executive leader was in and just coming out of COVID and kind of having the capacity to drive forward skill improvement was really difficult. ⁓ So yeah there's loads and loads of tips I would have for an executive leader around the sort of maybe what not to do ⁓ but based on what I've learned is a director of skill improvement where I can almost step back from the role and look inwards at it and think, right, what I knew about that role was that that was really hard, so I'm going to put something in place for that. And where we've got two executive leadership models working within our trust at the moment, so I have an executive leader of three primary schools in the west of Cumbria. That model emerged because it was difficult to recruit to those Catholic schools. Paul Ainsworth: Mm-hmm. Lianne Lomas: really difficult. So one school had four national adverts and no applicants, the other had two. So thankfully we had ⁓ an executive leader who was really, really brilliant at building the capacity of a team and nurturing talent within her team. And ⁓ we have a really successful model running there now. But a lot of that I think is about me. enabling her to be effective within her role rather than thinking about her as the head teacher of three schools because she's not she's an executive leader and she has a team. Paul Ainsworth: That's really interesting. Could you give any more on how you've enabled her to become an executive head? Because that's gold dust, isn't it? You were an executive head and now you're taking that learning in a not an easy location, those three schools up in in Kynacumbria. The knowledge that you must be able to share must be gold dust to her. So what kind of have you done to try and enable her and help her make that transition? Lianne Lomas: Yeah. I think one of the things that I've been able to do there is to really appreciate the things that I mentioned earlier about what, if I could go back in time, what I would do first. So in terms of timescales around implementation plans within our trust, obviously we've got an overarching development plan. But what I was able to do for her, say, listen, I completely appreciate you're not going to be able to meet those milestones of implementing, for

example, CUSP right now in this term. you need to work on this. talked about one of the big priorities was about her establishing the assistant head teachers and subject leaders in school. And without her being able to do that, then it would have been a flop. Let's be honest. So that's a gift to me that I'm able to do that. So yes, I think you have to kind of look at it as a really different model to perhaps a single form entry school with one head teacher who has the capacity to do. But it's just thinking differently about it, isn't it? And it's been a listening guide without kind of, there are still things that obviously I'm responsible and accountable for and I have to go and talk to the board for. it's about, I seeing steps of progress at that school in terms of outcomes for children? Are those primary children getting ready for secondary school? Is reading, are they all reading by the time they leave school? Those are the things that I'm really bothered about. as well as obviously the things that I need to kind of measure for all the other metrics for every other agency in the world. But those are the really important things for me that at trust level, my leaders in September always get the speech from me about if every child in our trust could read, that's all. I well up and they all look at me, she's off again. But I find it just crucially so important. But for her, the phonics schemes needed redoing and it wasn't all about phonics, it was about the reading scheme, she needed the right people in the right places. So allowing and trusting her, I had relational trust with her and I was really quite blown away by how quickly the environments changed, so I was reassured. And obviously being that regular kind of coach, know, there's mentoring and coaching, I think, having been through an executive headship. I was able to say this is going to be a really difficult thing. We have a second executive leadership model and I think that person is probably more similar in personality to me. So it's about me being able to identify where I can see something's going to come unstuck in the future if they don't pull back on something into that system leadership spot rather than wanting to maintain. that direct control over something that you have as a head teacher. I think you've got such kind of vulnerability and closeness to your community as a head. And you do lose some of that as an exec leader. So you've got to be really comfortable with that. I don't think I was particularly comfortable with that at first as an exec head, probably because the people around me didn't really understand what executive leadership was. And I can remember feeling quite frustrated about that at the time and doing the whole, I'm not, I can't be the head of two schools because I can't be in the same place every day at the same time. So there was, I think again, one of the big learning points is about making sure as an executive leader, you're surrounded by whether that be governors or other leaders. If you're in a multi academy trust or a local authority who really understand the difference between headship and executive leadership. It's very, very different. So I'm, have a different coaching model with with a different executive head because she really does lean into that closeness and proximity to every child and every family and one of the things that we've been talking about in the last week is that can you really be the DSL in the school as an exec lead if you've got a very very high safeguarding tariff because actually what you really need is somebody in there who can do that who you have complete trust in is going to do a fabulous job for you. to allow you to be a system leader of both schools. Otherwise your capacity is going to be kind of, you know, really, really not great as this term continues. So it's about recognising where people's skill sets sit and what they lean into as their areas of comfort. And yeah, that's working really well for us at the moment. But the executive models have tended to come as they did for me. out of necessity where recruitment has been an issue and we know that if schools have had a difficult time to recruit ahead and nobody's really had eyes on the school then there are going to be vulnerabilities in there so it's about giving executive leaders time to really you know begin that school improvement journey by getting the culture right and the building of belonging across you know the staff in one school need to feel that they're suddenly connected to another school because actually the power is in the capacity between those two schools to solve any vulnerability or three schools or four schools or as I'm now working with you know much more than that but the power is in us being able to help each other really effectively. So there's a huge shift, huge mindset shift I think and a lot of self, you need to be really self aware of where's your comfort zone and what are you going to want to do when it gets really tough? Because if that's kind of to lean back into what you were doing as a head that felt that sustained you, you need to look outwards and find other leaders who can help you with that, I think. Paul Ainsworth: That's a brilliant answer, Leanne, that's superb. And regular listeners to the podcast will picked out, you were talking about vision there, what's the vision across that group of schools? You were talking about that shared purpose amongst your senior leadership team. You've talked really eloquently about unleashing that capacity, you whether that's using a DSL or building the relationships with your assistant heads. I'm sure our listeners will be really grateful for that advice. Lianne Lomas: Yeah. Yeah. Paul Ainsworth: So if we just come to the end of our conversation, what are the possible next steps for the Trust? What are you working on? So you put that course curriculum in. Give us a few pointers of what comes next at Matter Christie Trust. Lianne Lomas: ⁓

so much. So, I mean, obviously we keep our, we're keeping our eyes very firmly on the things that every school and every academy in the country needs to be looking at. You know, what's AI going to look like for us and what's happening with our send kids and where are we going to fund our school staff from in the future? So there's all of that. But I think for me, it's about really acknowledging about the The geographical area in which we sit as a trust, to me, has so much more opportunity for our children than we're currently exploiting. So for example, sort of outdoor education is something that some of our schools do really well. But it's still very kind of the Essex kids go on a residential and, you know, nursery have an outdoor area in some schools. And I've always been... really really passionate about forest schooling and the outdoors being a really huge ⁓ impactful piece of work for learning in the classroom. I think the two are so connected. So we're working on looking at first of all finding out where our expertise is, doing the stakeholder voice with our children and thinking about do they really know where they live? Do the kids who are at school in Barrow and Furness or Carlisle How often do they really go? Because I think again we make assumptions that our children do travel out and go paddle boarding on the lake or sailing but actually how many really do? So for me that's a personal bit of a project that I feel so passionately that this is such a great place to be a student in school but are we really exploiting the opportunities for every student and that sense of place and their sense of belonging. I think we've got to sort of lean into that a bit more. In terms of our central team, we're thinking about what do we need next as a trust, and we know that we're going to continue to grow. So there's lots of things around what models do we need for that? What are we going to do with inclusion at the trust? What does that look like? We've got really loads of exciting things around making sure that that stakeholder voice that we have been doing kind of in a what I would call quite historical fashion like questionnaire stuff, are we going to make that really sing by using a platform or using some kind of technological advancement that helps us to understand things really quickly and unpick our priorities collectively because again we're kind of doing the each school. feeds into us, but actually we need to move that to each cluster and then the mat. So we've got so many things that are going on, but I think it's taken us two years to kind of codify what we're doing now. I just love that building that professional development for our trust, building the development of from ECT right through to senior leadership and senior leadership within the trust as well. And the other thing that I think is a huge thing for the Catholic Trust and for us as well is to continue to be working with the diocese to make sure that all of our kind of strategic partners in the areas are really, really ⁓ impactful. So we work closely with the English Hub and the Maths Hub, but I think we've got to make that work much more impactful for every kind of child within our schools. So there's loads going on. It's very exciting. Paul Ainsworth: That's just fantastic, then. It has been just a real pleasure to talk to you today and hear all that learning that you've picked up along the way on executive leadership and all the really cogent advice you've given us on step six and nine steps to executive headship, that impactful quality assurance. So just thanks so much, Leanne. Thank you for your time. Lianne Lomas: It's my pleasure Paul, lovely to talk to you today.