Full Transcript for Step 8: Delivering Continual Improvement - A School Leadership Podcast with Sam Gibbs

to make that change? And how do we know it's the right change? And then I think one thing I think about a lot in my role is how then do we, how do we build on the time? Because that's all always there. the crux isn't it? We're lacking in that. ⁓ And often it's just about, we've got to rearrange the time we've got and make sure that we're using it in the most purposeful way. ⁓ And then critically, how do we create the trust ⁓ and a culture of real psychological safety that actually enables people to get better? ⁓ So for me, continuous improvement ⁓ is about anchoring everything in professional learning in the right culture, and then supporting people to build the habits in the long-term that enable them to keep improving and developing. ⁓ over time. Paul Ainsworth: Yeah, those habits are so important, aren't they? You know, we're kind of so used to that. And so that's something that I'm looking at in one of the other chapters. How do you build, habits around teaching and learning or behaviour management? So you've given us a little bit of a feeling that just at the start there about the role that you've got. So I'm really interested in the different roles that people hold. So tell us a little bit more about what director of education means and what are the key skills of, working across a group of schools? after being a very successful colleague in an individual school. Sam Gibbs: So the one thing I've realised through my work with the Trust Wide CPD Leaders Forum is that people's job titles and what they actually do as part of their role differs wildly. ⁓ So... And I think its really dependent on ⁓ if you work in a trust or across a group of schools ⁓ on where that organization is and its growth. So even my role, mean, my fifth year of this role has changed significantly over that time. ⁓ When I first started, I was much more involved and I'd say quite an operational level with one of our schools that was in ⁓ special measures. And I was really involved ⁓ for the first couple of years ⁓ in the journey of that school. And then when that school then came out of measures, is now in a much, much better place. Another school came into the Trust and I was working more there. But then in the last couple of years, I'd it's become much more strategic and my role is much less operational and firefighting and much more about building teams within and across the schools as well. In many trusts, the sort of title of Director of Education can be more around line managing head teachers, more of like an executive head teacher function which is not what I do at all. Essentially my role comprises two things, it's really about the quality of the curriculum. and making sure that we have a shared understanding across our schools about what effective curricula looks like, how we implement it well and then sort of alongside that professional development for teachers. Obviously those two things are intrinsically linked. I do a lot of work with middle leaders around curriculum design and delivery but also a lot of work with teachers. One of my big pieces of work over the last year has been the development and implementation of our professional growth model and increasingly we're starting to think about that as a lever to improve the curriculum. So I think we're at a key point in the growth of our trust as well. So we're about to welcome a primary school, the first of probably three in the new year. And again, that will then lead to a reconsideration of my role and what that looks like. and be thinking about how to work with primary teams, but to co-create with them as well, what some of those key things like the professional growth cycle will now need to look like as we transition into a cross-phase trust. I think that's why I love the job so much, because it evolves, it changes, it's never boring, but it needs to reflect the needs of the organisation and will continue to do so, I think. Paul Ainsworth: And I think that's one of the really interesting things, isn't it, about the scale of your organisation has enabled your organisation to put you in this very specific role. The other executive head teachers and system leaders would have it as just one of the many strands that you've got. So talk us through a little bit about that scale that is in the Greater Manchester Education Trust. You know, I work with some trusts where six schools might be 500 pupils. I know that's definitely not the case with your trust, isn't it? So go and tell us a little bit about the schools and academies that you work in to give our listeners some idea of that scale, Sam. Sam Gibbs: Yeah, sure. So we serve around six and half thousand pupils across our current four secondaries, which I believe means that we serve around 14 to 15 percent of the young people of secondary age in Greater Manchester. So despite only having four schools, we do have quite quite a scope. One of the reasons that is two of our schools have large six forms as well. So obviously for us, the idea of now working with primaries is really exciting because it means we're going to go from nursery through to post 16. The way that our schools originally came together as part of a legacy trust was essentially two really highly performing schools were asked to sponsor and support a school that was in measures and struggling. Later down the line, those three schools became GMET and then welcomed a fourth school into the group. I think one of the things that's really interesting about our trust, I think lots of trust will say this, know, all our schools are different. They also have different contexts. We often talk about our schools being like they are the two ends of the spectrum so the school that was in the and served they take something like 75 % of children who are pupil premium increasingly a range of children with really complex needs and that school is in one of the most deprived wards in the country. We've then got two of our schools are all girls schools one

of them is smaller one has a large sixth form and then the school that came in the most recently is a real, like your real typical kind of comprehensive, you know, we have all sorts of children from all sorts of backgrounds in there. So we're really proud of that and we're really proud that we are serving Greater Manchester. It is a beautifully diverse and eclectic city and that brings loads of opportunities, loads of challenges, but loads of opportunities for us. So with that diversity in the context of our schools. And again, I go back to this idea that like the trust and how you organise the trust, the central team, the roles, the work needs to serve the schools and you know, we can never be and would never want to be but could never be a trust that centralises heavily everything and directs from the centre. mean, personally, my view is that that's not what trust should do anyway. this idea of like having these discussions about what we align around and like what's important to us and what's going to best serve of our communities and what the principles of that are is really important, but how heads then, senior teams, have autonomy within their own context to implement that in ways that work for them. And then critically, what does that feedback loop look like? So how are we then gathering information data about the efficacy of that? And then going back and looking again at... at systems, processors, initiatives to continually review and refine them. So yeah, it's a very, it's a really interesting trust to work in for the right reasons. We put huge emphasis on our people and people development and that's a huge part of my role. And we really mean that, you know, our values of excellence, care and respect are really important to us. And we've done a lot of work over the last couple of years to really codify those in terms of how we behave to each other. and we think that how we treat each other, how we behave and how we show up to work is as important, if not more important, than all the other stuff that we've just talked about. So yeah, it's a great role to have and a brilliant trust to be part of. I'm really, really proud to work there. Paul Ainsworth: important isn't it, it's not just what we do, it's how we do it, that kind of makes a massive difference to the colleagues that we work with and that diversity across that group of schools is just you know immense and I was in Manchester yesterday and it is fascinating isn't it as you drive you know five or ten minutes the different communities that you're driving through are so diverse. So let's return to those nine steps of executive headship and step eight, which is delivering continuous improvement or could otherwise be known as the CPD strand, in some ways. So you've kind of talked about some of those theories a little bit in those previous answers, Sam, but how have you tried to build that culture of continuous improvement across the schools? And what have been the challenges or barriers

to that, you when you started working with those schools to get those head teachers and those colleagues and those teachers to work together. Sam Gibbs: I think, ⁓ I ⁓ I come at this, ⁓ you know, we all come at our roles via our experiences, don't we? And I taught English in secondary schools and Leeds for ⁓ over 13 years. ⁓ And so I guess the lens that I bring to this is, ⁓ I think as a teacher, I often ⁓ perceived, ⁓ I ⁓ experienced ⁓ improvement as surveillance, I guess. And I think I sort of taught through that time where, ⁓ ⁓ observation of teaching ⁓ was very compliance led. So, you know, those lessons, I was very used to, you know, once a year having that high stakes lesson observation where somebody in a special high-vis jacket would come in with their clipboard and tick off the things that I was doing, ⁓ you know, and then ⁓ you'd rock out your show lesson. I I often tell this anecdote to teachers I work with, you know, I had a lesson, I must have used it six or seven times and got an outstanding judgment for it. And it was a total nonsense because it was all, you know, performative. It was like, you know, traffic lights that I kept in my desk drawer, you know, and all the rest of it. ⁓ I, ⁓ you know, having sort of talked through that era of performativity, ⁓ to me that is a barrier to improvement, because those of us that were doing it knew that it was a nonsense. We knew it wasn't improving or developing anything. I think even the kids knew it. They knew those lessons when somebody was watching and Miss was being all weird, you know, in that time. So ⁓ getting... actually getting, breaking down that perception of staff that you are monitoring them, watching them and trying to catch them out is a bigger barrier, particularly when you work in across schools than I had ever envisaged. And I think one of the mistakes I made coming to this role was to start with what are the initiatives and didn't spend enough time really understanding and thinking about how could I address that culture. So there's lots of things I was trying to do in the first couple of years of this role, for all for good reason. to develop teachers and give them opportunities. But what I kept hitting upon was appraisal and performance management because I tried to do some things and we've talked about this before, Paul, around when you try to bring in a coaching model, for example. But when you are saying to teachers, you know, this is coaching that is developmental, it's not going to be about judging you, it's not going to feed back into performance management, this is about trust. No one really believes that if at the end of the year, they're still held to, we're only going to pay you on the next level of the scale if you hit these three targets. And at least two of them are meaningless. And one of them is about your year 11 results for which, you you are not entirely in control. to me, it was then that conversation. So how do we actually build a culture that supports

all the things we're trying to do and really gives it fertile ground. So one thing we did last year, which has been critical, was to remove appraisal and performance-related pay. And actually just that statement to staff, that is going and in its place will be something more developmental was really, really important and has made a big difference. And I can hear that through conversations and our staff. And we've done that for everybody, for every colleague. What we then need to do was to fill that void with something that was genuinely going to lead to continuous improvement. And what I didn't want to do was rush in something and go, here's a model, we're all doing that tomorrow. So we sort of accepted that we would have a year really where things will be really loose. And, you know, because we've basically said to staff, we're going to pay you regardless. We want you to engage in a process of development. We want you to help us create, co-create that. And we want it to be something really effective that's really going to suit our contexts but that's going to take time and also we said we're going to get this wrong probably we're going to make loads of mistakes we're going to be things we haven't considered so we need you to buy in now What I should have thought more about was what that was going to mean then for head teachers in terms of how they were able to message that, but how that also enabled them to continue to lead improvement in their schools, particularly in schools where they're in more challenging circumstances and have had higher staff turnover and all that kind of thing. So I guess what this spoke to is the tension between in a trust role, how do the things you're trying to enact to build the culture of the trust interact with the existing culture in schools and that's synchrony. So that's been a real learning curve for me this year. I think where we're at now is we have developed a developmental model which is effective. There's loads more work to do to continue to improve it but because it's grounded in increasingly I think a shared understanding of what we mean by improvement. So the process is called professional learning and improvement. We had a real moment of when we talk about improving what do we mean and we understood that we needed to have a shared language of excellence and improvement which we've now got. So for teachers that looks like our teaching charter or what we now call our teaching framework of excellence that was co-created by all the teachers across our trust or as many as we could get involved. So the model speaks back to that. So teachers now identify at the start of the year a professional learning goal that they want to work on over the course of that year. they identify in the framework of excellence what's the strand that that's going to speak to, but it has to align critically with school improvement priorities. So this is where I've really tried to understand from a head teacher's perspective, what are the things they're trying to drive in their schools and how does this process support that, not sit separately to it. And that's been the biggest move we've made. And then throughout the year, teachers will then work on that goal. My job then is to support that learning through dissemination of research. and opportunities and things they can access to enable them to do that. And then at the end of the year, they go through a process of reflection and evaluation where they consider how is what I've learned this year in relation to my goal, how is that going to add value to the school's improvement journey? So for me, has been a huge piece of work, but it's also been a culture piece around that shared understanding of how we all improve together. But I definitely underestimated the barriers and probably made a assumptions about a culture that was there and wasn't always in terms of creating that trust. as I say, this is new work, so I'm not going to claim it's revolutionised everything. But I think the process has been developmental for everybody, teachers, everybody included, because we've tried to include them in the conversation, including where things go wrong, which they inevitably have, and sort of had the humility to say, this has not worked, we need to change it as we go through. So this idea that it's evolving. I think what that models is, hopefully, that as leaders within the Trust, we are also engaged in our own continuous improvement and development Paul Ainsworth: and Sam Gibbs: and we are not the finished article. And it's helped to embed some ways of working across our Trust which are really healthy around how change happens and what it's not done done to. So yeah, that has been a massive learning curve, I think for all of us, but definitely for me over the last 18 months or so. Paul Ainsworth: Well, there's so much in there and I love the way you've talked about those barriers. You know, you've talked about head teacher level and then teacher level. kind of issues around appraisal, issues around culture, issues around co-create things rather than just giving things to people. Yeah, that's kind of an answer to listen back to and just just reflect on for a moment. So one of the things that I'm also really interested in is in all executive headship arrangement or executive arrangement is How do you know you're offering more than you would as a standalone school? Because that has to be the reason, doesn't it? It has to be the reason that our children, our teachers, and our head teachers get more than they would have done if they were as a standalone school. So what do you believe that you offer your staff in terms of that CPD and continuous improvement across GMET that maybe you wouldn't offer as individual schools? And are there any models of support which should bespoke to that? So I know looking at your social media thread from a couple of weeks ago to a trust wide conference, for example. But yeah, what do you offer staff as a

bigger organisation that you wouldn't be able to when you were that head of English in that secondary school in Leeds? Sam Gibbs: Yeah, I think this is like the existential question at the heart of all trust, isn't it? It's like, what value are we actually adding here? We're not, hopefully not just creating extra noise. I mean, to me, I really, really believe in the trust system, despite the fact that A, I've had some negative experiences of working within it myself as a teacher, and B, that I don't think it's perfect. But this is also not a kind of, think trusts are great and, you know, local authority models aren't. And actually, I shouldn't have started with I really believe in the trust system. What I really believe in is working together collaboratively for the greater good, which also ultimately is children and their life opportunities and outcomes. I really believe in collective working and that no individual has got. all the answers and I think this sort of like old model of hero leadership and the kind of the head rocking on the white horse and saving the day is not healthy for anybody. So I believe there's great power in sort of coming together to explore shared problems and come up with collective solutions. Now there's loads there because to be able to work in those ways you've got to have the right behaviours and mindset and ethics to come into that space and do that so that will not work if people come into that with ego or with an idea that like their way is is the only way. But I think what we can do together that we can't do apart, mean there's you know there's financial things also you can harness you know the power of your collective capacity for efficiencies and there's ways that we've been able to do that. But more importantly than that to me it's about how can we How can we create opportunities for critical thinking and reflection? That really speaks to the way that I think about teacher development and you can do that within your school so you can bring staff together in subjects or you can get people together across subjects. But there's so much to be learned from the way that other schools are thinking about the same problems in different contexts. we can get our school, you know, that's been on that really rapid improvement journey and had to think about school improvement through that lens for a long time, together with colleagues in a school where we've, you know, that school has been really stable and high performing for a number of years, but get those colleagues together and go, do you know what? I'm a head of English, you're a head of English, and we have the same problems. We still struggle to get kids to engage with English language and to have stamina for writing and to really serve our most vulnerable children, all those things. And then have that conversation where your thinking is then expanded because you hear and understand how somebody else has tackled that same problem through a different contextual lens.

To me, it's really powerful. I've placed, I suppose I've hung my hat on that sort of theory of change that if we bring colleagues together in meaningful deep collaboration to discuss shared problems of practice, that's going to have huge benefits. So one way we've done that. is through our subject professional learning communities. So this was in response to what teachers have been saying for years they want, which is more subject-specific CPD. I think it's really hard to do that at school level because that team of people work together all the time anyway, so what new thinking are you bringing to that? Whereas actually if you bring every English teacher in your trust together, you've got that real diversity of thought and without that you're not going to get critical reflection. So we have now, I appointed last year Trust Subject Leads in all the subjects. I didn't recruit based on who's the most experienced teacher or even the best teacher, if we even know what that is. I recruited on who are the people that can facilitate and enable the learning of others and promote deep collaboration. And we've got amazing people in those roles. We bring teachers together four times a year in those communities of practice, but I deliberately work with our Trust Subject Leads on the implicit and explicit purposes of that work. The explicit purpose is to develop subject expertise across the trust. The implicit purpose is to build culture. So we really think about how we run those groups in relational ways. So down to things like how do we welcome teachers into that space? How do we make everybody feel heard? How do we make sure that there's a collective voice? How do we help teachers to identify really meaningful problems of practice that are worth exploring and that benefit from collective expertise? and then what do we do with that learning once we've collated it? And we go right down to the detail of what should the refreshments look like? Because if people have made the effort to travel to a different school at the end of the working day, they deserve nice biscuits at the end of it. that is, that's been, we're in our second year of that now. And I'd say we're just starting to reap some of the benefits in terms of how teachers are now talking about the impact of that on their practice. So for me, it's increasingly, I think my role is as a leader in the trust, to create a model where schools feel there is more benefit to working together than there is to being on their own, to creating opportunities for them to do that, to come together to think, to explore shared problems, and then the time and capacity to go back and to implement those things so it makes that difference. There's loads of other stuff we've done, but think at the moment that's the most significant piece of work in terms of teachers that has helped us to to start to think about how we continuously improve, but to build the culture for that. then I was working with our TSLs the other day and I

can't remember where the quote came from, but I shared with them a quote for something I'd read that said, one of the benefits of communities of practice is that the benefits go beyond the initial innovation. we were talking about, it is important that teachers are talking about subject specific CPD, but actually there's going to be a ripple effect that if when they're in that space, they feel like this is great. This is really energizing. I'm with colleagues from across the trust and I'm learning stuff. I'm also having a nice time here and isn't it all these people in my trust are great. That's going to have a ripple effect and feed into lots of other things that we do as well. to me that model of working across and within your school but across schools and bringing that back and thinking about things differently is a microcosm of what I think the sector should do more Paul Ainsworth: Hmm. Sam Gibbs: of in the spirit of professional generosity and collaboration and I think we need to do that more and reduce our reliance on external experts coming in telling us what they think we should do in our schools, but actually developing those solutions together. Paul Ainsworth: I think it's one of those real issues around secondary school improvement, isn't it? That people are teachers of their subject almost as much as they are teachers. Are you a teacher or are you a mathematician? Are you a teacher or are you a linguist? It's a really interesting perspective. And if you're going to improve teaching and learning, you have to tackle it at a subject specific level. But then you need your trust subject leaders to have that shared collective view so you've not got all those different silos, all those different subjects. So have you delivered an amount of training to those trust subject leaders and do you support other middle leaders across your organisation or senior leaders with their pedagogy and their professional development and that continuous improvement? Sam Gibbs: you Yeah, so the teams I've mainly worked with. So initially it was mostly with the CPD leads within the schools and starting to create that shared understanding of, so the big first piece of work we did was what should, what's our shared understanding on what are our shared principles around good CPD? And there was good CPD going on in all the schools before I took on this role. So it wasn't about coming in and ripping it up or imposing an idea, but it was, let's look at the best of what we do. Let's try and sort of bring that together and let's try and codify it so that we can use that as a tool. to sort of like review and audit ourselves and continue to improve. But also as new people come into this role, which they already have, there is that shared understanding and that shared language for them to join as opposed to, you know, keep making it up as we go along. so we created from that what we call our growing great people charter, which is a set of aims, values and guiding principles

that we all sort of subscribe to that we use is continually evolving. So that's the first group of people increasingly I've worked with middle leaders, so obviously the link between teacher professional development and curriculum design and delivery, you know, they are really intrinsically linked. I've done lots of work with middle leaders around a shared understanding of a framework for curriculum design, how we know the curriculum is impactful, etc. And then increasingly in the last year, the trust subject leads and thinking about their development for the reasons that you've just said, Paul, around that shared understanding of how do we deliver and effective community of practice. What is it we're all trying to do? What are the aims that we're working to? And how do we know if it's having impact? So that's newer work. yeah, increasingly, I suppose this goes back to what I saying at the beginning, my work is much less in schools on the ground, dealing with problems or implementing initiatives, but much more sort of stepping back strategically. Who are the teams of people that can drive this work? in the school context and across the trust. And then I think the next step now that I'm starting to think about is how does all that link together? So have my CPD leads got the same shared mental model of effective development as the trust subject lead, as the middle leaders, and then increasingly as the senior leaders? And how does that all feed into each other? Which is obviously no mean feat, but it's around that coherency. Paul Ainsworth: That is a fascinating problem to kind of have, isn't it? And I suppose we've seen that being managed in some ways by the NPQs, haven't we? That that's similar, almost that similar curriculum, whether you're an ECT or doing the NPQEL. And I suppose that's maybe one of your challenges as to how do you decide at Greater Manchester Education Trust, what is your curriculum, you know, that can Sam Gibbs: Yeah, yeah. Paul Ainsworth: feed at different levels? Sam Gibbs: You're right. I think think NPQs and the ECF are a really interesting example of this. Obviously both are under review at the minute. I mean, we at the Trust, Wide CPD Forum we talk about this a lot. So how do we harness really great ⁓ opportunities, for example, through the NPQs and offer those to our colleagues, but do that in a way where it's going to have maximum impact. And obviously all those courses was designed through the lens of equity. It's about giving everybody in the profession access to a codified body of ⁓ evidence ⁓ that they could then take back to their institutions, you know, and all would be rosy. ⁓ The problem is, ⁓ I don't think anybody thinks that that's what's been achieved. achieved yet and obviously it's still relatively sort of early work but for me a key purpose of a role like mine is to do that work of thinking what are the opportunities for our colleagues to access but how do I harness for everybody's benefit that learning so

if 20 of my colleagues go off and do NPQLT leading teaching great well they've all learned things but what's going to be the collective benefit of that and also how that going to coherently link to everything else? I think we've done some really good work around that. So for example, colleagues that go off and do the NPQ SEND ⁓ we've brought all the NPQs mostly where we can in-house now. So our own staff facilitate and coach on those programmes. ⁓ So we've got a group of staff at one of our schools, ⁓ pastoral staff, about to start the Leading Behaviour and Culture NPQ together. And that's being facilitated by the senior leaders that line manage that team. ⁓ There's going to be some really powerful of learning from that course. What I worry about in the system ⁓ is that we're creating a sort of Matthew effect with NPQs that were designed to do the opposite, where in organisations like mine, where you've got someone like me who can do all that, you know, moving pieces around, getting the right people in the right courses, and then thinking about how strategically about how we harness the benefits of that. ⁓ If you are a small primary or rural secondary school and you're on your own and you haven't got this ⁓ access to this kind collective capacity, it's going to be really hard to move away from a model where people just do NPQs and silos or let's be honest, where anybody's doing them at all because of now ⁓ access to them is not necessarily as equitable as we might want. So ⁓ I think that comes back to... ⁓ my belief in collaboration, but also in professional generosity. I think it's incumbent on those of us now that have that, that we support the continuous improvement of other schools who haven't got the same capacity and resources and think about how we can reach out and open up some those opportunities to them as well, because otherwise the sector is going to keep fragmenting and splitting down the middle. And the people that suffer from that at the end of the day will be children because it shouldn't be a lottery of which school you go to and how much capacity and resource that School of Trust has. Paul Ainsworth: Professional generosity is something that you always display, Sam, and kind of the networks that you're involved with, that's always a key part of that. So just thinking about that professional generosity towards the end of our conversation, what advice would you give to a colleague developing CPD or continual improvement across a group of secondary schools? You've got five years of learning now. What would your kind of starting points be for somebody who is picking up that baton? Sam Gibbs: So I was just having a conversation this morning with Tracy Goodyear, who's the chair of that forum and who is a great friend of mine as well. We talk a lot about this idea of this obsession of product over process. the reason that we set up this forum, or Tracy did, and then invited me into it its early stages was we recognise that people in our roles are hugely underserved in terms of CPD for themselves. But actually, I've got great opportunity to make a huge impact across the sector. But this idea of how we sort of rush to what's the product, what's the thing, I think I made that mistake early on in this role and my advice to anybody coming into it would be not to start with your plan or your initiative or your model or your product but to start with people and to undertake some really deep listening and understand the context that you're serving and critically the people within them then to think about what they need and then to involve them in the co-construction of that product or initiative or plan. I think for people coming into this role new, because increasingly there are more of these kind of roles across trusts, how do we make sure, what's the induction for those people? I guess that's the void we're trying to fill through this network. So come and join us, learn from those of us that have been doing it a while and perhaps we can support you. I think as well, like we were saying before, it's about habits, not initiatives and being clear what are those habits that you want to intentionally build. Then I think it's around taking time to understand the culture that's needed for genuine improvement that's sustainable and making that safe and removing barriers that stop that feeling safe. And sometimes that's having, you know, often it's having hard conversations about the things you've always done as leaders. this might be a bit controversial. I think it's recognising sometimes the things that you do as leaders are through the lens of accountability and that's a really serious thing that we all need to take seriously because it's how schools are held up for scrutiny and they absolutely we absolutely do need accountability but I think we all recognise that within that system there are There are ways that that drives behaviours that sometimes, I'm going to be controversial now, are more about us and our egos than they are about children. I think having that healthy conversation about what we can remove and ways that we need to change as leaders that better benefit the children and the staff and the communities that we serve is really important. Ultimately, a role like mine where I'm now increasingly further removed from the day-to-day experience of teaching, which was job I loved for 13 years. And as I said before, the grief of not being an English teacher anymore is sometimes really hard. But the more I step away, the more I need to remind myself constantly that everything I do needs to improve the daily life of teachers. So if someone come into this role, that's what I would remind them. Like keep a tight hold on. what it felt like when you were in that role and it's not that you are now you know better than, I'm not saying anybody would think that's this, you're not better than, they're doing the work, the hard work and it's really hard and your job is to serve them. So it should never become about what you want to do, what you think is important, what you've read in a book somewhere that you want to implement. It's always about how is what you're doing going to help make their jobs easier, more enjoyable and ultimately make them better able to serve children. that might all sound a bit like pompous or know, but that is really what I believe. I think sometimes... My worry about education is that it's become too far removed from what teachers experience and are doing day to day. And I think it's incumbent on all of us that are not full-time teachers to remain really mindful and ask ourselves that question, how is what we're doing serving their work? Because that's the thing that's the most important. Paul Ainsworth: Wise words, Sam, and I think that's just a brilliant place to finish. It really is, isn't it? So if you're on that executive headship journey, you're on that system leader journey, what are you doing that's making a difference for your teachers, that's making a difference for their children in their classrooms? thanks so much, Sam. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on, you know, step eight, delivering continual improvement. I think there's, you know, I need to listen to this again and sit there with my bio and my notepad and write down some of those great ideas. but thanks so much for your time, Sam, I really appreciate it. Sam Gibbs: My pleasure, thank you for having me.