Research School Network: New director, same direction As Chris Runeckles takes over as director of Durrington Research School he looks forward to the coming year


New director, same direction

As Chris Runeckles takes over as director of Durrington Research School he looks forward to the coming year

by Durrington Research School
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However closely we work with our immediate superiors there is always much of their daily work that remains hidden from our view. After five years as assistant director of Durrington Research School I felt I knew the role of director fairly well, having worked alongside the previous incumbent Shaun Allison since we first put together the bid in 2016.

However, the summer and the start to term have revealed many corners of the role that I was clearly less familiar with, financial spreadsheets perhaps chief among them. Luckily Shaun remains only a few offices away in his new role as co-headteacher.

What hasn’t changed though is our core purpose: to connect the profession with the best bets that research evidence gives them and in turn break the connection between family income and educational outcomes.

The passion and drive to pursue this goal has not dimmed across our time as a Research School, and now given the opportunity to lead, it burns brighter than ever. Shaun blogged at the end of year about what he had learnt in his time at the helm and by extension where our energies should be focused, and I would echo those sentiments absolutely.

And so to this year and what we will be working on in order to achieve our aims. It would be fair to say our work has evolved substantially over the years and has now reached a point where deep and sustained partnerships form the bulk of what we do. However, there remain plenty of opportunities to get involved outside of these partnerships.

We have several large partnerships running this year, which each involve dozens of schools coming together to receive evidence-informed training, share best practice and plan implementation. This year we are working with all three local authorities that form the bulk of our patch. Some of these partnerships are now entering their fourth year, with layers of evidence-informed training being added each year. As a result we are now seeing sustained and embedded changes in the schools we work with. This year the training we will be delivering with local authorities will be:

  • West Sussex
    • Cohort 1 – From Mitigation to Success (a programme focused on educational disadvantage)
    • Cohort 2 – Designing Effective Professional Development
  • Brighton and Hove
    • Cohort 1 – From Mitigation to Success (a programme focused on educational disadvantage)
    • Cohort 2 – Designing Effective Professional Development
  • East Sussex
    • Learning Behaviours (a programme looking at the core learning behaviours that wrap around students to make them successful, with a specific focus on SEND students).

Training programmes created centrally by the Research School network form the core of these programmes. Huge time and expertise is poured into the creation of these programmes and they are brilliantly resourced and increasingly tried and tested across the national network of research schools. However, each programme is contextualised according to the needs of the partner. For example in East Sussex the focus is on SEND students, and so the programme has been adapted to address this cohort particularly. 

What binds all the programmes is implementation and professional development. At the national Research School conference in July I heard one contributor describe all programmes as essentially implementation training with a change in focus and there is much truth to this. Without a laser focus on evidence-informed implementation the training we provide will ultimately fail to find its way into the classroom and by extension change outcomes for students. Furthermore, we have to provide the professional development that will allow staff to embody the intervention that makes the difference. The lessons from the Effective Professional Development guidance report also thread through our training.

Beyond working with local authorities this year is the first we will complete large scale partnerships with a multi-academy trusts. These are:

  • TKAT – In this partnership we are working to develop the academy chain’s ACE programme which supports their disadvantaged students.
  • REach2 – This is a partnership involving multiple Research Schools and will focus again on improving outcomes for disadvantaged students.

We are also working with a number of other groups of schools and leaders to help them realise their particular priorities:

  • Supporting Students with SEND in the Mainstream – Working with teaching school hubs to support schools with implementation of the EEF guidance report of the same name.
  • Rother Valley – Here we are working with a group of rural primary schools, specifically on developing curriculum in foundation subjects.
  • Schools Alliance for Excellence – Together with Greenshaw Research School, working with the SaFE group in Surrey to train schools and leaders around disciplinary literacy.

Added to this work is the work we do to support our associate Research School in Kent who are running a series of programmes in their locality and supporting the TKAT project.

The above clearly represents an ambitious body of work. It is only through the experience we have gained over recent years and the capacity we have built both in our core team at Durrington and many other professionals who support us, such as the brilliant Marc Rowland, that we are able to deliver this.

However, we still very keen to provide an offer for schools outside of our partnership work. We know from feedback we have received that there is a growing desire to engage with research evidence and as such we maintain a strong desire to provide this training. As a result we are offering one day deep dives” into several of the EEF’s guidance reports. Here we are using the expertise of our team to find the best facilitator for each area of focus. Each training day will cost £150 and you can book on using these links:

I would be deceiving you if I wrote that I did not find the prospect of leading on such a range of projects daunting. However, it is also hugely exciting to think about the number of leaders, teachers and ultimately students who will be positively impacted by this work. Time to get to it.

Chris Runeckles

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