: The power of a conversation with: a fellow Trust Disadvantage Lead This series of blogs follows professional conversations with a range of voices that can be recognised within our schools.

This series of blogs follows professional conversations with a range of voices that can be recognised within our schools. Classrooms are an eclectic mix of pupils with different backgrounds, experiences, knowledge and skills, all of whom are welcomed and celebrated. Exactly the same can be said about the adults in our schools. Through this series, we are hoping to give these voices a platform to share their expertise.

Anna and I met at the Gloucestershire Research School Disadvantage conference last autumn. At that point, I had not met many other Trust Disadvantage leads so we instantly fell in to a conversation about our roles, our priorities, actions and challenges we were facing. This initial conversation led to a series of meetings over the course of the academic year in which we have been able to share good practice, reflect and collaborate on barriers and be a professional sounding board for one another. We talk a lot about the power of relationships in education, often with pupils or parents in mind, but for us the power in this professional relationship has been invaluable. It has provided an external perspective for one another but also an opportunity to talk to someone that really understands the nature (and enormity) of the task we have in front of us!

Step 4 of The EEF Guide to the Pupil Premium (Deliver and monitor your strategy) walks leaders through the importance of providing staff with relevant and effective professional development and poses consideration questions to leaders around how to ensure staff take ownership of and are enabled to enact the Pupil Premium strategy. Based on the explore tool found in A Schools Guide to Implementation, Anna and I reflected on the delivery and monitoring of the pupil premium strategies in our schools, sharing our current practises and what influenced them. Being a new relationship, we developed a sense of trust very quickly, both understanding the professional walls within which we were talking. We centred our initial conversations on the training we provided for senior leadership teams within each of our trusts. We were both providing training opportunities but agreed that they were currently being delivered and received in an isolated way rather than as part of all school development and improvement conversations which would have the potential to be more impactful. As a result of this reflection, we both adapted our approaches in order to improve the quality, frequency and status of this professional development offer.

Anna ensured disadvantage became a standing item in every heads meeting thus raising the profile of the issue for senior leaders. She included updates from recent research, opportunities to collaborate and share good practice, space to discuss outcomes from school pupil premium audits and time to focus on data. I revised the agendas for the training sessions planned to allow more time for collaboration between senior leaders in the room to share good practise and support one another through barriers they were facing when enacting their strategies. I also introduced a workstream in which I worked in a targeted way with our priority schools to forensically look at data, exploring what it was telling us about potential issues in schools and considered, with those school leaders and their teams, actions that could be taken to mitigate them.

Being able to collaborate with a colleague who holds a similar role therefore understands the nature of the job, but is also able to provide an external perspective, has been refreshing, enlightening and invaluable. It has allowed us to share and celebrate our successes where impact can be evidenced but also talk through and explore potential reasons why other things have not gone so well or had the impact that we had hoped for. When thinking about the cross-cutting behaviours set out in the Implementation guide, these conversations have given both of us as leaders, the time and space to reflect, monitor and adapt to improve implementation in our own contexts.

Moving forwards, Anna and I intend to continue and build our professional relationship to enhance the work we are both doing in our own contexts, where it is right and feasible. Leading a trust to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils can feel like a vast task but the power of talking, listening and learning together with Anna has been a small but mighty win.