Secondary case study: The Vital Role of Extracurricular Activities for SEND pupils
Fostering Belonging and Growth through a coherent extracurricular offer
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by Huntington Research School
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Take a moment to consider the following scenario. You are in a school meeting with the senior team. You are discussing a hot topic that has a variety of opinions on the leadership team – maybe it involves a budget decision, such as purchasing a glossy new edu-product. Now, before you get a chance to speak, the Executive Headteacher makes their feelings known. Forcefully.
Those feelings are diametrically opposed to your opinion and all of the available evidence that you have carefully collated to present your case.
What do you do?
We all wish to be brave leaders and step into the breach and fight for what is right. Only, we are only human. Our decisions are influenced by others. We don’t want to be ostracized, or seen as critical of our hard working colleagues. I’m pretty sure most of us don’t make a habit of annoying our boss. In these all-too-natural conditions, making decisions in schools is hard. We are tired, stressed and often lacking in information and evidence: the exact conditions that compromises our making the best decisions possible.
Being a devil’s advocate is difficult hard work, so a successful Research-lead then requires some crucial support factors.
Everyone complains about meetings. Teachers complain about school leaders being in endless meetings, with school leaders lamenting the hours spent trudging through minutes and the muddy waters of messy school decisions. We need to do the very best job of making such meetings productive and ensuring our decisions are supported by the best available evidence.
A Research-lead can prove a boon for any school leadership structure because they can be trained to access and translate useful evidence that can better steer our decision making down a productive channel. They can add useful insights into good planning and evaluation (how about considering using a ‘theory of change‘ model to direct your initial planning, before then trying the Education Endowment Foundation DIY Evaluation Guide on for size for robust evaluation).
Crucially, a Research-lead shoud be able to challenge and critique proposed changes, asking hard questions. To do this, meeting structures and the way we plan, implement and evaluate may need to shift too. And how can a Research-lead support this?
Do we really dare be this challenging and this trusting? Do we really want to wrangle with the complexity of our decisions and genuinely battle with the evidence when it contradicts our opinions? These are hard questions we should ask ourselves. A Research-lead, given the right training, time, support, and infrastructure to support and challenge, could help us better answer those questions.
Alex Quigley, Director of Huntington Research School
If you see a role for a Research-lead in your school context, or you are a budding, or existing Research-lead, then take a look at our ‘Building Confident Research-leads‘ programme.
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