School improvement drives everything that we do.

The strategic school improvement team comprises the Headteachers from each MAT school and our School Improvement Directors (Primary and Secondary). Headteachers from schools planning to join the MAT are co-opted onto the team so that they begin collaborating on school improvement whilst undergoing conversion. These schools are also able to take part in all MAT school improvement, inset and CPD programmes. This highly skilled and experienced strategic team support our schools in the following ways:

• Support and challenge in order to raise standards
• Sharing and benchmarking of data
• Monitoring and evaluation
• Intervention as necessary
• CPD delivery
• Specialist tracking support
• Teaching and learning support
• Curriculum development

Further expertise is provided by external School Improvement Partners who support headteacher appraisal and quality assure our school improvement work in each school. This role is vital as we fully recognise the need to be outward looking and benchmark beyond simply our own schools.Our well established school improvement model is based upon collaboration and operates in the following way:

This flexible model enables us to respond quickly to local and national issues. By developing key issue based hubs, staff across all our schools are able to work collectively and collaboratively, thus saving time and resources. The changing nature of these hubs also enables us to build capacity through upskilling key staff.

We undertake annual peer reviews in each school. This involves the CEO, headteachers from one or more of our schools, the head of the host school, members of the host school local governing body and our primary or secondary school improvement directors. The host school sets three priorities from their SEF and the team work together to review practice. This process has proved highly effective in establishing areas of best practice that we can share, and areas for development that we can support. From this we produce a development plan to include joint CPD, partnership working, moderation, joint planning, reciprocal visits etc.

Staff in our schools have worked collaboratively to develop a range of writing and Maths moderation tasks that are delivered to each year group across all our schools. These then form the basis of our MAT wide moderation programme enabling staff to more effectively compare standards across each school. Our common assessment calendar consists of a triannual cycle of standardised reading and Maths tests, TA assessments, Headteacher data peer reviews and question level analysis to facilitate best practice sharing.

Key to our ethos is the recognition that schools need to be able to respond to their specific circumstances. We have, however, developed supportive core standards that apply across all of our schools. These form the bedrock of all our school improvement activities and relate to teaching and learning, behaviour and assessment

Our approach to school improvements has enabled significant rapid and sustained improvements in all our schools and has been highly praised in all recent Ofsted inspections.

Associate School Improvement offer

The Warriner Multi Academy Trust continues to grow, attracting new schools who support our ethos and recognise the significant impact of our school improvement approach. In response to requests from schools and academies we are pleased to be able to offer key elements of our school improvement package to non-academy members.

To find out more, please click on the attachment below.