Tower Hamlets harnesses power of collaboration
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Collective ethos among Tower Hamlets' schools creates a community of learning.
- Specialist service helps target evidence-based support to struggling pupils.
- The borough has lowest attainment gap in England, quarter the national average.
ACTION
The east London borough of Tower Hamlets is one of the most deprived in the country, with 44 per cent of children eligible for pupil premium funding and around a third of children classed as "persistently disadvantaged" which means they are eligible for free school meals 80 per cent of the time.
While national studies have shown there is a strong correlation between high levels of deprivation and low levels of academic attainment by pupils, Tower Hamlets is bucking the trend, delivering some of the best academic results in the country.
There are many factors behind the improvement, according to Christine McInnes, Tower Hamlets director of education and partnerships, but the key one is that all the professionals and agencies involved in education improvement in the borough have bought into creating a "unique ethos" based on "collaboration not competition".
"We have very few academies and free schools," explains McInnes, "but even our academies work as part of a community of schools. They have a collective approach, where getting better outcomes for pupils is not based on competition. The community of schools has high aspirations for young people."
Attainment is not just seen through the prism of education, but has become a central aim of all children's services, says McInnes. This means that priority is given to removing barriers to learning by working with families where there may be problems or concerns.
"Attainment and barriers to learning are intrinsically linked," she adds. "We've invested a lot in parental engagement and the council has a family support and engagement team because we know parents are the primary educators of children."
In some instances, the engagement and support team may work with a family that are not sending their child to school due to cultural concerns or a desire to educate children at an unregistered school. "Workers can talk to parents in their own language and in a safe way," says McInnes. A key part of this is that the council actively recruits staff from the local community and has a number of volunteer roles that help parents gain skills.
When children are struggling academically, schools can buy in specialist support from the council's Quality First Teaching service, which helps classroom staff match work tasks to a pupil's ability and build their confidence.
The approaches are underpinned by research from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), with which the council has a partnership, ensuring teachers use techniques and approaches that have been shown to improve attainment.
School improvement has for the past two years been overseen by charity and social enterprise the Tower Hamlets Education Partnership, which has EEF chief executive Kevan Collins and former Ofsted chief inspector Christine Gilbert on its board.
"It has specialist primary and secondary teams that work with schools," says McInnes. "They undertake risk assessments and target packages that provide challenge and support to schools."
In addition, the borough's location next to the financial hubs of Canary Wharf and the City of London has been a factor in raising aspirations, says McInnes. "We've got a lot of successful business people acting as role models and providing donations," she adds.
McInnes says the area's education success is due to schools "getting the right balance" between putting "a lot of stock in attainment" while having an "inclusive approach" to education.
IMPACT
Recent analysis by EEF found the attainment gap in Tower Hamlets to be seven per cent, the lowest in the country. Across England, the attainment gap is 29 per cent.
The borough's most recent key stage 2 scores placed it fifth nationally, while its GCSE results were the best in London.
The gap in attainment between pupils from poor and wealthy schools in Tower Hamlets has reduced from 5.4 months in 2012 to 3.8 months this year.
"It used to be that we didn't achieve academically and that was seen as okay - no one wants to go back to that," says McInnes.
However, she admits that the challenge now is to tackle variation in academic performance between schools in the borough and among different ethnic groups - and at a time when education funding is falling across London boroughs.