How to build resilient schools: place-based approaches to supporting teachers and leaders

Join us to hear how Toby Greany’s research into Rethinking leadership development through the lens of place and Steph Ainsworth’s research into Developing place-based data-driven interventions to improve teacher resilience and retention can help support resilient schools.  The panel will discuss how emerging findings relate to the issues facing schools right now before opening up to questions from the audience

What Matters in Education? Panel Discussion Series

This is part of the What Matters in Education? Panel Discussion Series, jointly organised by the UCL Institute of Education Pro-Director Research and the ESRC Education Research Programme (ERP). It aims to spark new thinking across education, social research and the wider social sciences on how research, policy and practice can most productively interact. 

Events will be online. Recordings and a summary of the key questions the debate raised will be made available on the ERP website afterwards.

Co-Chairs: Professor Gemma Moss, Director, ESRC Education Reserach Programme, Professor of Literacy at the UCL Institute of Education; Professor Lynn Ang, IOE Pro-Director and Vice-Dean Research; and Dr Becky Taylor, Head of Impact and Engagement at IOE.

Rethinking leadership development through the lens of place 

Prof Toby Greany, Prof Pat Thomson, Dr Tom Perry, Dr Mike Collins

Debates about education policy tend to focus on the national scale. Ministers have national remits, as do their departments and agencies, even if these include regional teams. Intermediary arrangements between national government and individual schools vary across the UK: Local Authorities have retained a significant role in Scotland; their role is being strengthened somewhat in England’s fragmented system; and arrangements are similarly complex in Northern Ireland’s smaller system. School leadership development has generally been run nationally, sometimes with regional or local delivery partnerships designed to provide a level of contextualisation.  

This paper presents emerging findings from the ESRC-funded Sustainable School Leadership study, which is exploring approaches to the recruitment, development and support of senior school leaders across the UK. Our project conceptual framework has a focus on place and our data collection has included seven place-based case studies, undertaken in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.  We draw on our findings to suggest that school leadership is inherently place-based, meaning that leaders must not only understand and respond to their context and to the needs of the children and families they serve, but must also work productively with other local schools and stakeholders to shape sustainable educational responses to wider societal challenges. We argue that leadership development should be more deliberately place-based and that this can be compatible with a national approach.  

Developing place-based data-driven interventions to improve teacher resilience and retention

Dr Steph Ainsworth, Jez Oldfield and Dr Carrie Adamson

Alongside the growing teacher supply crisis, there are widespread concerns about the mental health and wellbeing of in-service teachers. In this discussion, we will explore the process of developing place-based interventions to improve teacher resilience and retention. A mixed-methods approach was used to investigate the factors that teachers reported to be most important in relation to teacher resilience. Results from a resilience survey completed by teachers in England (n=2878), were used to inform a process of ‘ecology mapping’ in 8 case study schools (n=102). Data from ‘mapping’ interviews were then used to co-produce interventions within each school. The discussion will explore insights gained in relation to the distribution of potential levers for change across the social-ecological systems which teachers work within and the related implications for policy and practice.