How Holyrood Academy is bridging gaps and building futures

Dave MacCormick

Headteacher
Holyrood Academy

The context

Holyrood Academy in Chard, Somerset, is demonstrating how a school, as a key institution in its community, can play a vital role in developing a joined-up, local response to improve children’s outcomes.

Concerned about the growing attainment gap for its children experiencing disadvantage, as well as an increase in pupils’ mental health struggles and growing youth crime in the area, the school (part of the Blackdown Education Partnership, the multi-academy trust) decided to develop a ‘cradle to career’ (C2C) design as a way of tackling some of the deep-rooted challenges its pupils and families are facing. These include inter-generational poverty, a lack of early years support, poor transport infrastructure and limited post-16 opportunities.

Since September 2022, Dave MacCormick, headteacher of Holyrood Academy (and LeadingTrusts Alum), has played a key role in the development of the Blackdown Education Partnership’s C2C model. As the only secondary school in Chard, the vast majority of pupils attend the school, putting it in an advantageous position to coordinate various elements of C2C support across the wider community. To achieve this, the school recognises the importance of developing a deep understanding of the assets and challenges within its community, as well as building stronger relationships and partnerships with pupils’ families and key civic actors across Chard.

For Dave, part of this realisation stemmed from his own experiences of growing up in an area of high deprivation on the west coast of Scotland. He talks openly about how his drive for social justice and social mobility was informed by his exposure to ‘non-school factors which are systemic and very sticky, leading to long-lasting community challenges’. These experiences have led him to believe that ‘a school can be a stable, anchor institution in an area’, working towards the vision that all children in Chard enjoy lives of choice and opportunity.

Developing a C2C model

The first step that the leadership team at Holyrood took to develop its C2C model was to plan alongside colleagues from local primary schools to ensure that the start of the curriculum in year 7 was planned effectively. This was so that the school could have appropriately high expectations of children while building upon what they already know in each subject. To extend the C2C pipeline, a key priority for the partnership is also to develop strong early years support within the town.

In addition to joining up the educational provision from birth to adulthood, a key part of the C2C work is building school-community partnerships so that children’s family and community contexts can support better outcomes for babies, children and young people. This in turn can help to both alleviate some of the pressure on schools and increase their capacity. Since joining the C2C partnership in September 2022, Dave and his team have sought to understand their school community better—both the assets and the challenges—and in doing so, they have been able to identify gaps in services and support.

Building strong school-community relationships

As part of their relationship building with the community, Holyrood’s team established a ‘Community Leaders’ Breakfast’ as an opportunity to get to know local residents and employers, and to better understand what works well in the community and what doesn’t.

Headteacher, Dave MacCormick, opening Chard’s 9th ‘Community Leadership Breakfast’ in May 2024

Having shared information about the first breakfast by knocking on doors, posting fliers through letterboxes, and spreading the word with pupils and parents, the school team remained apprehensive about the initial turnout. Until, that is, the inaugural breakfast saw 40 local people turn up, with representation from health, social care, local businesses, local government, charities, faith groups and local primary schools. The following half-termly breakfasts (featuring free bacon rolls, tea, and coffee) have continued to convene this number of people or higher.

Off the back of these breakfasts and the wider relationship building that Holyrood has done, the school was able to identify a local community hub that already existed, but in a very small, old disused shop front (7mx5m squared), run by committed, passionate volunteers doing their utmost to support local families. Keen to find a bigger space and build relationships with these volunteers, the leadership team at Holyrood worked closely with the Community Hub’s directors and volunteers to support each other’s goals and events. he states,

‘It’s all about relationships, about popping down and having a cuppa together’. From this, a group came together to secure funding from the Local Authority to rent an existing community centre in the town, which is approximately 10 times bigger. This means that the Community Hub has been able to expand its operations and is now supporting many more families.

Through further local fundraising efforts the community leaders have appointed a new Centre Manager and Early Years lead to coordinate this wider work and to build strong alignment with other individuals and organisations who may be supporting children and families at different points in their lives. In Chard, this has led to a shared vision and purpose based around three priority areas:

Improve early years provision: improve antenatal, perinatal and toddler provision in the town.
Reduce food poverty: help to feed hungry children.
Improve transport links in and out of the town: work with the Town Council and Somerset Council.

Chard Community Hub’s new, larger premises (image via *Chard & Ilminster News*)

Every half-termly Community Breakfast begins with these three priorities in mind. Each priority is taken in turn and partners are asked to contribute to the following questions:

What’s working
What’s not?
What can you do to help?

Around food poverty, in particular, these meetings have led to local strategic partnerships which orchestrate food distribution. This has meant that the community hub has gone from helping a handful of people per week to now having four fridges, two freezers and a whole pantry full of food every week. The next step for this work is to set up a Community Fridge Subscription Service where those who can afford it pay approximately £10 and receive £25 worth of food in return. This would enable efficient food distribution while also generating a revenue stream for the hub.

Within the food poverty priority, a partnership with the local Tesco branch has also meant that in addition to the £2.50 lunch for pupils on Free School Meals, there is an extra £1.50 for children to eat something hot for breakfast at school. In addition, Tesco has committed to providing the school with ingredients for a free breakfast each day for any pupil who would like it. This partnership came about through a joint letter from all representatives at the Community Leaders’ Breakfast, reinforcing the power of collective action centred around a common goal.

Speaking to local reporter, Jamie Grover, Dave summarised how this wider work is already having an impact on his school community:

What we’ve managed to do is make a real difference by understanding the challenges in the town, understanding what people need and want, and starting to provide some of that…The best schools are able to help communities to address that disadvantage gap at the earliest possible age.

Key drivers of success

Arguably, the main driving force behind Holyrood Academy’s partnership-building work with its community is a mindset-shift on the part of the school leadership and, as a result, a mindset shift among the school staff.

As Dave notes, ‘The mindset of the head is the first thing that has to change. It’s the critical first lever; you can’t get further without that’. He describes how staff became increasingly bought into the idea of building stronger school-community partnerships after he first showed them data from the Indices of Multiple Deprivation which emphasised the inequitable trajectory for pupils experiencing disadvantage in the local area.

During staff INSET at the start of the school year, one of the school’s leadership team also organised a walk around the community to recognise the many assets, gradually deepening school staff’s contextual understanding of pupils’ lives. Here, though, Dave is also keen to emphasise that deeper knowledge of the community context should never equate to lower expectations of pupils due to the challenges they may face. On the contrary, he is finding that by better understanding the context, staff develop a clearer vision, based on values of social justice (linked to the school values of compassion, consistency, and community), to ensure all pupils achieve the best possible outcomes, regardless of their starting point.

Reflecting on previous school-community relations, Dave feels that the school had previously not been strong at building strong relationships with its wider community. He believes that ‘place-based leadership’ (which he defines as acting to improve a community informed by a deep understanding of its context, challenges and assets) is really important, perhaps especially in rural communities where services tend to be more disparate, and towns can feel more isolated as a result.

Positive relationships with a range of staff members from the local authority (LA) have been another key factor in the development of Holyrood’s C2C, and particularly regarding the funding of Chard Community Hub. This has led to money to fund an Area Community Champion which Dave recruited. He reflects that prior to starting the C2C work, the school had relatively limited relationships with the LA and he was conscious of the need to be proactive in building stronger relationships in order to share the challenges, outline the vision for change and build buy-in to the Chard C2C vision. Over time, meaningful collaboration has created a snowball effect, with increasingly more local partners coming on board and an additional £450,000 into the school and its community work over three years.

The partnership-building work is also based on the understanding that schools cannot build family and community capacity single-handedly. Other civic leaders and civic institutions are essential to the development of a C2C design and Holyrood Academy is proving that it is possible to work towards broader pupil outcomes by considering who else a school might work with across a community and how best to bring these stakeholders together to connect what already exists.

What’s next?

To start developing the beginning of the C2C pipeline in Chard, the next step for the Early Years lead is to develop relationships with families in underserved areas to better understand their context.

In response, it is the school’s ambition to provide a high-quality antenatal, perinatal and early years offer that is well-attended and free at point of access. This reflects Dave’s understanding about this wider work beyond the school’s typical remit:

‘The school’s role is not to do that work, but to spot the gap in support and facilitate that gap being filled with a high-quality service’.

Often, filling the gap relies on access to funding, and this remains a key element of the partnership-building work where services may not exist. Given the local authority’s current financial deficit, partnership building with other businesses as well as finding more philanthropic sources of funding will likely be necessary.

The million-dollar question for the C2C design, though, is whether the wider work beyond the school is having a positive impact on pupils’ long-term outcomes.

On the subject of measuring change, Dave acknowledges that it’s hard to track significant change in the short term given that the partnership building work still feels nascent and not fully established. In the shorter term, the team in Chard is tracking the numbers of people engaging with the hub as a starting point, and they’re keen to start measuring parental perception of this wider work.

Over time, there is the hope that the statistical data on pupil progress at key educational transition points (Good Level of Development aged 4, Reading, Writing and maths levels at the end of Key Stage 2 and GCSE results, for example) will start to indicate a narrowing of the attainment gap between pupils experiencing disadvantage and their more affluent peers. While it will never be possible to prove a clear cause-effect link between the wider partnership-building work and pupil outcomes, it should be possible to identify where, and how, the C2C design in Chard is contributing to positive change and to the vision that all pupils thrive.

If you’d like to hear more about the work happening in Chard, please get in touch.