How King’s Oak Academy is working in partnership to restore trust

King’s Oak Academy’s (KOA) ambition is to become the community school of choice—not convenience—for Kingswood.

To secure this, leaders at KOA have focused on embedding strong, trusting relationships throughout their school community to better understand and support the school’s families and local community.

Context

Coherence, continuity and change

King’s Oak Academy (KOA) is an all-through school for 4- to 16-year-olds living in the Kingswood estate on the outskirts of Bristol. It is part of Cabot Learning Federation (CLF), a multi-academy trust with schools in South Gloucestershire and surrounding areas. KOA is currently the trust’s only all-through school.

KOA has two-forms of entry from Reception to Year 6, with five-forms—soon to be six-forms—of entry in Years 7 to 11. This means that in Year 7 up to 120 new students from 18 partner primary schools join the school community. There’s a similar picture upstream too: in Reception, KOA typically welcomes a majority of its children from one of two local preschools/nurseries, with a significant minority joining from a dozen other providers in the area.

To manage this heady blend of continuity and change, KOA has recently adopted a three-phase structure:

the ‘Lower School’ (situated over the road from the rest of the school) caters for Reception to Year 4,
the ‘Middle School’ for Years 5 to 8, and
the ‘Upper School’ for Years 9 to 11.

The three-phase structure aims to bridge the gap between primary and secondary transition while giving due precedence to Key Stage 3. KOA’s Middle School prepares children for some of the demands of Upper School whilst providing children and parents with the more familial environment associated with Lower School.

The design of Middle School provides a continuation of some of the familial environment of Lower School—such as a central library space. There is also a playground exclusively designated for Middle School students, whilst other outdoor spaces are for both Middle and Upper School students.

Community challenges

Kingswood is an area of significant deprivation on the eastern edge of Bristol. The school is situated in a South Gloucestershire Priority Neighbourhood domain indicating that the area has significant levels of deprivation for multiple factors. For example, income, employment, education and crime are all ranked within the top 20% deprivation quintile in England.

26% of students are eligible for Free School Meals, whilst 27% qualify for the Pupil Premium. The proportion of FSM being claimed has increased by 5% over the last three years. This may point to a changing demographic but could also be due to the rise in financial hardship families in Kingswood are encountering as a result of the pandemic and an increase in the cost of living. To support these families, as well as those on the margins, the school runs a ‘care bank’ that supports families in hardship by providing food parcels (donated by staff and families), as well as school uniform and equipment. Recently, 120 families were provided financial assistance to support the transition to the new school uniform.

The cohort is primarily White British and there is a large number of students whose parents, grandparents and close family relatives attended King’s Oak or another local school. This creates a strong sense of ‘grown here’ and ‘community’, both in Kingswood and within the school itself.

17% of the cohort has an identified special educational need and/or disability. There is a rising number of students with identified SEND in the KS2 and KS3 year groups and, currently, there are 18 students who have an EHCP. The school makes a high number of referrals to the local authority’s ART (Access and Response Team) and Early Help (up from 23 in 2021-22 to 27 in 2022-23) for students for whom there are safeguarding concerns. The school has increased its internal specialist capacity in certain areas such as counselling to ensure continued support for its most vulnerable students.

Rationale for embracing a ‘cradle to career’ approach

What’s interesting, perhaps, is that Katherine’s motivation for engaging with the Cradle-to-Career Partnership has evolved over time: Katherine came across the Partnership somewhat ‘by accident’—via a CST webinar in which The Reach Foundation were presenting their work.

For Katherine, the Partnership seemed like a good opportunity to connect with other all-through schools given how few there are nationally. And while it’s true that connecting with like-minded schools and trusts who share all-through values and thinking has been beneficial to KOA, when seeing the practice at another all-through school, Reach Academy Feltham, it was their approach to establishing strong, trusting relationships and community development that really resonated with Katherine.

The overall goal for KOA is to become the school of choice—not convenience—for the Kingswood community. This means working closely with the local community for three key reasons:

Because the school recognises the need to restore the somewhat fractured historical relationship between the school and the community.
Because the school’s leaders believe that the school maintains a civic responsibility to do good for the community and leave it in a better place than before—especially post-pandemic with rising levels of financial hardship and need.
Because the 12+ year relationship the school and its families invest in one another (as a consequence of the school’s all-through structure) represents a unique opportunity to shape the local area.

Aims, activities and aspirations

Katherine’s current aims for KOA’s cradle-to-career model are:

To develop a strong, mutually respectful communication strategy with the school’s families, multi-agency partners and local businesses in order to share information to support children more effectively—in particular, in mental and physical health, school attendance and employmen.
To develop a pilot Family Hub in collaboration with the local authority.

Establishing strong, trusting relationships

Clear communication

One of the biggest challenges the school has—like many—is around maintaining a regular cadence of meaningful, positive interactions with families.

To do this work, they appointed an Associate Assistant Principal for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Hannah. Alongside her existing role as a Science teacher, Hannah has developed a Communications Framework that sets out frames for email writing, phone calls and face-to-face conversations with families—for example, ensuring that letters to parents are at a reading age that is inclusive for all parents and scripting ways of having particular types of conversations with parents. She has also conducted audits of all the school’s comms materials, such as reviewing its website.

The Comms Framework is centred on the school’s values of ‘work hard and be kind’. However, it clarifies that kindness involves being clear and honest with parents rather than simply being ‘nice’.

Taking part in the C2C Partnership has offered ideas for good practice in parent comms. One of the practices used at Reach Academy Feltham and adapted at KOA is how they conduct family meetings involving the child. Where previously staff would have met the child and parents together, they now meet with parents first to thrash out the issue (for example, a negative behaviour incident) and agree on a joint response. This enables the school and parents to present a united front in subsequent meetings with the child, which in turn is more likely to lead to subsequent positive courses of action.

Meetings with parents and children take place in a room that’s been remodelled to look and feel like ‘your nan’s front room’. This can help to put parents and children at ease, re-framing the dynamic of conversations between families and the school.

Clear expectations

Managing change has not been straightforward. For instance, one practice that Katherine observed when visiting Reach Academy Feltham was the behaviour system in which, upon a negative behaviour incident, the child is sent to a reflection room where a parent meeting is scheduled for the next day.

This appeared to tick the box for what staff at KOA wanted (being able to take a clear set of actions when a negative behaviour incident occurred and following up with a restorative conversation) and Katherine decided to put this straight in. However, suspensions sky-rocketed at KOA and the sheer volume of next-day parent meetings this necessitated took up all of Katherine’s time.

Leaders acknowledged that, in simply transplanting the practice, they hadn’t tackled the root cause of the issue; nor did they have the wider structures in place to support teachers and pupils in classrooms. They recognised the investment required to make changes like this stick and resolved to review and iterate their approach. Staff and leaders learned lots from the experience and are drawing confidence from the efficacy of the system’s subsequent iteration. The school now has a stable behaviour system, establishing a working group to trial any new measures. They’ve also linked their work on behaviour to staff professional development and to their SEND team to build greater coherence throughout the school.

Community development

Developing a Family Hub

The central piece of KOA’s cradle-to-career model is the development of an outward-facing Family Hub in partnership with South Gloucestershire Local Authority.

The aim is to provide a long-term, versatile asset to the community that offers an inclusive space to address community needs, promote community engagement and generate revenue to support children facing disadvantage. The Hub will offer varied help for young people and their families that includes mental health support, parenting classes, adult literacy and numeracy, access into employment, cookery and life skills and a food bank.

Whilst many Family Hubs focus on babies and young children, the intention for Rose Cottage is to focus on children at risk of child criminal exploitation around the Year 6 to Year 8 age group. This would complement the local authority’s plans for another Family Hub in Patchway that focuses on a younger age group, whilst addressing a perceived need around the limited existing resource and mental health support available for teenage children. Although evidencing the perceived higher risk of CCE in the community is difficult, contextual indications include the data around school attendance and NEET figures, as well as some recent gang-related murders and attempted murders in the area.

The work is currently at the brokering and bid-writing stage. The local authority is leading on writing the Family Hub bid but the school is closely involved in this. The school is providing the premises for the Hub—a recently vacated caretaker’s house over the road from the school. Initial development of the Hub will involve transforming Rose Cottage into a suitable site for hosting community programmes.

Rose Cottage is a former caretaker’s house located within the overall grounds of the school, but with its own outdoor space and entrance from the road.

A key motivation for working with the local authority on the Hub is the potential for long-term funding and resource to run the Hub. Having the local authority take on this responsibility longer term is crucial because the school needs to think carefully about the time and investment they put in. Finding funding can be a time-sink and could mean school improvement suffers otherwise.

As Katherine notes, her thinking on this has undergone a huge change. Having been inspired by seeing The Reach Foundation’s Children’s Hub in Hounslow, she thought this was something she could replicate at KOA, having it up and running within six months. What she later realised is that the setting of Reach is entirely different and, in particular, their funding model which relies heavily upon philanthropy. This isn’t possible within most schools’ funding models. To set up and run a sustainable Hub therefore requires different thinking. For her, the local authority-led Family Hubs model is a means of building in this sustainable funding.

Brokering between the school and the local authority on funding and responsibilities is ongoing. The school’s central offer is the use of Rose Cottage, a recently vacated caretaker’s cottage, as the site for the Family Hub. In the short-term, the local authority are putting in £10,000 to start and the trust (CLF) are also putting in some central resource to transform the cottage into a suitable Hub site.

When ready, Katherine intends to take £20,000 of seed funding from The Reach Foundation to fund a Hub Manager for a year. Katherine’s intention is that whilst in the first year or two the school will provide support, in the longer term, the local authority will be responsible for funding and running the Hub. One question within the brokering is the extent to which KOA children will be accessing the Hub. Currently, the two parties have agreed to pilot the Hub for a year. If it’s successful, they will need to agree on the long-term structure.

Lessons learnt

Relationships beget opportunities

Katherine’s existing relationship with the local authority have been critical to the development of this work. Katherine sits on South Gloucestershire Council’s Children’s Partnership Executive Board (which includes the Council’s Head of People, the police and the ICB) and in the Council’s Best Start in Life Network. She’s also on the Council’s Fair Access Panel and High Risk Group for children who have been permanently excluded or are at risk of permanent exclusion, or are out of education.

Being engaged with these groups led her to think about how to influence South Gloucestershire policy and to sell the bigger vision of the Family Hub to them as the relationships have developed. The inspiration from Reach’s Hub and the opportunity of the vacated caretaker’s house led to initial discussions about the Family Hub.

Work is just starting on writing the bid for the Family Hub. Katherine is working closely with South Gloucestershire Best Start in Life Network to develop the model – in particular, Kevin Sweeney, Strategic Lead for Early Help Partnerships, and Alison Sykes, Service Manager for EDT and Projects.

Embrace community voice to steer and derisk the project

To kickstart the work, the school initiated a set of meetings involving South Gloucestershire Attendance and Exclusions, Trust staff, the school nurse, the PCSOs, the town clerk, and representatives from the student council and PTA groups. The PTA also ran coffee meetings to make sure parents’ voices were heard. In this first set of meetings, they discussed what services the Family Hub should offer.

At the same time, the school’s Deputy DSL went to local parks, precincts and other community spaces and asked people: “what is putting pressure on you and your family?” (the question The Reach Foundation uses to initiate open conversations with their families and the wider community).

Since that initial research, the school has established a new relationship with a community group called Connecting Kingswood: a collective of local public and third sector organisations who aim to increase community action through things like promotion of community events, services and volunteering opportunities. The school has offered them a venue to host meetings asnd events while benefitting from their community links, expertise and knowledge.

Prove the concept

In the meantime, the school is running more community programmes as proof of concept for when the Hub gets going. Because these are taking place on the school site, rather than in a separate Hub, the focus for now is on ‘lower risk’ projects such as cookery classes. To lead this work, Katherine has hired an Associate Assistant Principal for Health and Community Partnerships, James. Like Hannah, James is an existing staff member who now has additional responsibilities and has joined the wider Senior Leadership Team.

One ‘high-risk’ programme they have set up is a Monday-night youth club at the school. The community has seen some high-profile incidents of violence amongst young people in recent times (not associated with the school) and there have been concerns over the way a local youth centre was being run. The goal of the youth club is to encourage children to come to a ‘safe space’ rather than hang out in local parks or elsewhere in the community in the evening.

As the youth club is outward facing (i.e. open to all young people rather than KOA students only), the school makes sure they are not seen to be running it. However, they keep close oversight so that they can work with agencies to share information that might come to light. This is until they are confident that it can run by itself at low risk. The programme is being paid for by Wesport, The West of England Sport Trust.

The school also hosts local authority-run Triple P parenting courses, which support parents of teenagers to reduce mental health, emotional and behavioural issues. These are not exclusive to KOA families, although the school can encourage their own families to attend, and a few do so. The school continues to run existing events that include the wider Kingswood community such as a summer festival.

With specific regards to employment, KOA has hired an Associate Assistant Principal for STEM who has been working on making connections with Bristol-based businesses such as Renishaw, Airbus and the Navy. Currently, the focus is on building relationships while exploring opportunities to get these big employers to run student engagement activities and developing business partnership arrangements including apprenticeship routes.

Key takeaways

Reflecting on the last 18 months and her work with the Cradle-to-Career Partnership, Katherine offers two big takeaways:

Embrace ‘systems thinking’

Katherine notes that when she visited Reach Academy Feltham, there were practices she saw that she wanted to adopt quickfast at KOA—but the setting of the two schools is so different that these wouldn’t work (as described in the behaviour systems and hub examples).

Instead, it’s about understanding ‘the why’ rather than ‘the what’; embracing a systems approach to develop context-sensitive solutions that do not create unintended consequences but instead tend towards healthy dynamics. Affirming why you want to do something frees you up to do whatever is required, in your school setting, rather than applying a short-term fix. A lot of CPD in education is about learning practices that you can adopt in your school, so this is quite a different approach.

‘Slow is smooth; smooth is fast’

Beware your own expectations. Slow down. Purposeful, intentional, sustainable change takes time.

Katherine says that she was naïve in thinking they could do everything—including setting up a children’s hub—in a year! From the work on relationships in schools, she’s realised that trying to change everything in one go—whilst students and staff are still in school—is a bad idea. Meanwhile, with the Hub, she found that building something sustainable requires taking the time to build relationships first.

Instead, Katherine has found that she needed to slow down to work in a purposeful and developmental way for the school, bringing people on the journey along the way. This has involved managing some of her own expectations for what she wanted to achieve from the two years of the partnership.

Key enablers

Four key enablers to developing an effective cradle-to-career model have been:

Establishing strong, trusting relationships with external partners

As described in the Family Hub section, building strong prior relationships with external partners has been vital to doing this work—and you need time to make these relationships first. This is something Katherine has learnt over time through hearing Ed Vainker talk about this. Rather than simply asking for things, it’s about forming mutually beneficial relationships—offering things to others first without expecting anything in return. This then carries a weight that means you can ask for things in future.

Securing staff and trust buy-in

Staff buy-in is vital for the sustainable and purposeful development of the school. Staffing shortages are a current barrier within the sector, but offering career progression routes with good professional development is a way of addressing the additional staffing needs of the C2C work—as they have done with the AAP roles.

Trust buy-in involves navigating trust politics, particularly as they are the only school in the trust participating in the C2C Partnership. This has involved understanding how to ‘sell’ the work to different audiences: developing a deeper understanding of individual and organisational priorities and working towards alignment.

Aligning the C2C work with school and trust priorities

Katherine has chosen to focus on the Family relationships and Community development threads of the C2C Partnership—given how well-established the trust’s curriculum, teaching and learning frameworks are.

Katherine has found that weaving the C2C work into the school’s Annual Implementation Plan has been transformational in terms of maintaining focus.The school’s AIP for this year is focused on literacy, attendance and partnerships, which meshes well with the ‘Relationships’ and ‘Community’ threads.

Embracing the C2C Partnership as a place to pause and think

Engaging with the Partnership has given Katherine reason to remove herself from the day-to-day of school operations and given her the requisite headspace to reflect and think strategically about some of the broader challenges (and opportunities!) facing her and her school. What you end up thinking about—things like relationships and community—aren’t always the things that are at the top of your ‘to-do’ list as a head teacher. Yet, this wider thinking is important to do. It’s like a nudge to keep these things on the agenda.