Towards a New Vision of Staff Effectiveness

Canons had undertaken a lot of work looking at teaching staff effectiveness, moving away from the use of observation grades alone and to more holistic measures with a focus on development and challenge. In October in developing the planning for 2 Inset Days, the importance of looking at this from an overall staff perspective was incorporated.

Both Teaching and Support staff started the day together, before sessions involving support staff in teams were introduced. In order to capture the feedback from these sessions, we decided to use a model used to analyse culture from a strategic and human resources point of view. The first model, shown below, takes the feedback and captures what was said during the day using the model.

 

This was fine, but what did we want to change and how would things look in an ideal Canons? The next attempt using the model tried to capture the future and what it could look like (see below).

Next steps

This was fine as far as it went, but it was clear that we needed to take this forward. We agreed that a small working group should look to get some more information, to help address this vision and add some information and detail. The working group met and suggested some next steps based on the models and the feedback from the Inset days. These next steps were:

- To research professional review/standards at other schools looking at both materials and possible visits. The questions to be asked were around what is best practice and do we need to adapt our procedures in the light of our research? What can we learn about what other schools do for staff effectiveness?

- To research professional review/standards in wider world – the questions to be asked were around what is best practice and do we need to adapt our procedures? What can we learn about what other organisations do for staff effectiveness?

- To devise a questionnaire to go to support staff (enlisting the support of our Research Advocate). This would provide a view point from staff, to add to the ideas from the Inset Day, but this would provide harder data.

- To review what being a leader of support staff might entail – perhaps creating something like a skills matrix questionnaire and something around establishing a Canons leadership standard.

We have now circulated the questionnaire and with a 60% response rate have some hard data to interrogate further. We also have visits underway, though we are interested to find any organisations in education and beyond to help us, either as a venue for a visit or to provide research information.

We will update this space!