download

System leadership
will carry our name Tudor Grange.
This is nothing to do with arrogance or
pomposity, it is we believe very important.
You may or may not have noticed the
advertising message on red Warburton’s
lorries. It says: “We care because our
name’s on it”
In the words of Jonathan Warburton,
the chairman of the 134-year-old family
baker business, “When your name is over
the door you tend to look at things in a
different way. It is very, very personal.”
In 2010 we were very keen to take the
opportunities that we felt were provided
by academy status. We converted to
academy status in October 2010. It
would have been a month earlier, if
not for some protracted bureaucratic
land issue. Once again phrases such as
a ‘two-tier’ system were ringing in our
ears. We have no regrets whatsoever. At
Solihull we now have post-16 provision
having been held back from this offer for
many years by a local cartel that wanted
to maintain a very tired status quo. The
view was, ‘if it’s not broken don’t fix it’.
Our view is always much more like, ‘if it
is not broken you have not looked hard
enough’. Continuous improvement and
development is fundamental to success in
any walk of life.
There have been times when we have
had concerns. Such journeys are not
usually smooth every day. However the
benefits have been enormous. As well as
developing our multi-academy trust we
have also developed our Teaching School
Alliance and we have become an initial
teacher training organisation in our own
right. We are attractive as an employer
but more importantly we have been able
to provide development opportunities for
many of our talented and inspirational
staff. This has meant that we have been
able to retain high quality staff that
may not have been previously possible.
We are currently making the transition
from seeing ourselves as a school to
seeing ourselves as an organisation. The
future is our multi-academy trust being
responsible for a group of schools that will
all carry the Tudor Grange brand name,
for the want of a better term.
Many converter academies are doing
important work in helping to lead our
system. I would encourage them to
continue to do so because they have much
to offer. I would also encourage them to
consider becoming sponsors of academies
in their own right. There are two reasons
for this. Firstly, they have much to offer in
terms of system leadership. I am far from
convinced that the large multi-academy
sponsors are necessarily the way forward.
Secondly, there are many advantages in
developing a more focused approach to
system leadership.
For those schools that are unsure and
less confident I would finish by reminding
them of the words of Kurt Hahn: “There
is more in us than we know if we could be
made to see it.”
Summer 2014 | 15