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Participant stories

Leanne Simmonds

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I am a Consultant Subject Leader for MFL at the Evelyn Grace Academy, which opened in September 2008 with a Year 7 cohort.  Working in a new school, and starting everything from scratch, has presented me with extreme time pressures.  I enrolled on the Teaching Leaders programme to provide myself with the support and training I thought I would need in my exciting, but challenging role.

I found it difficult to run straight from the residential week into a new term because I also had a new job and a new role. It was intellectually, emotionally and physically demanding, but I enjoyed the networking and exploring ways of working out issues away from school. The issues they talked about were things that I found extremely helpful when I started at my new school.

The introduction to the Data Toolkit at the residential week was something that I really benefited from and is part of the Teaching Leaders kit that we can use back in our schools. Data was really one of my weaker areas, but now I’m beginning to get quite excited about it.  I’m putting everything in one place and I’m using it to inform all the planning I’m doing for the whole cohort, as well as thinking in detail about the interventions I can make for my target students. Whenever I had a question about the Data Toolkit, the staff at Teaching Leaders provided excellent support and this commitment to us, the participants, has been clear throughout the programme.

I have found the support of my coach particularly helpful in extending my understanding of how to analyse data and sharpen my focus so that I will be able to identify exactly what the impact of my initiative is on each of the targeted students.  I am also beginning to appreciate the potential value of the Data Toolkit beyond the needs of the targeted students. Working with Year 7 students in MFL means that there is no KS2 MFL-specific baseline data for me to use.  The Teaching Leaders team have proved open to modifying their deadlines to ensure that there is as little conflict as possible between academy deadlines and the programme deadlines.

The support that I have been given is the biggest difference between this programme and other programmes. I have really appreciated it, and it has helped me produce some good results. With the support of my coach, Teaching Leaders staff, and my own colleagues, I have identified forty-two Year 7 students with reading levels two years below their current year, who will benefit the most from my improvement initiative, which concerns raising these students’ levels of literacy.

 

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