Engage, Enrich, Excel Academies (EEEA) Trust
Recognising the critical importance of staff wellbeing, EEEA Trust has prioritised creating a supportive and sustainable working environment for its staff. This case study explores the strategies and approaches that have enabled EEEA Trust to successfully manage staff workload while expanding their reach. By examining their experiences, educational leaders can gain valuable insights and identify best practices for balancing staff workload, improving staff wellbeing and retention within their own organisations.
Their insights illustrate how leadership fosters a strong organisational culture conducive to manageable and fulfilling workloads. Along with other schools and trusts we interviewed we created a Balancing Workload in School Trusts guide, which acts as an encyclopaedia of approaches, practices and advice, this guide is built on interviews with 18 leaders.
Engage, Enrich, Excel Academies (EEEA) Trust is a trust of six primary schools serving disadvantaged pupils and their very diverse communities across the south of England. Having grown steadily by adding a school per year, the Trust plans to continue to grow its number of schools but is steadfast in upholding its approach of “localism with positive collaboration.”
Ravenscote Junior School is the founding school of EEEA Trust. It is a large junior school in Camberley, Surrey, and with 620 pupils and 70 members of staff, it is a similar size to a small secondary school. The school is awaiting the results of its first Ofsted inspection since it became an academy in 2014.
Key contributors: David Harris (CEO), Amy Wells (Headteacher of Ravenscote Junior School)
In this case study:
- Practice and impact
- Challenges and solutions
Practice and impact
Trust-wide initiatives, localised flexibility
EEEA has implemented several policies to reduce staff workload, focusing on efficiency, wellbeing, and effective teaching practices. Some of the policies are implemented trust-wide, but there is flexibility for schools to try out localised initiatives, and the senior leadership team at the school- and trust-level are constantly looking for feedback and ideas for improvement. Their approach focuses on ongoing commitment to reducing workload, striving for evolution rather than revolution, and at the heart of all decisions is the question “How does this benefit the children?”.
Live marking and assessment
Ravenscote Junior School’s headteacher, Amy Wells, saw their most significant improvement in staff workload when they moved to live marking and assessment. Now, teachers provide feedback in real-time within the classroom, and identify pupils who need additional support with a particular concept before they can move to the next topic. After an initial trial, it became clear that this worked for all subjects except for English: pupils were developing just as fast in other subjects as they were before the policy changed, but in English progress had begun to slow. So they reversed this decision for English and kept it for the others. With this initiative, they have decreased out-of-hours marking from 5 hours of lessons per day to 1 hour, and created a more interactive learning environment for their pupils, without compromising on pupil results.
Setting email boundaries
Ravenscote Junior School has seen huge improvements in staff workload by implementing strict email rules and managing parental expectations about who can be contacted when. Parents are not provided with individual staff email addresses, instead all correspondence goes through a shared inbox and is forwarded to the relevant member of staff. The email is closed from 6 p.m. during the week, and all weekend. As the time spent in school can come with a lot of surprises, it is important to enable people to switch off and have dedicated time for bigger-picture thinking, and simply to enjoy their life outside of work. One colleague, who initially was concerned about the policy being implemented, reported “I’ve been able to cook for my children every night this week and I feel like a different person”.
Balancing in-school and after-school workload
“I think I split the idea of workload into two parts, so you’ve got what happens between 8:30 and 3:30 and what happens before 8:30 and after 3:30. They’re two very different workloads because as a teacher teaching full-time in the classroom you can’t do the planning and assessment part fully during the school day hours.”
Flexible working opportunities across roles
EEEA has been creative with flexible working opportunities across the Trust. They have implemented wellbeing days, allowing every member of staff (including those on part time contracts) a day off per year they can take when they want, allowing them to recharge and attend personal events without guilt. This has led to reduced staff absence and, in some cases, a reduction in supply costs. Headteachers are expected to take dedicated headship time off site to enable strategic planning and opportunities to reflect on the vision and school development plan. When they are offsite, they are not contactable via some of the usual means available within the school grounds, enabling them to be more present when they are there and more productive when they are not. By modelling this behaviour themselves, Headteacher Amy and her leadership colleagues at the school see that teaching staff recognise the importance of a work life balance.
Different mindsets: school vs. home
“I think that certainly for myself and I know the senior leadership team here our brains work differently when we’re in the school building to when we’re at home.”
Reducing lesson planning time with a connected curriculum
The introduction of a connected curriculum, setting very clear curriculum guidelines and adopting existing external tools has enabled staff at Ravenscote Junior School to reduce time spent on lesson planning. The trust focuses on ensuring that skills are being built across the curriculum, so what is learned in one lesson is built upon elsewhere. This starts with reading: when pupils join in year 3 they can come from as many as 17 different feeder schools, and the range in experience and expectations can vary enormously. By working hard in the early months of their time in the school to bring everyone onto the same curriculum, pupils and teachers are able to have a shared understanding of expectations, and lesson plans are much less bespoke from one teacher to the next and from one year to the next – the staff build on existing good practice, evolving rather than reworking the plans each time. The school uses AI as a copilot in the development of resources: teaching staff remain the expert in the overall design of the curriculum, but tools like TeachMateAI enable them to create engaging resources that make learning fun.
Challenges and solutions
Evolution – not revolution
The focus at EEEA, and at Ravenscote Junior School specifically, is on evolution not revolution. Headteacher Amy Wells and CEO David Harris do not believe it would have been possible to implement a connected curriculum at the same time as changing their email policy, moving to live marking and introducing flexible working opportunities. Each of these took a consistent effort, with a clear focus each time on “the Why”. Beyond this, they have kept a close eye on people’s reactions, seeking feedback via Edurio’s annual Staff Experience Survey, and on-the-go discussions about the approaches they have taken. This has allowed them to be nimble and tweak things that are not working as they had hoped, making big strides forwards without overwhelming the team.
Over communicating to ease doubts
There has been some resistance to change with some initiatives introduced at Ravenscote Junior School, for example from parents who were told they would not be able to access staff during evenings and weekends, but once the new email policy was adopted and parents saw no reduction in their children’s quality of education, this changed. High levels of communication throughout any change have been vital in ensuring people understand why something is happening, what exactly the change is and what the expected outcomes are. Educating staff on new tools, like AI teaching resources, takes time and energy but pays off in the long term as staff make them a core part of their working day.
Transparent rationale for change
“Because we always start to explain why we’re doing anything with the children at the heart of everything. You don’t come to work in a school unless you care about that. So I think for everything that we’ve brought in, if anyone has not understood why we’ve done it then we have the rationale conversations and we are open and transparent. This has worked to bring staff on board. It’s been very positive.”
Balancing consistency with personal preference
Maintaining high standards for pupils and staff at Ravenscote Junior School, while allowing flexibility in how staff manage their workload can be difficult. There is often a tension between accountability measures and the need for staff to feel empowered. The leadership team have worked to set clear parameters for staff to work in, while giving them flexibility within those to make it work for them. Using the email example, there are staff who prefer to do their thinking time in the evening, and they felt concerned that not being able to send emails during this time would lead to inefficiencies. They have instead found that they can still do their thinking time, only now it is without distraction from inbound emails, and they can schedule emails to be sent the next working day.
At what cost?
Some of the policies they have implemented at Ravenscote Junior School seemed expensive at first. By allowing everyone to take a scheduled Wellbeing Day during the course of the year, there was a concern that this would drastically increase costs of supply staff. Instead, they have found that by being able to schedule this in, they can manage the costs more proactively. Retention at Ravenscote is also significantly above the national average, meaning there is an overall reduction in costs of hiring and training.
Wellbeing days reducing absence
“And when you weigh [wellbeing days] up against staff absence rates. You know the ones that take the well being days and thrive on them have a lower absence. There’s lower absence in that school, and in the ones that don’t there’s a higher absence so actually from a cost perspective it sounds a lot initially but actually it works out for the best. It’s about having that bravery.”