SEARCH-Education-Trust

SEARCH Education Trust

Improving staff wellbeing and retention can be challenging, especially when serving diverse pupil populations with varying needs. This case study explores the strategies and approaches employed by SEARCH Education Trust, a values-driven trust supporting both mainstream and special schools. By examining SEARCH Education Trust’s experiences, educational leaders can gain valuable insights and identify best practices for creating a sustainable and fulfilling working environment for their staff across different school contexts.

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.

SEARCH Education Trust, founded in 2013, is a small, values-driven educational Trust currently supporting two schools in North London. Heartlands High School, a Secondary School, and The Grove, a special school for children with autism and complex learning needs. With a focus on community engagement, high quality teaching, and holistic pupil support, the Trust serves over 1,300 pupils with the help of approximately 280 dedicated staff members.

Looking to expand its impact, the Trust has outlined plans for a new free school in Enfield to serve additional pupils with autism, underscoring its commitment to inclusivity and educational excellence across North London.

Heartlands High School opened in 2010 as part of ‘Building Schools for the Future’ in a state of the art new building in the heart of Wood Green in North London. The school became an academy when the Trust was established in 2013. The school has established a very strong ethos of aspiration that is focused on educational excellence through a common language of values and shared traditions, capturing pupils’ imagination and motivating them to be the best they can be. The ethos of the school is encapsulated in the term SEARCH which stands for School Matters, Effort, Achievement, responsibility, character and High Aspirations.

Key contributors: Nasma Katon (Director of HR) and Elen Roberts (Interim CEO and Headteacher)

Practice and impact

One centralised calendar

A well-organised calendar that doesn’t change is central to managing workload at Heartlands High School. The calendar is approved by the Senior Leadership Team, the Extended Leadership Team (including faculty and year leaders) and the School Council, which is a group of staff that handles routine staff issues, like holiday parties and staff room supplies, making sure there is buy-in and representation from many staff stakeholders. The calendar is live, it can be superimposed on your personal calendar, but nothing goes on or off without being approved. Interim CEO and Headteacher of Heartlands High School Elen Roberts emphasises that this provides clarity and alignment for staff and is a way to quickly identify if too much is being asked of staff members.

Clear, unchanging communication process

“Bulletin; Briefing (if it’s really important or needs to be repeated); Meeting (either line management, curriculum or another).” This clear process is how communication channels are kept in line at Heartlands High School. All tasks and requests amongst staff must go through a school bulletin to manage workload effectively and this is reviewed weekly by Headteacher Elen Roberts herself, who will remove requests or “can you’s” if they are abundant. This is supplemented by weekly bulletins created by middle leaders to communicate key information and deadlines to their teams. An “in and out” policy is in place to ensure that if new tasks are assigned, the school either builds in the time for staff to do this or something else is removed from the workload. There is also a permanent online form available for staff to provide feedback or suggestions to leadership, fostering a culture of open communication and a reliable feedback loop. Regular monitoring and adjustments are made based on staff input to improve processes.

Managing staff workload effectively

“The problem is when staff are constantly hit with ‘can you do this’ or ‘can you handle that’—it’s overwhelming. If there are too many of those requests, it’s like death by a thousand cuts. That’s why I review the bulletin every Friday, and if I see too many ‘can you’s,’ I take them out and push them to next week. It’s all about controlling the micro-tasks so they don’t pile up.”

Elen Roberts, Interim CEO and Headteacher

Heartlands High School

Flexible email policies and using chat for speed

Staff at Heartlands High School are encouraged to send emails at their convenience, without strict expectations for replies during school hours. This has been done to allow for flexibility to work when it’s convenient, for example for the parent who wishes to leave school early to be with their family, but plans to finish some tasks once their children are in bed. However, the rules clearly state that while you can send emails at any time, you cannot expect a response at any time, and responses should be expected during work hours. To further increase flexibility around emails, the school is rethinking what needs to be an email and what doesn’t, by using Google Chat for internal communication. This has reduced email volume and streamlined communication, by being able to respond with a thumbs up instead of having to write an entire reply in an email message. The use of Google Chat continues to address the need for an audit trail, but the interaction has been sped up immensely and provides a centralised place for informal communication between colleagues.

Investing in pastoral care

Pastoral care and discipline are highly organised to ensure pupils are prepared for lessons, which reduces teachers’ need to manage behaviour and material readiness during class time. 10% of the Heartland High School’s budget is spent on pastoral care. This means no pupil will come to class in a poor uniform, as staff at the gate monitor pupils and give them the uniform supplies they need to start the day. Additionally, all children are provided with essential equipment like pens and glue sticks, removing the need for teachers to deal with such issues. There is no need to stop a lesson for a teacher to find a pen because the children have pens given to them.

“Pastoral care is at the heart of what we do. We invest heavily in it, making sure students are supported before they even step into the classroom, and so teachers can focus on teaching. It’s about creating an environment where students are ready to learn, and staff aren’t burdened with those day-to-day issues.”

Elen Roberts, Interim CEO and Headteacher

Heartlands High School

Challenges and solutions

Tackling the micro tasks

Interim CEO and Headteacher Elen Roberts makes a point that it isn’t the big tasks that are a detriment to workload, but the build up of micro-tasks, that are hard to keep track of and take up a lot of the limited thinking time teachers at Heartlands High School have. Big tasks are the ones that staff spend a lot of time discussing, the inspiring part of the job, but micro tasks will quickly overwhelm staff who already have a lot on their plate and are pulled in too many directions. Elen frequently emphasises to staff that “It’s not the big tasks that make your job hard, it’s the little ones that are given to you by each other.” Nobody can send an all-staff email unless it’s been approved by the headteacher or deputy because it’s usually a request for people to do something, or for someone to do a micro task, which increases the burden of staff.

The beginning of AI tools

AI tools are being explored for administrative tasks like report writing and communication, which can save significant time. There has been a decision at Heartlands High School to not use AI for lesson planning at the moment, but it is being used for other tasks such as report writing, newsletter writing, the bulletin, email communications, and synthesising information to understand key points. All of the SLT currently use SLT AI, but not everyone was easy to convince to start using it. Training sessions are provided to help staff effectively use AI for their needs. This year the school will implement AI drop-in sessions to teach staff how to ask the AI tools their role-specific key questions. As Elen describes, “The leadership skill [for using AI] is knowing what the question is. The answer is just a synopsis of the research. It’s doing what you would do anyway, in terms of research, but it would take you 12 hours.”

De-digitalising homework

Heartland High School uses Google for most of the systems they have in place, such as making centralised requests to the administrative team through one Google Form, all documents being on the Google Drive cloud where everything is sharable and workable. Homework, however, is one area where the school found too much time being spent on marking or giving feedback digitally and decided to take it back to basics with bingo stamps. Each staff member has sets of green, amber or red bingo stamps to give pupils as needed. The bingo stamp system is used for marking homework; doing this in class and live saves time for teachers, who don’t have any other marking to do outside of school. This is supplemented with a weekly quiz, which is online, but gives the answer automatically to pupils, again reducing the marking load of staff.

Building resilient staff

If staff at Heartlands High School have a very high cognitive load, it is the school’s responsibility to give staff members the tools to address that cognitive load, but not tell them how to process it, as needs will vary from person to person. The same goes for managing work-life balance: flexibility is given to staff to work when and how they wish (within the constraints of their pupil-facing responsibilities), but setting boundaries and balancing their interests, hobbies and time to relax is ultimately their responsibility, not that of their leadership. The role of regular 1:1 line manager meetings is important, as each meeting starts with “How are you?”. However, it is the staff member’s responsibility to say that they are not well and to work together with their line manager to find a solution that will help improve that wellbeing. This is all supplemented by various other wellbeing services provided by the school.

 

“Building resilient staff is crucial in a challenging environment like ours. It’s not just about reducing workload, but about giving staff the tools to manage their own wellbeing. We emphasise that while we’ll support them, the first responsibility for maintaining boundaries and balance rests with each individual. We want our teachers to be passionate, but also to know how to decompress and protect their own mental health. Resilience isn’t about making the job easy, it’s about making it sustainable.”

Elen Roberts, Interim CEO and Headteacher

Heartlands High School

Other highlights

Hard, but not impossible

Built-in trust and leadership doing what they say they will do are key components of the school culture at Heartlands High School. Every line management meeting starts with “how are you?” to make sure every person has a listening ear to support them. There is a balance between implementing new initiatives and being humble to accept that not all ideas work and needing to stop doing things. At the centre of it all is the mantra that “working in schools should be hard, but it shouldn’t be impossible,” and that balancing workload is not about making it easier, but making brave choices about where and how limited time should be spent. As interim CEO and headteacher Elen describes it,

“Children deserve your absolute hardest and best work. We can’t forget that passion, drive and desire to make schools fantastic will be hard work. Reducing workload and increasing wellbeing is not the same as making it easy.”

Elen Roberts, Interim CEO and Headteacher

SEARCH Education Trust

Workload crisis in different contexts

When reflecting on the challenges secondary schools face in regards to workload, Elen is quite clear that there is simply more to do in secondary schools than in primary schools. Having less built in time to plan and prepare, having more pupils to manage and get to know are just some examples. Additionally, the crisis around workload is closely linked to behaviour and behaviour issues are more acute by secondary school, for example the impact of undiagnosed SEN is much more dramatic. Special schools also need to be regarded differently in terms of workload, where emotional and physical wellbeing is as important as workload for staff. Workload may be different in special schools, there may not be as much marking exams, but there will be other tasks, such as writing up behaviour reports; if a child gets 14 behaviour reports written up in one day, that is workload time for an adult to input that information that is needed to analyse and understand patterns of behaviour with that child.

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