Teach Secondary Issue 14.7

LEARNING from the best Mark and Zoe Enser reflect on what visiting hundreds of schools taught them about the real markers of success... W hen you spend years visiting schools up and down the country – as teachers, leaders, inspectors and nowwhile working in school improvement – you begin to notice patterns. Each school has its own context, challenges and story, and yet certain common threads keep re-emerging. The best schools aren’t those with glossy prospectuses or clever branding. They aren’t defined by the quirks of a charismatic leader, or by one impressive initiative. Instead, their success rests on something far more deliberate – clarity of purpose, intentional action and relentless reflection. Beyond the surface That’s the core message of our new book, HowDo They Do It? – Learning Lessons fromAmazing Teachers, Leaders and Schools . It’s a celebration of those schools that get it right, and an invitation for all of us to learn from them. Schools are complex places. Every day, thousands of small interactions add up to something far greater than the sum of their parts. In weaker schools, this complexity looks chaotic; in stronger ones, it appears to be seamless. But when you dip beneath the surface, you see just howmuch thought has gone into creating that apparent effortlessness. From our visits, four big lessons stand out as the real markers of success. 1. Purpose comes first In too many schools, curriculum intent became little more than a glossy statement on a website – something retrofitted to existing practice, rather than driving it. In the strongest schools, intent was woven into the DNA of their planning. Leaders thought hard about what they wanted pupils to achieve, and then stripped away anything that didn’t serve that purpose. This didn’t mean narrowing the curriculum. Quite the opposite. Purposeful schools achieved breadth without bloat . They were ruthless about cutting content that didn’t fit, freeing up time for greater depth and coherence. As one leader told us, “ If you don’t knowwhat you want, then you don’t knowwhat you don’t need. ” 2. Ambitionmeans more than slogans Every school claims to be ambitious for its pupils. The difference is in what that looks like in practice. In less successful schools, ambition was pitched either too low (with KS3 students repeating the rainforest lessons they had already studied in primary) or unrealistically high, with pupils asked to tackle material they had no foundation for. In great schools, ambition was carefully sequenced. Leaders knewwhat excellence looked like in each subject and age phase, and created the steps needed to get there. Most importantly, they gave pupils real opportunities to do ambitious things – writing extended essays, performing complex drama, conducting serious fieldwork. Ambition wasn’t an aspiration pinned to a wall; it was something lived daily in classrooms. 3. Coherence beats gimmicks We’ve all seen the laminated ‘whole school themes’ that distort curricula, rather than unify them. Egyptians in history forcing a detour via the Nile in geography, novels chosen for their thematic links rather than literary merit – that’s not coherence, it’s confusion. What marks out the best schools is a deeper coherence; a clear, shared sense of purpose that shapes decision- making across the organisation. You can see this in assemblies that reinforce curriculum aims, in assessments that align with values and in how all staff – fromNQTs to senior leaders – can articulate why they do what they do. ‘Coherence’ needn’t mean “Ambitionwasn’tanaspiration pinned toawall; itwas lived daily in classrooms” 22 teachwire.net/secondary