You have to sweat the small stuff...
What I learned on a visit to Stanley Road Primary School
In the 90s, there was a bestselling self-help book called “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff”, the title of which has passed into common parlance.[1] Nowadays, when we hear the phrase, it’s usually in the context of leaders setting the “vision” and not worrying too much about the details. Whether that is good advice for business leaders, I can’t say, but anyone planning to lead a school better be prepared to sweat the small stuff in extraordinary detail. That was the main lesson I learned from a visit to the amazing Stanley Road Primary School (“Stanley Road”) in Oldham.
I joined one of Stanley Road’s regular open mornings aimed at educators where I joined 5 other teachers at various levels for a briefing and tour hosted by deputy head, Andrew Percival. The tone was set the moment I walked inside the school gates – my presence was picked up by one of the staff on the gate within seconds who then radioed ahead and took me where I should be, walking past groups of children in the corridors all with their hands behind their backs (more on that later). A varied group of educational professionals assembled to be briefed by Andrew before starting the tour. We had mainly found out about Stanley Road on Twitter although I had also listened to Andrew’s appearance on the Dynamic Deputies podcast (well worth a listen to understand more about Stanley Road’s approach to behaviour). Andrew explained that the school had been on quite a journey since he started (and almost quit immediately) nearly 20 years ago. Stanley Road’s current reputation was built on 3 pillars – exemplary behaviour, knowledge-rich curriculum and explicit teaching.
The school is in a challenging area with proportions of children on free school meals and for whom English is not the first language well above national levels. As Andrew described the school when he started, there were fights in classrooms, constant misbehaviour and the worst results in the local authority. That experience and the population served by the school must have informed the approach that they have developed over the years.
As soon as we set off on the tour, everyone in the group noticed how orderly it was. “Wow – it’s so quiet,” was a whispered comment behind me.
As Andrew tells it, this level of order and calm isn’t achieved by draconian punishments but by explicit teaching of behaviour as a curriculum plus constant reinforcement. It’s also based on an incredible attention to detail and a rationale for every behaviour – that walking with hands behind backs may look a bit draconian and even unnerving to some. However, Andrew’s rationale is clear – it reduces the ambiguity or grey zone of what is and isn’t acceptable in the corridors. If a hand has touched another pupil, it’s clearly a breach of the rule. Another example which I saw in action was “chin it” for holding up mini-whiteboards – all the children know to hold their whiteboards just under the chin, looking at the teacher. (I shamelessly stole this idea after hearing it on the podcast mentioned above and it’s so useful). Overall, the level of calm and focus might make you rethink what is possible in a primary school.
The other “wow” moment for me in the classrooms was the handwriting. I had always implicitly assumed that you would always get a large discrepancy between levels of neatness in handwriting because it is such a difficult skill for many children (myself included). After seeing book after book with neat and legible handwriting, I had to ask how it was achieved. In short, lots of explicit teaching of the skill and using a scheme called Kinetic Letters which breaks all aspects of handwriting down into small steps. It doesn’t just look nice but that it makes it so much more efficient to review the quality of the writing if you can easily read everything. An investment made lower down the school which really pays benefits at the higher end.
The same attention to detail has gone into the curriculum, fully accessible on the Stanley Road website. When we got back from the tour, lots of questions were fired at Andrew - and, if they were curriculum-based, he simply looked them up so he could be precise rather than speak in generalities. He demonstrated how Stanley Road would revisit and expand knowledge throughout the primary by reference to the highly detailed subject curriculums.
Even the lunch break showed meticulous planning – with children not outside for more than 30 minutes and led by adults known to the particular children. Andrew explained that this minimised lunchtime incidents and hence wasted time on coming back to class in the afternoon sorting them out (a familiar issue in my time teaching Year 4). Making this happen must be a logistical nightmare and several in the group were surprised that they could get it to work.
Before I came, I wondered if it would be incredibly hard work as a teacher in Stanley Road Primary given the level of detail they put into everything. Whilst the subject knowledge required could be daunting, I came away with quite a different view. A lot of the thought which had gone into details would likely reduce teacher workload. Examples included “no comments in book” with a focus on whole class feedback (originally based on a template and now a more general teacher feedback book), simple and uniform displays in classrooms. Most importantly, the relentless focus on behaviour made it so much easier for teachers to teach rather than constantly correcting behaviour (and then dealing with the consequences of that).
It’s a cliché to refer to a good organisation as a “well-oiled machine” but that was the phrase that came to mind repeatedly as I went round the school. This school might not be for everyone because some would find the teaching required over-restrictive but it’s clear that this has had major success. The restrictiveness is the flip-side of the incredible consistency they have achieved. I felt it would be a wonderful place to train as a teacher and wasn’t surprised to hear that many of the staff had trained with the school. Did I have any doubts about what they were doing? I did occasionally wonder if the Stanley Road leadership had almost been too successful in removing friction around the school. Do children need the occasional failure, whether in the classroom or on the playground, to fully grow and develop? That is, however, a nice problem to have.
Perhaps the most impressive thing of all is that Stanley Road Primary have made so much of this available publicly for the benefit of the teaching profession as a whole. The curriculum they use is available in full detail on their website - this includes their behaviour curriculum as well as the full range of subjects (an 88-page art and design curriculum, anyone?). The open mornings are a wonderful opportunity to look at things in even more detail and ask any follow-up questions. It is a refreshing display of openness and commitment to raising standards for all in an era when it often feels that schools must compete against each other.
[1] It’s fair to say that the common usage these days is somewhat divorced from the actual book which was more focused on creating balance in your life by prioritising what was most important to you rather than how the phrase has come to be used.