Headteacher Performance Management

Option 1

This will involve an initial ½ day’s training for the schools involved.

The peer review involves working in a triad of schools facilitated by a school improvement consultant. Each review takes 1 ½ days of contact time for reviewers and the host school (and an additional ½ day for the consultant to prepare/write the report.)

Scheduling the dates and along with other related admin tasks are undertaken by each host school in turn.

A spreadsheet of validated good practice will be maintained by the facilitators and shared with the LA’s school improvement team and the CPD manager of Lilla Huset. At the end of each peer review the host school will be invited to create a ten-minute MP4 file, outlining the effectiveness of the chosen theme, along with how this was achieved.

The cost is £1,400 per review. This includes two days of facilitated support and initial training.

Option 2

This a lighter touch option bespoke to schools familiar with peer review process where the format and extent of the peer review is negotiated and agreed with a school improvement consultant. This is to encourage innovative and sustainable approaches to school development through peer-to-peer networking.

The cost is £350 per ½ day. The full cost of each review will depend upon the level of support provided.

Key Benefits

The peer review process has five clear benefits to schools:

• It validates and provides deepening impact of the school’s own self review and improvement process.
• It provides capacity to support the strategic direction of the school for the coming year.
• It develops a platform where schools can share a range of educational initiatives and resources.
• It institutes a radical model of continuing professional development, that is essentially school based.
• It provides a platform where ‘in-house’ leaders will model how best to develop a subject area or key school initiative for the visiting schools and their own staff; By emulating this process when the review is over should deepen schools’ own self-evaluation audits of important themes such as the wider curriculum subjects.

Sustainability

• The peer review process is carefully structured so that schools work together to practice and strengthen in skills of evaluating and triangulating evidence.
• Having had the experience modelled for them by a facilitator, leaders are better placed to support each other in their own school self-evaluation and development.
• This in-house training model for school leaders is in line with Ofsted’s Framework for evaluating the quality of education in relation to the curriculum.
• As well as co-creating a report of the identified best practice at the end of the peer review, schools will be asked to complete a questionnaire to show how they have used the methodology to shine a light on other areas of the curriculum and how they have used the process creatively with other schools.

It is good practice for schools to engage with a new triad of schools for each round of reviews. This way, visiting schools benefit from seeing new ‘best practice’ with fresh eyes.