The Hayes Primary School

The value in the PROGRESS Programme lies in the way it moves everybody to think about the learning environment: how they can make it change and offer a much more worthwhile experience for everybody in the school community. It was a really friendly way of getting a fresh pair of eyes into the school to see our school and how it worked, then to show us how we could make it even better. It gave us the opportunity to dig deeper, to look into issues that were going well and issues that weren’t going so well. That empowered us to go a little bit further.
David Wilcox, Headteacher

Headteacher David Wilcox sees the developments brought about by PROGRESS as having an impact on standards at the Hayes Primary School. ‘It has raised our confidence,’ David says, ‘our self-awareness not just for the staff but especially for the children. They feel more confident about asking questions, about not accepting a standard answer. That helps them to question a little bit more, to increase their understanding and their knowledge.’

This impact came about partly from the way the PROGRESS Programme improved staff communication. People who had previously felt a little isolated now feel they are in the communication loop.

This improvement in communication resulted in part from practical measures such as setting up a large whiteboard in the staffroom and timetabling a formal slot for communication between teachers and teaching assistants, but also more generally through fostering cohesion in the staff team. ‘People feel more confident,’ David says, ‘about sharing and understanding other people’s points of view.’

The Programme helped the School Council to become stronger in sharpening their views about what it is they want to discuss, what impact their discussion was going to have on the school and how they are able to negotiate with the governors, their teachers and the headteacher about the areas they want to discuss.

‘For the children,’ David says, ‘it has been a wonderful opportunity to have some real quality time to discuss their learning environment. It has required the children to think about other people, their part in the school structure and how we can join up their thinking. They have had to go beyond looking at black and whites to looking at the grey areas, learning there are areas you have to negotiate. They were enthusiastic about it because they are proud of their school and wanted to make it even better.’

PROGRESS has enabled staff and students to move from talking about ‘I’ and ‘You’ to talking about ‘Us’ and ‘We’. The process of engaging with other people’s perspectives and experiences caused them to see that everyone’s perception was valid. They have greater empathy with the experiences of others and this has fed creativity about how they could make a better learning environment for everybody.