The role of cake in helping schools use their freedom

Squidgy chocolate cake plays an important role in Antidote’s work with staff and students on delivering strategies that raise achievement by boosting enthusiasm for teaching and learning.

The PROGRESS Programme works by gathering data on what is happening, engaging the whole school community in a conversation about what will make things even better, then monitoring implementation of the strategies that emerge over a number of years.

The process can be exhilarating, as people start to discover their power to make a substantial and lasting difference to school life. At the beginning, though, it is often only the downside that is visible: time spent away from some more pressing task.

Staff and students turn up to strategy group meetings apparently unaware of why they have been called together; unprepared to engage with the evidence they are working from or the outcomes they are being asked to deliver.

The slow start to the Programme that results is a consequence of school personnel spending too much of their lives doing what they are required to do, rather than working out together what will be the most strategic and effective ways of delivering good outcomes.

What cake communicates to these groups is that we are more interested in nurturing their possibilities than in imposing additional responsibilities upon them. Once they know this, they can experience sufficient hopefulness to start working together. In the process, they discover that their voice can be heard and their ideas can be taken forward.