What are Sharing Leading Practice events?
Sharing Leading Practice (SLP) events provide opportunities for our partners to immerse themselves in the context and practice of a school with particular expertise in a specific area, phase or subject, often accredited through our QA Review process. You can see an archive of past virtual events here.
SLPs can take two different forms:
1) Sharing Leading Practice Days: Face-to-face, structured school visits lasting one full day that provide senior leaders with the chance to learn about another school's approach and strategies, observe lessons, look in books and reflect with colleagues.
2) Sharing Leading Practice Webinars: Virtual sessions conducted by a headteacher or senior leader, lasting no more than 90 minutes, providing an overview of a specific topic or area of practice within the school. Click HERE to view some of our excellent previous events.
Sharing Leading Practice events provide the opportunity to:
- Observe leading practice in a good or outstanding school with a particular specialism
- Gain insight into the daily practice of another school through open and honest peer support and knowledge exchange
- Reflect on your own and your school's practice, gaining ideas from others
- Address common challenges and collaboratively explore solutions
- Work with Challenge Partners school from across our national network
Key information about Sharing Leading Practice events:
- We analyse data from school's individual Quality Assurance Review reports, Hub Action Plans, Annual Survey & Senior Partner feedback to determine the most common areas of school improvement across our network
- Partner schools are then chosen based on accredited Areas of Excellence or Systemic Areas of Excellence in Growing the Top Schools to host events on these topics, usually on a Tuesday or Thursday
- Occasionally, SLP events will be held on exciting and innovative areas of practice that have not been accredited through our programmes (these will be advertised accordingly)
Feedback
Sharing Leading Practice events consistently receive high feedback scores and we are proud that on average they received 4.5/5 from over 600 school leaders who attended events across our 2019/20 partnership year.
What do our partners say?
School leaders welcome these opportunities to learn from schools which have the best practices confidently embedded throughout their organisation as well as discovering more about their journey to success.
“A great day, filled with the passion of dedicated pupils, teachers and leaders. A fabulous opportunity to hear, see and experience the successes in another school.”
“It was really interesting and insightful! I learnt a lot and have taken away lots of tips that I can't want to implement within school. Thank you so much!”
"We had lots of exciting ideas to take back. It was a great opportunity to reflect on my own school setting."
“I shared with colleagues the part of the training about our recovery curriculum and how important it was to start the year with lots of wellbeing activities. Our approach has changed and it seems to be going very well.” – Deputy Head Sandra Mulholland
“Challenge Partners helped us with how to prioritise the engagement of learners, especially the bottom 20%.” – Headteacher Tim Hughes
“It’s so powerful for my staff to see how other schools operate, which is then extremely beneficial for our students.” – Headteacher Nicki Hyde-Boughey
What is the cost for school leaders to take part?
Sharing Leading Practice events are FREE to all school leaders who are partners in our Network of Excellence. Some host schools may charge a nominal fee to cover the operating costs of an event, but these will be advertised accordingly.
How do I sign up?
You can sign up by visiting the Events Page of our website HERE.
Interested in hosting an SLP event?
If you have an accredited Area of Excellence or you're developing exciting and innovative practice and would like to share your work, please let us know!
We are very keen to host more SLP events on an array of diverse and interesting topics. Contact [email protected] for further information - we would love to hear from you!