,
11 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Last week I made a trip to the east coast to visit @BarryNSmith79 at his school, Great Yarmouth Charter Academy @GYCharter. Here are some of my observations... 1/11 
The overriding aspect to strike me was the attitude of complete solidarity among the staff. Don't think I've ever been to a school where everyone from the cleaners to SLT had such respect for the head and shared a common sense of purpose. They like each other! 2/11
They clearly felt Barry had improved their lives and given them back their school and sense of purpose. Part of this, I think, is down to his willingness to regularly put himself on the frontline, with a heavy teaching workload, then staffing detentions, managing breaktime 3/11
Goes to show that when leadership is prepared to roll up sleeves, muck in and seriously get involved down among the junior people on the shop floor, a genuinely communal belief and vision develops and this makes everything else ten times easier. 4/11
Next thing was the credibility and authenticity of the pupils: no stage army with rehearsed lines, but real kids with spontaneity, spark and - in places - a bit of pushback. But normal, appropriate and good-natured. No silent corridors, but all silent lessons. 5/11
I stayed at the end of the day for the detentions, and there were some real problem cases there. But I saw these handled beautifully by SLT whose calmness and measured response was very far from the authoritarian regime I'd been led to expect by some media portrayals. 6/11
The discipline I saw on display was exactly the kind of thing I'd be happy for my own kids to experience. No shouting, no histrionics, no drama, no harshness. Just clear what kind of behaviour separated the adults from the kids, and how the latter could start to develop it. 7/11
Lunch wasn't at all stage managed - I just found a group of pupils to sit with and they were v natural: some a bit shy, some reserved, some v chatty, but all polite and answered my Qs honestly and intelligently. Totally spontaneous, no sense of on-message marketing-speak 8/11
All the time I was thinking this was a very real school confronting some profound problems, but everyone (ppls, staff, leadership) was pulling together, happy to be there, and convinced they were going somewhere. Proof that we don't need new types of school to do this 9/11
But most of all, convinced me that *experiments can work* in ordinary schools to make them extraordinary. We know how the head and the school have been portrayed in some places, but Charter is definitely doing something innovative but totally unfrightening or 'dangerous' 10/11
Best way to sum up @GYCharter for me is that it is a truly remarkable place for how it defies educational orthodoxy, how onboard everybody is, how quickly it has turned into a success with the most improved results in the country, and yet how normal, happy and positive it feels.
