On Tuesday it was both refreshing and quite liberating holding a face-to-face meeting with ten secondary head teachers from across Camden, Haringey, Hounslow, and Tower Hamlets, who had come together with the objective of devising a peer review model that could be used across the four partnerships. This was one of those pieces of partnership work that we had planned to undertake just before lock down in March 2020, so it felt good coming together to pick up where we had left off. We were delighted to have Nick Brook, Deputy General Secretary of the NAHT join us to set the scene by identifying the key principles of effective school-to-school peer review. We also pondered and considered the range of peer review models that schools currently use and worked through whether there is a consensus about what we would want to adopt, to consider further and where more information is essential.

We got to a point of agreeing the key elements of a London Partnership programme or processes that we wish to use, a timespan of the pilot and identified the tasks and resources that are necessary to get the peer review programme underway. Essentially, there was an appetite to ‘get out’ across partnerships to see practice in neighbouring schools, that added value and essentially got us back to thinking about effective practice and school improvement.

Our next Camden Conversation is taking place on Wednesday 13th October at 4pm, I am delighted that Stuart Taylor has agreed to lead the session. Stuart is committed to positively disrupting the way the world does business. He champions working collaboratively, within a participatory and systemic framework with clients, colleagues, partners, and stakeholders. His aim: to align and ground people strategy with organisational strategy and to inspire individuals to orient themselves around their passions. Always minded of equity, diversity, inclusion, belonging and sustainability impacts. Stuart understands leadership capacity to be a high-value distributed capability. His work supports individuals and teams to develop agility and poise, ready to meet emergent realities with confidence, creativity, sensitivity, and good humour. Stuart invests in Camden the place by being an active governor at a William Ellis School and a parent of a boy at the school too. Stuart will be leading a session based on his recent work with a school in another borough, talking about Freedom: Cultivating care, Courage, Inclusion and Trust, believe me it will be a stimulating session for all. Hana has sent out an invite with a joining link, if you did not receive it, please email hana.emami@camden.gov.uk

Reminder that Mike Sheridan, Ofsted Regional Director, London will be doing an Ofsted briefing for Camden headteachers on 15 October, 8am-9am. Mike will share materials around changes to inspections, there will also be an opportunity for questions. If you have not received the invite, please email hana.emami@camden.gov.uk

Jon Abbey

Managing Director of Camden Learning