York schools are being challenged to strive for excellence as part of a new initiative launched this autumn.
York Challenge aims to empower the city’s schools to achieve excellence in four key areas: leadership, curriculum, teaching and ‘narrowing the gap’ to accelerate the progress of under achieving children. Focusing on partnership working, schools will work in geographical groups – school improvement clusters – with the emphasis on ensuring that all schools become good and outstanding through working on improvement priorities as a cluster.
Maxine Squire, Interim Assistant Director, Education and Skills, City of York Council, said: “Working in partnership, offering appropriate support and challenge have long been key components of our work with schools. The concept of the York Challenge is to empower schools to support and challenge each other, helping all of our schools achieve and sustain excellence.”
Anna Cornhill, headteacher of Scarcroft Primary School, “Many York headteachers have already been working in local clusters in order to share good practice between schools. This new way of working, set out in the York Challenge, will ensure that every York school becomes part of an active cluster, which can only be to the benefit of all the pupils across the city.
“The new initiative will provide clusters of schools with a clear structure that can be adapted to meet the needs of the schools involved, in order to facilitate Headteachers and schools working more closely together on a shared school improvement agenda.”
Caroline Hancy, headteacher of Dunnington School, said: “Many clusters of school leadership teams are developing an increased sense of collective responsibility and are working proactively to improve outcomes for young people within, and beyond, their own schools.
“The York Challenge is an exciting opportunity for teaching staff to become more engaged in partnership working and to learn from each other in order to maximise pupil progress across the city.”
The council’s education chiefs hope that the initiative will ensure that all York schools achieve at least a ‘good’ Ofsted rating, with an increasing proportion rated as ‘Outstanding’.
The concept of the York Challenge is based on the success achieved by the City Challenges (London and Greater Manchester) and the Kent ‘Every Lesson Counts’ initiative.
The City Challenges have resulted in significant improvements in the quality of leadership, teaching and pupils’ achievement and Ofsted outcomes. As a result of the City Challenge programme London has been consistently the highest performing regional nationally for the percentage of schools judged to be good and outstanding by Ofsted and has seen standards rise at a faster rate than nationally.