Sharing Good Practice
became the driving force behind the
birth of ‘Raha’s Exceptional Journey’. I
was very fortunate to have an incredible
team of senior leaders and teaching
staff, who enthusiastically bought into
the concept of moving Raha from
Outstanding to Exceptional. The team
recognised the need for continued
forward momentum, instead of resting
on their laurels. Like me, they were
dedicated to working hard towards
continued improvement to ensure
the highest learning outcomes for our
students. But it was more than that.
When I took over the school, it was
obviously doing very well, however,
it went about its business quietly
and without much fuss. I wanted to
change that, put the school on the
map and make the entire community
even more proud of the school. Our
exceptional journey has now been
adopted as a permanent, lifelong
journey for the school, providing
the vision for continued excellence
beyond the regular school inspection
framework. We have also gone so far
as to change our mission and values
to incorporate our relentless drive
towards being exceptional. We are
now three years on from the start of
this initiative and can look back at how
we started and where we are now.
We began by letting parents know our
core aim to move from Outstanding
to Exceptional (we realised one year
in, that this was the wrong way to
label our vision, but I will come back
to that). We wanted to emphasise our
intention to never take our foot off
the pedal and to ensure continued
improvement. I’m not ashamed to
admit that the psychology of telling
inspectors two years later that we
are on a journey beyond outstanding
was a more difficult thing for them
to argue against, but let’s keep that
secret between ourselves for now!
Once the parents knew about our
plans we spent a considerable amount
of time, a full year in fact, creating what
is now labelled Raha’s Exceptional
Journey. This process involved the
entire
breadth
of
stakeholders,
including students. We looked at what
we already did very well and what
could be improved even further. This
didn’t have to have anything to do
with inspection frameworks, and even
now you will see that there is nothing
in our journey relating to attainment
or progress, or even teaching and
learning. As a school we already knew
we did this very well so we looked
at where we could go beyond these
areas to offer more to our students
and wider community.
Towards the end of the year-long
process we began to have parents ask
us about what the chances were of us
actually achieving ‘exceptional’ in the
inspection the following year. It took
us a while to realise that parents were
under the impression that ‘exceptional’
was an official rating, so we changed
Class Time
Term 1 Sep - Dec 2019
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