DALE STREET SCHOOL
CD
When did you come to work at this school?
I’ve been here for six years. I started here part time for two days a week. I’ve
taught for quite some time – about eleven or twelve years – in lots of different
schools and I then had my children and my son, who is actually in cohort 7 here
and so I’ve got the parent view as well. When I had Joshua I worked part time
at a different school and I then had my daughter and took three years out of
teaching and then picked up two days a week here which rapidly became three,
four days. Richard is very good at understanding the whole kind of family
situation and was hugely supportive. I didn’t apply for a specific job when I
came here.
CD
What does being a subject leader mean in this school because it decided some
time ago to make MFL compulsory?
It was compulsory when I came here.
CD
Do you know when it became compulsory?
No.
CD
If you could chart what you’ve done in terms of the subject leadership of MFL
how has that interacted with any new policy initiatives coming in from the
outside? And how have developments in the school affected your role and MFL in
the school?
Richard and the school have always been massively pro-languages which is
great because a lot of places see languages as a tricky subject and quite
academic and so are marginalised. And I know lots of language teachers in other
schools who have a department of one or two teachers. There are ten of us here
and, yes, lots of us are part time and that is partly due to the fact that teachers
tend to be primarily female. Up until a couple of years ago we had a very small
number of kids who were taken out of languages to have additional literacy if
they needed it but we are now not doing that at all and everybody goes to MFL
and has to take a language to GCSE. We always have a fair number of dual
linguists and triple linguists. The leadership of the team is very much a two
strand thing because we have the subject leader and then the curriculum
development leader as well.
CD
Tell me more about that.
Well subject leader and subject development leader are equal in terms of status,
if you like. In my situation I had a really great relationship with my subject
development leader who had previously actually been the subject leader and
really the subject leader maintains the department and does some of the admin
part of it and all that kind of stuff and the development leader looks into where
it is going next. But a good team is very much interlinked and we do an awful
lot of sharing ideas and working collaboratively. And one of the big changes,
curriculum wise, is we’ve been trying to bring Spanish further into the
curriculum because when I first started we were offering Spanish just to a very
small group in cohort 10 because we couldn’t introduce it lower down due to
staffing and timetabling. What we’ve been trying to do is to push the idea that
people develop their own wider language skills and that then helps us to widen
what we can offer. So one of the first things I did was to pick up Spanish
because I didn’t have any Spanish – I’m a French and German specialist – so I
put myself back into the position of being a learner and I had about six months
Tracey
1
DALE STREET SCHOOL
and taught myself Spanish and did GCSE which was a really bizarre experience.
It was really good though because the kids knew that I was doing it and I was
telling them that I found it really hard and I asked them to help me out. So for
them to see me struggling with it was really good and we are looking to try and
spread that idea a little bit more. For the first year, from September, we’re
going to be offering Spanish in 7 as well. The other thing that we are doing is
that instead of walking into a room and having French or German on the
timetable it will be a language session and the kids are actually choosing the
language that they are learning. So, in 7, they are going to have blocks of
French and German and Spanish initially through the first two terms of 7 and
then, in the third term, they are going to be given a challenge and they choose
the language that they work in. The reason we did that this year in cohort 8 is
because they will be starting their GCSEs next year and what happens
traditionally is that they take their options and they might decide to take French
or German and a significant number of them say ‘I’m taking French so I won’t
bother with German anymore’. So to kind of get around that kind of apathy
what we’ve said is if they are determined to concentrate on only one language
they can so we offer them this challenge and the last one was about designing
their dream world and that had loads of opportunities for language. We would
supply them with the resources and we would give them a taste of some master
classes if any of them wanted it and they would ask for what they needed and
they worked collaboratively in groups and they had all sorts of choices they
could make as to how they were going to approach it but it makes the language
more real and more relevant to them and it certainly stops all of that apathy.
CD
How has that interacted with the general direction in which teaching and
learning within the school is going?
Massively because it is about choice and ownership and we are giving them
absolute choice in terms of how they are working and the language they are
working in. I’ve never before taught in a room where you’ve got different
languages going on. Initially I thought that was a bit crazy but, actually, when
you see it happen it isn’t crazy because they have had quite a good grounding in
how to learn a language. I think if you just threw them into a classroom and
then said ‘there you go’ it wouldn’t work.
CD
And is that grounding needed across other subject areas as well?
I think there is a fine line between giving them structure and the building
blocks, if you like, and just letting them completely go. If you let them go
entirely before they are ready then they could go off on the wrong path and, to
a certain extent, going the wrong way is not a bad thing because you can learn
a lot that way. And that is where we need to be observing them very carefully in
a session because if you see somebody going down the wrong path you might
let them do it for a little while but then you start to question them so that you
are bringing them back but what you are not doing is saying ‘stop, stop, stop’
because that is going to demotivate them, isn’t it?
CD
Right can we now look at external initiatives – have any of those impacted on
you?
I don’t think it’s influenced us massively in as much as we’ve always been very
pro-language and we’ve always had compulsory GSCE and so we are not now
trying to catch up. That would be a very difficult situation to be in. And we’ve
done quite a lot of work with our primaries in terms of the transition between
Year 6 and 7 //
Tracey
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DALE STREET SCHOOL
CD
So that would be indirectly to do with government policy because government
policy has said languages must be taught in primary schools //
Exactly. And so some of the primaries were panicking a little bit but,
interestingly, it was some of our primaries that made us rethink the curriculum
in cohort 7 because when I first came here one of our primary schools is really
fantastically developed in terms of its language and they do German whereas
nearly every other primary school does French. Now I had a personal interest in
that my children were going through that primary school at the time and so I
was aware of what they were doing and they were really getting to quite a good
level and really liking what they were doing. So we had a situation where we
had some children in Year 7 who were = when I first started, in 7, it was purely
French for the whole year and then, in 8, they could pick up German and carry
on with their French and that is quite a traditional model. But we had quite a lot
of children from this particular primary school who were quite enthusiastic about
their German but we had to say ‘try and shelve it for a year’ but that was not
ideal. So we introduced French and German from the beginning.
CD
And what about the all-important results in terms of GCSE results?
Well they are there or thereabouts. It obviously changes a bit and often in Year
11, when they are panicking about doing their GCSEs, you still get a few parents
saying ‘let’s take them out of their languages so they can concentrate on their
other subjects’. But, this year, I worked really closely with the cohort leader to
really try and reduce this situation and we only had two or three opting out.
CD
I want to ask you a different question now about the school: what is different, if
anything, about the way that change is approached in this school?
I think change and challenge and new stuff and being uncomfortable with new
stuff is embraced as opposed to people being fearful of it. It feels as if we are a
very forward looking school and that is how we want to be seen. It feels very
much as if it’s not let’s just do it because that has always been the way but, at
the same time, with external initiatives and things I think we’re quite secure in
saying ‘well that’s rubbish’. We’re not afraid of change but if somebody tells us
to change just because then I think we are quite good at saying no to that
unless it supports what we are already doing. We spend a lot of time
researching the things we change and we don’t just do that on a whim.
CD
Are there any outside initiatives which you think could, potentially, harm the
future development of the school?
There will always be things like that but we are developing people and we want
our learners to be happy and secure and proud of who they are and that’s a big
part of what we do but, obviously, in terms of parents, we want our children to
come out with a handful of qualifications which will get them through the next
door and so there is always going to be that slight = because we haven’t had a
cohort through who have entirely done our new curriculum so there is always
that kind of slight fear at the back of your head because although the work that
they are doing is excellent we still haven’t seen any GCSE results. I guess it’s
about trying to be aware of the two things.
CD
Do you think that most staff that you come into contact with are good at
managing that tension?
I think that tension is a personal thing and some of it is to do with whether you
are Dale Street born and bred to a certain extent or whether you are new in
Tracey
3
DALE STREET SCHOOL
and, therefore, there is a transition period. I think we’ve got an awful lot of staff
who are comfortable and happy and quite able to manage that anxiety but we’ve
always got an element who aren’t and part of my new role will be – because I
am going to be looking at newly qualified teachers and trainees – making sure
that they are ok about feeling uncomfortable because it is ok to feel a bit like
this and we do talk about it a lot and we are very good at talking and sharing
how we are feeling about things.
CD
Is that just in MFL or is it across the school?
It’s across the school. I picked up the line management of humanities which is
an area that is not my field but I’ll be managing that field and there is a really
big spread of confident, experienced people plus those who aren’t so confident
and maybe feeling a little bit anxious but the important thing is that we all
honest about where we are on the journey.
CD
To what extent would you put that down to Richard?
Massively. He is so clear in terms of his vision and so open to people. I’ve
worked a lot for different heads and I think his own experience of learning has
radically imprinted on how he wants learning to be //
CD
The fact that he didn’t succeed initially.
Absolutely. I think he puts a lot of time into thinking and he’s very good at
reading people and understanding how they are feeling and he’s very good at
working out where you are and where you are headed before you realise it
yourself. And he’s very good at making you feel ok about having a bit of a
moment if you need a moment and it feels very real and there is no sense of
pretence.
CD
How much is government policy affecting the school’s role in initial teacher
training?
I can’t really say because I’m so new to this at the moment. An awful lot of our
trainees go on to work here and we massively commit to the time that we give
them because we want to develop really good teachers and, obviously, if we can
develop them we’d like them to stay here.
CD
So what schemes do you have for training them? Are you involved with the
university only or are you involved in Teacher Direct?
Well it’s changing, isn’t it, but we’ve always had GTP and SCITT and then School
Direct will happen next year. So, in terms of in-school training, we provide a
huge amount of that and we also go and deliver and we put NQT conferences
together for local schools as well. We are really quite involved in that side of
things. When we have the staff conference and things like that everybody is
encouraged to contribute to the R&D groups that feed into that. So there is an
awful lot of opportunity right from the beginning for teachers to be involved in.
And that mirrors our philosophy because we would be getting it wrong if we
were teaching them in one way for their training and they said ‘right now go out
and do it like this’.
CD
Do you have to be in a special category in order to be eligible for Teacher
Direct?
For School Direct?
Tracey
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DALE STREET SCHOOL
CD
Sorry.
I couldn’t tell you. To be the lead school for a consortium you have to have
outstanding in teaching and learning. We’re the lead secondary school: the lead
school is Lime Hall Primary School and we are the lead secondary school.
CD
So Lime Hall would be a teaching school?
Exactly. So we’re not the teaching school but we feed into that programme and
because of that we can do Schools Direct.
CD
My impression of the school is that it has developed along three strands:
curriculum, children’s learning and the third one is adults learning. And the aim
is that young people can come out of the school as qualified as they possibly can
be but also more aware of themselves. Is that also your impression?
Definitely. It’s about that whole idea that we are all learning together and it
never stops and we always need to ask questions in life and asking questions is
a good thing and it’s ok not to know what to do but you need to know where to
go to find out what to do. That is what we are trying to instil.
CD
And you do that by focusing on learning in the curriculum but almost to the
extent that whatever is coming in from the outside in terms of government
policy doesn’t deviate the school from its main aims. Would that be right?
Absolutely. And that’s to do with a really clear vision that this is where we are
moving to and we are doing it for the right reason and we’re together in it.
CD
If you were to take a group of successful schools as measured by Ofsted and
they are all in a similar socio-economic circumstances to this school you can
look at them from the outside and you can see that they are achieving success
but if you go inside them you realise that they are achieving different kinds of
success. The first kind is the one that Ofsted sees and the one that parents see
but then you can differentiate between them so you could have three or four
different definitions of success.
Absolutely. I think it’s to do with what do we want our young people to be like
when they leave us: do we want them to be ready for the world; do we want
them to have self-awareness and life skills? Yes it’s great if they have
qualifications as well because every parent wants that but, equally, I want my
children to be really confident in who they are and what they believe. I think
that is massively important.
CD
Tracey
Thank you.
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