What about Special School and AP leaders?
🫵 We need you!!
🙋 Can I apply for Yorks100 if I am currently working in a Special/AP school?
The short answer to this is: “Yes, please!”
And, as ever, there’s a longer version…
We haven’t had anyone representing Special or AP schools in any of our 100s thus far and we really want to change that because:
Our mission is to eradicate educational disadvantage so that all children can enjoy lives of choice and opportunity. If we do not include children and leaders in AP and Special schools, we won’t accomplish this.
We are building as diverse and as representative a network as we can. As a collective, we’ll be far richer for the expertise, experience and knowledge that our friends in Special and AP schools will unquestionably bring to proceedings.
🤨 But will the learning be relevant to me?
We believe so. We focus on doing less, better.
As you may have read elsewhere, we’re not shy about sharing what we don’t do, or how our programme compares to the also great but different NPQH.
You may have also read here that we cover three main themes in the programme:
Building strong relationships,
Developing great teachers, and
Embedding a culture of excellence over time.
We believe these pillars are foundational to all leaders in all school contexts—particularly those serving children experiencing high levels of disadvantage.
Add an essential and generous drizzle of regional expertise specifically in the realm of special and AP leadership (in the shape of Trust partners at Nexus Multi Academy Trust and Exceed Academies Trust, and friends of the programme at Wellspring Academy Trust) and we believe that we are co-creating a programme that meets a wide range of leaders’ needs.
We’re not really about PDFing the slides for the year in September and rolling them out come what may. No. When we say we’re ‘locally rooted, regionally led, and (inter-)nationally connected’—we really do mean it.
Come the end of our opening residential in September, we’ll have spent a fair bit of time getting to know one another and building a collective understanding of what and where we want to explore.
Armed with this knowledge, we will work in collaboration with you, our partner trust leaders, and our external regional contacts to mould what we do (and how we do it) to fit the needs of your cohort.
As an example; with the second SW100 cohort, leaders wanted more exposure to turnaround schools with ‘properly comprehensive’ intakes (as opposed to ‘start-up’, free schools in large cities)—and so that’s exactly what we did. The great thing about being small and agile is that we can adapt and pivot to where the energy is.
Of course, we can’t be all things to all people, but we intentionally maintain a degree of flexibility throughout the year to be led, in part, by your curiosity and the inquiry questions you generate as a group throughout the year.
Naturally, that makes life a little more difficult for us, logistically, but the experience is so much richer for it.
How does that sound?
If you’re a Special or AP educator, keen to lead a school of your own in Yorkshire within the next five or so years—please consider applying here. We need people like you. The deadline to apply for cohort 2 is 19th April.
If you’ve got any questions, or queries, or would just like to discuss the programme in a bit more detail—please get in touch. Your can join one of our information sessions by signing up here, or you can arrange a 1:1 call with us here. Good old fashioned email also available (y100@reachfoundation.org.uk).
Finally, if at any point reading this article a brilliant Special or AP educator you know has leapt to mind, please let them know about us (and/or us about them!).